The Beat Manifesto: Avant-Garde Poetics and the Worlded Circuits of African American Beat Surrealism

Abstract

John Clellon Holmes’s essay “This Is the Beat Generation,” which served as a public introduction to the notion of “Beat” when it appeared in the New York Times Magazine on November 16, 1952, is but the first of many published attempts at self-definition and self-assertion on the part of Beat writers. While the Beats never produced a “Beat manifesto” as such, a whole range of Beat texts contain what we might call a manifesto function as key figures such as Holmes, Jack Kerouac, and Allen Ginsberg, in addition to many “minor” Beats, believed themselves compelled to define and redefine their aesthetic and social practices, to state and restate their opposition to post-World War II American conservatism. Exploring the ways in which Beat writers have borrowed and adapted the formal and rhetorical features of the avant-garde manifesto, an initial claim of this essay will be that the Beat movement owes as much to European traditions of the historical avant-garde—futurism, Dada, and surrealism chief among them—as it does to a strictly American tradition of Whitmanian democracy and the open road mythos. But at the core of my argument lies the further assertion that to reevaluate Beat writing in terms of its engagement with European experimentalism is also to reassess the role played by African American writers in the Beat movement as a whole. The work of Amiri Baraka, Ted Joans, and Bob Kaufman evinces a particularly intense and longstanding commitment to avant-garde poetics and politics, and by illustrating their truly worlded conception of the history and legacy European avant-garde, I hope to shed new light on the internationalism of Beat writing.KeywordsYork Time MagazineBlack NationalismYork Time ArticleSurrealist MovementCommunist ManifestoThese keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.