Amiri Baraka Research Articles

“Space Probe”: Science fiction across the Black Atlantic. The speculative geographies of Amiri Baraka and Emmanuel Dongala

ABSTRACT This article focuses on the literary genealogy that connects “Answers in Progress” (1967), a short story by Amiri Baraka (formerly known as LeRoi Jones) to Emmanuel Dongala’s “Jazz and Palm Wine” (1982). Both texts are significant because of their respective incorporation of science-fiction elements which constituted a fringe phenomenon in African and African American literature at the time of their publication. Baraka and Dongala create speculative geographies – populated by humans and aliens alike – that offer alternative visions of black liberation in the US and the Congo. As early examples of Afrofuturism, the two short stories aim to transform existing narratives about Africans and African Americans by representing them as vehicles of revolution and social change. Despite the similarities, Dongala’s transposition of Baraka’s story into an African context generates changes in structure, language, and plotline, which ultimately lead to a rearticulation of racial conflict, otherness, and black identity.

Amiri Baraka's "In Memory of Radio": Marxist Dialectics

The paper discusses the dialectics of Baraka's Marxism in relation to "In Memory of Radio," one of his best poems written during his Beat period and published in 1962. Though much of his poetry written during this period is judged by critics as having nothing to do with Marxism and thus no attempt is to be made to discuss his poetic production in the light of this literary theory, other literary critics prove that the seeds of establishing himself as a Marxist poet can find its roots in his Beat poetry prior to his transition to other two phases, namely the phase of Black nationalism and the phase of Marxist-Leninism.

Deferral and the Dream

Deferral and the Dream

Re-narration In The Translation Of Selected African – American Plays

The main purpose of the present study is to investigate Narrative Theory in the translation of dramatic texts. Narrative Theory was introduced to translation by Mona Baker in 2006. According to this theory, translation is a process of re-narration in the sense that translators re-narrate the source text in such a way to create a certain effect or support a hidden agenda in the target text. The present study seeks to analyze the Arabic translation of African-American plays in order to pursue the different strategies made by each translator to reframe narratives in the target text. The selected plays; Dutchman and The Slave are written by Amiri Baraka the African American poet and playwright. The translations are made by Mohsen Abbas, Saddik Goher and Naema Abdel Jawad. The importance of the present study lies in the fact that although some researches have sought to study Narrative Theory in political and literary text, none of them has dealt with dramatic texts. Another significant point is that all previous researches tried to take the theory for granted; no hypothesis was made that the translated text might appear free from any signs of re-narration. Applying Baker’s model, the present study reveals that although some translators are highly re-narrators, some dramatic texts are neutrally translated.

Poems That Kill

“Poems That Kill” examines the connection between poetry and revolution in Amiri Baraka’s “Black Art” (1965) and in general. The article tracks how Baraka uses poetry to start or advance a revolution in his own life, in the lives of his contemporaries, in poetry, in our present moment, and in the future. The article also discusses poetic address (how poems address readers), sincerity, ambiguity, and hate speech.

Afro-American Racial Oppression in Paul Laurence Dunbar and Amiri Baraka's Poems

This study explores how Afro-American racial oppression is reflected in Black Writers’ poems, Paul Laurence Dunbar and Amiri Baraka. Using a descriptive-analytical method, this study analyzed words, phrases, and clauses indicating Afro-American racial oppression in the ten selected poems of Paul Laurence Dunbar and Amiri Baraka. Roland Barthes’ semiotic was employed to get the interpretation of the signs used in the poems. These interpretations were strengthen by juxtaposing the meaning with socio-cultural context of the poems using Wellek and Warren’s perspective of sociological approach in literature. The result of the study showed that as African American, both Paul Laurence Dunbar and Amiri Baraka portray the experience and feeling of Afro-Americans towards racial oppression in United States of America. Through the use of particular signs in their poems, Dunbar and Baraka speak up about the ill-treatments directed to Afro-Americans as well as the injustice that occurred in United States. Dunbar depicts the life of African American during the Jim-Crow America where the practice of discrimination was spreading like wildfire. Whilst, Baraka portrays the life of Afro-Americans during the 1960s in which Black people remained the target of oppression. The analysis of the ten selected poems showed that despite the fact that Black residents have achieved formal equality through the Civil Right Acts in 1964, significant racial oppression persists. Afro-Americans had to deal with oppression during and after the segregation era. In their poems, Paul Laurence Dunbar and Amiri Baraka also advocate African Americans to establish racial pride within themselves for them have been degraded through racial oppression by White ruling race.

Sistuhs in the Struggle: An Oral History of the Black Arts Movement Theatre and Performance by La Donna L. Forsgren

Reviewed by: Sistuhs in the Struggle: An Oral History of the Black Arts Movement Theatre and Performance by La Donna L. Forsgren Le’mil L. Eiland Sistuhs in the Struggle: An Oral History of the Black Arts Movement Theatre and Performance. By La Donna L. Forsgren. Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 2020; pp. 376. La Donna Forsgren’s Sistuhs in the Struggle: An Oral History of the Black Arts Movement Theatre and Performance is the first history to highlight Black women intellectuals of the Black Arts Movement, which explicitly melded artistic expression with Black racial pride during the 1960s and ’70s as a challenge to white supremacy in the United States. Historiography on the Black Arts Movement is often male-dominated with a genealogy crediting figures like Ed Bullins, Amiri Baraka, and Larry Neal. Countering the logic that Black feminist drama was tangential to the movement, Sistuhs in the Struggles organizes a plethora of Black women artists to explain how they developed their Black aesthetics, nourished the racial politics of the Black Arts Movement, and advanced the genre of Black feminist drama. Centering these Black women’s artistic contributions, Forsgren offers a new perspective on the intertwining gender and race politics of the movement. Sans neat conclusions, Sistuhs in the Struggle examines the individual contributions of Black women intellectuals of the Black Arts Movement, their inspirations and accolades, and their methods for navigating sexism and racism. Forsgren’s project offers wonderful firsthand accounts of women in the Black Arts Movement and their legacies as their aesthetics informed various arenas of theatre and performance. In addition to providing a window into the movement, through these interviews Forsgren archives not only their aesthetic practices, but the politics that informed their work. She interviews a range of artists, some iconic like Ntozake Shange, Sonia Sanchez, Micki Grant, and Jackie Taylor, and some lesser known like Dawn Alli and Nora Cole. What began as a project to include nineteen interviews expanded to include the contributions of their dearly departed sistuhs, such as founder of Harlem’s National Black Theatre Barbara Ann Teer, as interviewees acknowledged her contributions to theatre. Forsgren was wise in including Black women intellectuals working on and behind the stage. In particular, her interview with Kathy Perkins reveals how distinct gender and racial politics impacted her career in lighting design. Each of the four chapters includes edited fragments of interviews, but concludes to resemble a roundtable of familiar scholars or an intimate space where women of your family gather. Each chapter orbits around a distinct concept in an effort to expand the discussion of Black women’s artistic contributions to Black theatre and performance. Chapter 1, “Spiritual Sister: The Black Aesthetic, Feminism, and Black Power,” explores the melding of and, sometimes, tensions between Black art, feminism, and Black Power politics. Chapter 2, “Black Theaters Matter: The Art of Institution Building,” charts how institutions like the Harlem Children’s Theatre Company, the Black Ensemble Theatre of Chicago, and the National Black Theatre of Harlem advance Black theatre on a regional and national stage. Chapter 3, “‘Traveling with Ears to the Ground’: Black Arts Movement Drama, Ritual, Teleplays, and Musicals,” explores various women’s transition from playwrighting to writing for television and Broadway, off-Broadway, and musical theatre. Chapter 4, “Performative Embodiment on Black Arts and Alternative Stages,” provides a glimpse into artists’ performance practices in front of and behind the stage. Forsgren’s methodology intertwines Black feminist oral history with critical performance ethnography to interrogate the “relationship between the Black aesthetic, performance, and Black empowerment” (5). Building off Dwight Conquergood’s praxis of witnessing, Forsgren includes her own responses to and commentary on the interview process and reflections on how her presence shaped her respondents’ engagement and candidness. This project also illuminates how Black women artists developed their art in dialogue with one another. Forsgren intentionally arranges the interview transcripts so that she shows multiple perspectives on (and sometimes disagreements about) a single issue or event. For example, some women like Shange associate themselves with the feminist movement, whereas others such as Doris Derby intentionally distance themselves from [End Page 202] feminism and define themselves as “womanist.” This book highlights disagreements among the...

Chorus Makes a Heart of Future: Selected Poems from the Poetry Project’s New Year’s Day Marathon

Chorus Makes a Heart of Future: Selected Poems from the Poetry Project’s New Year’s Day Marathon Kyle Dacuyan (bio) For forty-seven years, every January 1st a gathering of poets and their accomplices have greeted the passage of the year with a daylong ritual of raucous, tender, wild experiments and offerings. The New Year’s Day Marathon was originally conceived as a fundraiser for The Poetry Project at St. Mark’s, a touchstone of downtown culture in New York City, whose expeditions in language and performance have radiated globally across many generations of avant-garde art. The idea: a cast of radical poets, music-makers, dancers, performers, and artists would each share work a few minutes in length, unrolling over the day in a kind of unruly and exuberant fever dream, with the ticket revenue from this public performance helping to sustain the breadth of readings, events, learning programs, and publications produced each year by The Project. The Marathon, like The Project, is an improbable and enduring endeavor. By many measures (not least of which financial), poetry appears to be at the far edge of artistic and literary practice. And a spirit of iconoclastic counter-hierarchy pervades The Project: it is a home for work that resists and challenges [End Page 224] institutionalized notions of convention, value, and legibility. On top of all of this, the communities and individuals passing through The Project are passionate in their aesthetic and political difference, making for a not unquarrelsome atmosphere and lineage. Fractious and located at the margin of the margin, and still the work persists and thrives. The Marathon’s group of performers has grown from several dozen in 1974 to more than 100 in recent years, to more than 300 individuals at the turn of 2020 into 2021. Most years draw an audience of a thousand to St. Mark’s Church-in-the-Bowery in NYC’s East Village, where they sit shoulder to shoulder and on the floor for hours of oration and performance. Laurie Anderson, Amiri Baraka, John Cage, Diamanda Galás, John Giorno, Philip Glass, Eileen Myles, Yoko Ono, Yvonne Rainer, and Anne Waldman are a few of the thousands of artists who have been a part of the Marathon’s rich fabric—but what makes the assembly so special is that the usual markers of fame and recognition are each year totally atomized. The Marathon brings together poets and artists across generation and practice. There is no green room, no headliners; everyone and no one is a star. And beyond the performers, there are about 100 volunteers annually preparing and serving food, selling books, attending to the intricate logistics of such an unwieldy affair. The endurance of the Marathon affirms the vitality of dreaming, of experimental language practice, of ritual as we move through the constant vicissitudes of time—and ultimately the way these threads come together unpredictably to present new possibilities of collectivity. Every year, the Marathon demonstrates our appetite and need for new modes of listening and attention, new contexts for recognition of self and relation. And while catastrophe and uncertainty continue to roil across years and decades, the communities of The Project have always improvised to keep the Marathon alive. After a fire in 1978 left St. Mark’s unusable for several years, a number of neighborhood gathering places donated space to keep the annual event running. The Covid-19 pandemic in 2021 made physical gathering impossible—but the alternative online presentation opened the Marathon into a truly global celebration, with audiences and artists contributing from every continent but Antarctica. This portfolio brings together several of the poets who shared work as part of the 2021 New Year’s Day Marathon. Their poems ring with defiance, pleasure, and hope. Jan-Henry Gray’s River Capture presents polyvochal chords of suggestion and action, verbs cascading in erosion and toward new kinds of ecology. Lucía Hinojosa Gaxiola responds to the state’s continued erasure of paintings on public monuments in Ciudad de México, testifying in a series of poems to the necessity of ritual as an intervention against the normalized. Composed in response to a prompt for ritual by Kazim Ali...

African American Poetry: 250 Years of Struggle & Song ed. by Kevin Young

Reviewed by: African American Poetry: 250 Years of Struggle & Song ed. by Kevin Young Mildred R. Mickle African American Poetry: 250 Years of Struggle & Song, edited by Kevin Young. New York, Library of America, 2020. 1150 pp. $45.00 hardcover. Kevin Young's 1,100-plus-page anthology provides an intriguing selection of African American poetry that was published from the late eighteenth century all the way to 2020. The lineup of poets in this book rightly begins with Phillis Wheatley, whom Henry Louis Gates, Jr., in The Trials of Phillis Wheatley (2003), terms "the mother of African-American literature" (50). Wheatley's groundbreaking, pre-Revolutionary War poetry, published in Poems on Various Subjects, Religious and Moral (1773), provided a much-needed critique of the foundation of American conceptions of independence. At the anthology's opposite end we have poets younger than forty, such as National Book Critics Circle Award winner Ishion Hutchinson and Aja Monet and Jamila Woods, activists and civic engagers of the twenty-first century who are training the next generation of poets and paying homage to those who have died in the ongoing struggle for agency and autonomy. In between are selections by nineteenth-century enslaved and free poets, poets of the Harlem Renaissance, poets of the Black Arts Movement, and work by a number of Pulitzer Prize winners: Gwendolyn Brooks (1945), Rita Dove (1987), Yusef Komunyakaa (1994), Natasha Trethewey (2007), Tracy K. Smith (2012), Gregory Pardlo (2015), Tyehimba Jess (2017), and Jericho Brown (2020). Young also represents a variety of award-winning poets from abroad, including 1992 Nobel Laureate Derek Walcott, who lived much of his life in St. Lucia, and the Emmy-winning Kwame Dawes, who came to America from Ghana and Jamaica. Here too is much-loved Maya Angelou, a three-time Grammy winner and the author of the 1992 presidential inaugural poem. Young also makes a concerted effort to present work by lesser-known poets. In his introduction, which is titled "The Difficult Miracle," Young writes: [End Page 577] African American Poetry: 250 Years of Struggle & Song captures a quarter-millennium of Black poetry in the Americas, from Phillis Wheatley to the present day. Whether we consider that time span to consist of what June Jordan calls "the difficult miracle of Black poetry in America," what Amiri Baraka names "the changing same," or the pleasure that Toi Derricotte invokes when she says "joy is an act of resistance," this anthology provides a comprehensive look at the centuries of song and struggle that make up African American verse, a legacy that is fruitful and large enough to barely be represented by one volume. (xxxix-xl) Not only was it "difficult" for African Americans to write and publish poetry, but it is also difficult to capture the scope of that extensive body of literature accurately. What Young has achieved in this volume is to be commended. He does note that he made the executive decision to omit certain types of oral poetry like the blues and spirituals (xlii-xliii), but he compensates for that lack by including "poems in translation by American poets of African descent writing in languages other than English" (xliv). And, to narrow the selection further, he limits the geographic region to the United States and parts of the Caribbean. It would have been helpful to have poems from some of the French-language writers of the Negritude movement, such as Aimé Césaire and Léopold Sédar Senghor, who were influenced by Langston Hughes's efforts in the Harlem Renaissance. America is a postcolonial state, and the literary production of African Americans contributes significantly to the development of a postcolonial ethos. That very effort sent shock waves back to countries like Césaire's Martinique and Senghor's Senegal as black artists there struggled to find their own postcolonial aesthetic. Césaire's and Senghor's works have been translated into English from French. Still, it is easy to see why Young had to limit the scope of this volume. Already over eleven hundred pages long, the book hardly had room for more. The anthology is divided chronologically into eight sections; Young titles each with a quotation...

Hands Up, Don’t Shoot: “Suicide,” Black Gun Ownership, and Restoring Black Masculinity on Black Arts Movement Stages

The 1960s and ’70s witnessed hundreds of race-related uprisings across major US cities. Often provoked by white-authored shootings of Black people, these rebellions galvanized a generation of activists—including Black Arts Movement dramatists Amiri Baraka, Sonia Sanchez, Lola E. Jones, and Carol Freeman—to create works that sustain the hearts, minds, and souls of Black Americans. While Baraka’s Arm Yourself, Or Harm Yourself (1967) offers a representative engagement with the Black Power rhetoric of gun ownership, hegemonic masculinity, and white-authored gun violence, Sanchez’s The Bronx Is Next (1968), Jones’s The New Nigger, or Who’s Afraid of William Faulkner (1976), and Freeman’s The Suicide (1966) provide a unique departure. Collectively, their works produce womanist thought that complicates Black Power rhetoric of gun ownership and masculinist understandings of Black liberation. Recovering these less-studied works reveals not only how the Black Arts Movement was not so uniformly masculinist as it has sometimes been depicted, but also how these early womanist interventions laid a critical foundation for the Black Lives Matter movement of today.

Editorial Comment: Shooting

Editorial CommentShooting E.J. Westlake I decided I wanted to be part of the editorial team of Theatre Journal after the 2016 election. I felt a sense of urgency as I continued to read reports of “alternative facts,” and I was alarmed at a deepening climate crisis along with a crumbling infrastructure that led to the poisoning of the city of Flint. The Pulse Nightclub shooting had happened that year, followed by the Las Vegas mass shooting in 2017. Stoneman Douglas High School followed just as I began thinking about my first special issue. That year, I heard Meredith Conti’s paper at ATHE on the young student activists who survived the Stoneman Douglas shooting. That essay, partly reproduced in the “Post-fact Performance” special issue, described the conspiracy theory suggesting that the victims are “crisis actors.” These theories suggest that none of these devastating events are real, but that they are staged for the purpose of controlling public opinion about a range of issues, including guns. The reasoning goes that the government (or rather, a shadow government) stages these to make people believe there is a problem with gun violence as a pretext for disarming the populace. I began to think about gun culture in the United States, particularly as we have the distinction of having a gun for every human being. And although the United States is not the only country where mass shootings occur, the rate here far exceeds that of any other nation. There is a reason gun ownership is so staggeringly high in the country. One is an active and powerful gun lobby. Indeed, the National Rifle Association continually reacts to mass shootings in schools with a call for armed guards in schools or handgun training for teachers. The NRA’s influence in US politics means that legislators are hard-pressed to pass any meaningful gun reform. And while the NRA quickly defended the “law-abiding citizens” of the Waco and Ruby Ridge raids against “jack-booted government thugs,” historian Carol Anderson notes that it was conspicuously silent about the murders of Philando Castile and Alton Sterling. Anderson’s book, The Second: Race and Guns in a Fatally Unequal America, builds upon the work of Carl T. Bogus’s 1998 article in the UC Davis Law Review, tracing US gun culture and the enshrinement of the Second Amendment to slavery. Anderson cites archival research that suggests that although only half of US households owned guns during colonial times, the number rises to over 80 percent among plantation owners. Fearful that Northern states would undermine the planters’ mechanism to put down slave rebellions, Southern representatives pressured James Madison to include language in the Bill of Rights that guaranteed state control over armed militias. Additionally, states passed laws ensuring that Black people, free or slave, would never own guns themselves. Said Anderson in an NPR interview: “One of the things that I argue throughout this book is that it is just being Black that is the threat. And so when you mix that being Black as the threat with bearing arms, it’s an exponential fear.” Indeed, the US has a gun problem—but, more significantly, it has a white supremacy problem. The essays in this special issue all address shooting within a wide range of contexts, from Elise Morrison’s examination of virtual shooting to a study of the weapons training of San Diego police in Patrick Anderson’s essay. Examinations of white supremacy [End Page xi] underlie each. We begin with La Donna Forsgren’s “Hands Up, Don’t Shoot: ‘Suicide,’ Black Gun Ownership, and Restoring Black Masculinity on Black Arts Movement Stages.” Forsgren discusses several plays written as part of the Black Arts Movement of the 1960s and ’70s, with special attention to plays written by women: Sonia Sanchez, Lola E. Jones, and Carol Freeman. Beginning with an analysis of Amiri Baraka’s one-act Arm Yourself, Or Harm Yourself (1967), she notes that “many Black activists—including members of the Black Panther Party—encouraged Black male gun ownership as an essential step toward reclaiming their ‘lost’ manhood or kingdom. Baraka’s formulations tap into Black Panther Party imagery and rhetorical strategies, conceptualizing...

Problems of Assimilation and Difficulties of Becoming a Man in LeRoi Jones’s Dutchman

This article attempts to explore the obstacles of an African American in becoming a Man in the white community in LeRoi Jones’s play Dutchman. In doing so, it analyzes the text from African American perspective, which is a black cosmological lens applied to critically examine African American history, culture and the literature, primarily with its focus on cultural assimilation and its aftermath. LeRoi Jones, also known with his new name Amiri Baraka, in this play exposes how the black Americans fall victim of racial hatred in the process of assimilating themselves with the mainstream white ways of life. The major argument of this article is an African American’s process of assimilation with the white culture is not only a detachment from his/her origin but also his/her failure to be accepted by the new culture. It argues that in adopting a new culture, a colored American is twice the victim of his/her past and the present. To justify this stark predicament of colored American population, the article briefly looks back at the situation of the American blacks in the 1960s. It ponders on the entire behavior of Clay, a twenty years old black boy in the play, his fondness in choosing to imitate the white world as a model. His craze for white way of life is reflected in the dress up he is putting on, his mastery over the use of cosmetic language of the whites, his eating of apple given by Lula, a thirty years old white lady who morbidly tempts him for sexual intercourse, his attempt to forget his own ancestral history to make him look more like an American than a descendent of slave. The article also analyses Lula’s stereotyping of Clay and the way she dictates white values and norms.

Amiri Baraka – Militant Writer and Artist

Donald Friedman interviewed Amiri Baraka (1934-2014) in 2003. An edited excerpt of that interview may be viewed at https://donaldfriedman.com/2019/06/25/amiri-baraka-politics-exists-for-truth-and-beauty/ Below are an introduction to the interview and a full transcript of the excerpt. Introduction A political figure whose words were angry, often incendiary, occasionally homophobic, misogynistic and anti-Semitic, Amiri Baraka used his writing first and foremost as agitprop, as a means to change...

“Split by the Moonlight”: Beethoven and the Racial Sublime in African American Literature

AbstractAs Nathan Waddell has recently argued of the literary modernists whose aesthetic incorporation of the Beethovenian legend complicates the dominant view of modernism as an antitraditionalist enterprise, Ludwig van Beethoven’s music has in fact left a more significant and complicated mark on African American literature relating to the sublime properties of his musical aesthetic than has previously been recognized. As a point of departure, I apply Michael J. Shapiro’s definition of the racial sublime as a confrontation with the “still vast oppressive structure that imperils black lives” to the setting of twentieth-century African American literature, where Beethoven’s Romantic sublime often stands in for the racial sublime. This transference, I argue, is not an expression of the artist’s repressed instinctual conflict, the mere sublimation of their devotion to “white” culture and the cult of genius, as Amiri Baraka once suggested. Rather, Beethoven’s music formed a persistent and powerful political allegory of the racial sublime for many prominent twentieth-century authors in their literary works, where the sublime constitutes a sublimation of direct forms of power into a range of aesthetic experiences. This can be observed in the Beethovenian ekphrasis featured in prose works by James Weldon Johnson, Langston Hughes, James Baldwin, and Ralph Ellison—four writers whose works have also been considered indebted to blues and jazz musical influences and who approach the racial sublime not through language but by appealing to music’s nonsignifying suggestiveness, in order to capture the intensities that radiate out of these encounters. As this article reveals, their allegorical uses for Beethoven are not unitary. The forcefield of the racial sublime is registered allegorically through the performative sublime of Sonata “Pathétique” in Johnson’s The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man (1912); the sublime melancholy of the “Moonlight” Sonata in Hughes’s tragic short story “Home” (1934); the spiritual sublime of Beethoven’s piano concerti and the Ninth Symphony in Baldwin’s short story “Previous Condition” (1948); and the heroic sublime of the Fifth Symphony in Ellison’s bildungsroman Invisible Man (1952).

الشعر الوثائقي: دراسة لقصيدة امريكية “احدهم فجر امريكة”

The modern age is prolific of literary movements and literary genres. Documentary poetry, which can be considered a new genre, combines both primary source material, such as war, political events, terrorism, people in detention and many other events with poetry. Amiri Baraka is a contemporary American poet whose poem "Somebody Blew up America" belongs to this genre. It records the September 11 blowing up of the Trade Centre from a perspective different from what the American propaganda and mass media tell the world. The recent paper attempts to shed light on Amiri Baraka's attitude towards this event, the reasons behind it, the real terrorists and the intentions behind this terrorist event according to this poem. The poet argues that the American government knew beforehand that the Trade Centre was going to be blown up and they took no action to prevent the catastrophe and, in this sense, they were partners in the crime. Furthermore, he accuses the Americans of blowing up the trade centre.The paper is divided into three sections and a conclusion. Section One is Introductory; it sheds light on documentary poetry, its characteristic features and practitioners. Section Two is a biographical note of Amiri Baraka paying special attention to his attitude to American politics based on domination, persecution and genocide. Section Three gives a detailed analysis of "Somebody Blew up America" as a documentary poem recording the September 11 blowing up of the Trade Centre with the aim of finding a pretext to invade other countries. The paper concludes that this event happened according to a well-made plan in cooperation with the American government and the CIA as partners.

To Be Gifted & Talented & BLack (Arkology from the Last Angels of History)

"To Be Gifted & Talented & BLack (Arkology from the Last Angels of History" is an autobiomythography response to Rootwork Journal's call. It explores my journey through the educational system and that my greatest learning came after institutional schooling ended for me. Much of my process in this work uses etymology and wordplay, such as interplaying between the roots of ark/arch/archive. For me, wordplay is like speaking in tongues and is a form of remembering buried languages. Language is a form of coding and I want to imagine the possibilities of it beyond conventional ways. After reading works like Amiri Baraka's "Technology & Ethos" and Martin Heidegger's "The Question of Technology," the former thinking of technology through a black centric view and the latter from a white supremacist view, I wanted to write a poem reflecting on science and technology through the black body and earth and Afro-diasporic cultural mytho-history.

Transculturation, Ideology, and Double Consciousness in LeRoi Jones’s (Amiri Baraka’s) The Great Goodness of Life: A Coon Show and The Slave Ship

مقاله ی حاضر در نظر دارد تا در نمایشنامه های ایدئولوژیکی لیروی جونز یا امیری باراکا (2014-1934) با عناوین بهترین جذابیت زندگی (1969) و کشتی بردگان (1967) به بررسی مفاهیم میان فرهنگی، ایدئولوژی، و موضوع دو هویتی بپردازد. برای نیل به این منظور، از رویکردهای فرانتس فانون در حیطه ی مفاهیم میان فرهنگی و تحلیل هویت سیاهپوستان، و از نظرات اسلاوی ژیژک در تحلیل رویکردهای ایدئولوژیکی-روانشناختی استفاده شده است. یکی از مدلهای ارتباطات میان فرهنگی در حیطه ی عملکرد قوانین استعماری در ایجاد مستعمرات با عنوان حمایت از کشور آفریقایی یا منطقه ی سیاهپوست نشین و یا جذب سیاهپوستان مهاجر به کشورهای سفیدپوست اروپایی-آمریکایی صورت می گیرد. تأثیرات فرهنگ های مختلف در مستعمرات، حاصل آمیزش بین نژادها و فرهنگ ها، باعث ایجاد تضادها، ترسها، نفرت ها، خشونت ها، و جنایات هر روزه خواهند بود. نمایشنامه های باراکا مانند سلاحی سیاسی و انقلابی، به ساختارهای ایدئولوژی حاکم، فرهنگ و نهادهای قراردادی-اجتماعی سفیدپوستان حمله می کند، و آزادی سیاهپوستان، نابودی انواع برده داری، و رهایی از تبعیض نژادی از درون مایه های نمایشنامه های باراکا می باشند. نمایشنامه های ایدئولوژیکی باراکا باعث ترویج فرهنگ مقاومت در سیاهپوستان و افزایش خودآگاهی نژادی و اعتماد به نفس در میان آنان گردیده است، او سیاهپوستان را صاحب فرهنگ و زبان مستقل می شمارد و اذعان می دارد که آنان باید برای کسب استقلال و آزادی خویش به پا خیزند. این مقاله بر آن است تا با تمرکز بر نمایشنامه های ایدئولوژیکی باراکا، پیامدهای تقابل فرهنگ ها را با توجه به عملکردهای ایدئولوژیکی حاکم از طرف استعمارگران سفیدپوست بر سیاهپوستان تفسیر نماید، و براین اساس، به بررسی عوامل قدرت از طریق توصیف ابزارهای مختلف برده داری از جمله خشونت و سرکوب جهت ایجاد دوسویگی، تردید، و دوهویتی در سیاهپوستان بپردازد.

How the Other Half Looks: The Lower East Side and the Afterlife of Images

How the Other Half Looks: The Lower East Side and the Afterlife of Images

The Spiritual Imagination of the BeatsWomen Writers of the Beat Era: Autobiography and IntertextualityWorld Beats: Beat Generation Writing and the Worlding of U.S. LiteratureKerouac: Language, Poetics, and Territory

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