Brick City Vanguard: Amiri Baraka, Black Music, Black Modernity
James Smethurst
(Author)
Description
Amiri Baraka is unquestionably the most recognized leader of the Black Arts Movement of the 1960s and 1970s, and one of the key literary and cultural figures of the postwar United States. While Baraka's political and aesthetic stances changed considerably over the course of his career, Brick City Vanguard demonstrates the continuity in his thinking about the meaning of black music in the material, psychic, and ideological development of black people. Drawing on primary texts, paratexts (including album liner notes), audio and visual recordings, and archival sources, James Smethurst takes a new look at how Baraka's writing on and performance of music envisioned the creation of an African American people or nation, as well as the growth and consolidation of a black working class within that nation, that resonates to this day. This vision also provides a way of understanding the encounter of black people with what has been called "the urban crisis" and a projection of a liberated black future beyond that crisis.
Product Details
Price
$32.34
Publisher
University of Massachusetts Press
Publish Date
May 29, 2020
Pages
216
Dimensions
6.0 X 8.9 X 0.7 inches | 0.8 pounds
Language
English
Type
Paperback
EAN/UPC
9781625345158
BISAC Categories:
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About the Author
JAMES SMETHURST is professor of Afro-American studies at the University of Massachusetts Amherst and author of The African American Roots of Modernism: From Reconstruction to the Harlem Renaissance.
Reviews
"Once again, with Brick City Vanguard, James Smethurst proves that he is one of the leading scholars of the Black Arts Movement, of New Left literary studies, and of one of its emblematic writers, Amiri Baraka."--Jean-Philippe Marcoux, cofounder of the Amiri Baraka Society and author of Jazz Griots: Music as History in the 1960s African American Poem "James Smethurst has read everything on Baraka and produced an original and important book. Brick City Vanguard is a major contribution to the field."--William J. Harris, author of The Poetry and Poetics of Amiri Baraka: The Jazz Aesthetic "An illuminating work about a central figure in the Black Arts Movement."--CHOICE "[A] generous and generative work that positions Baraka as a listener and singer/vocalizer as well as a reader and writer. Smethurst invites us to think about Baraka's intellectual production with and about music as a sustained engagement with Marxist thought . . . Brick City Vanguard gestures toward exciting articulations of Black studies and cultural studies."--American Literary History "Brick City Vanguard equips readers to take seriously, at long last, the entire career of a major writer-activist, one whose abiding concerns remain before us today."--African American Review "Through a critical reassessment of the way Amiri Baraka came to understand and perform Black art while re?ecting the diversity of its social and political thought, Smethurst offers a novel approach to reinterpreting Baraka's cultural legacy."--Journal of African American History
