"Pat Your Foot and Turn the Corner": Amiri Baraka, the Black Arts Movement, and the Poetics of a Popular Avant-Garde

Abstract

My larger objective here is to engage current cultural conversation about nature of Black Arts Movement and its impact on politics and culture in United States and beyond. So while I honor significance of Amiri Baraka's work as artist, critic, and activist, my intention is to place that work within a movement in which Baraka is but one voice among many, albeit an important one. In other words, in spirit of Baraka's own critical and autobiographical writings, I want to emphasize, to degree that it is possible in a short essay, collectivity and diversity of Black Arts Movement, and try to avoid sort of great-man theory in which Baraka's work becomes a metonymy for all Black Arts literature, drama, criticism, and so on. (1) I also want to say that this is a small part of a larger work-in-progress designed to further conversation rather than shut it off with some gesture toward authority. As term suggests, avant-garde connotes a bold journey into future that, as Ezra Pound polemicized, made things new. This newness for many avant-gardists--say, politically very different Mayakovsky and Russian Futurists and Marinetti and Italian Futurists (and much of early William Carlos Williams, for that matter)--involved some vision of modernity which required wholesale abandonment or even destruction of existing culture. To degree that various avant-gardists sought or claimed inspiration from or kinship to existing (or once extant) cultures, these cultures tended to be somewhere else and/or to have existed at some other time. One thinks of Picasso and Africa, Artaud and Bali, Pound and Confucian China. However, by late 1960s a conception of an avant-garde found its way into American culture. This was a paradoxical conception of avant-garde that has roots in actually existing and close-to-home popular culture and is in some senses genuinely popular, while retaining a counter-cultural, stance. This is a conception that is still with us now to a large extent. One has only to consider many radio stations which claim to be in vanguard of rock revolution to see not only remarkable claim to avant-garde status by such major institutions of popular culture, but also that such a claim is both palatable and plausible to millions of listeners. To this one could add phenomenon of alt-country, which, though less high profile than alternative rock, involves sales of millions of CDs. And, in many respects, almost cliched hip hop obsession of the with term underground marking hip hop artists and works that are most real, expresses a similar concern with being popular, engaged, and yet formally challenging or new. (2) This model of a popular avant-garde was significantly developed and promoted by Black Arts Movement in Northeast during 1960s, in no small part through efforts of poet, playwright, essayist, cultural critic, and political activist Amiri Baraka, as well as in work of Larry Neal, Askia Toure, James Stewart, and others. (3) Black Arts participants synthesized and revised a cultural inheritance derived significantly from Popular Front, using new thing or free jazz of late 1950s and 1960s as a model for a popular avant-garde. In one sense, idea of a future society or culture rooted in some aspects of existing American culture and American realities, while simultaneously distinguishing itself from that culture, is quite old in United States, dating back at least to Ralph Waldo Emerson. However, one significant import came to these shores in late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries via nationalist movements of peoples of internal colonies within large empires of Europe: Irish, Finns, Poles, Czechs, Hungarians, and so on. The artists associated with these nationalist movements often saw peasant culture of their respective nationalities as containing basis of a national culture which could stand in opposition to imperial culture. …