The Sound Approach: The Changing Same of Amiri Baraka’s Black Internationalism

Following the violent deaths of Malcolm X and Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., no one did more to reshape black identity, space, and sound for African Americans in the United States than Amiri Baraka. His prolific organizing led to the development of all-black cultural institutions such as the Black Arts Repertory Theater and School (BARTS) in Harlem and Spirit House in Newark. It also resulted in the establishment of all-black political organizations such as the United Brothers (UB) and the Committee for Unified New Ark (CFUN), along with his national leadership of the Congress of African People (CAP). Baraka was an avant-garde poet-turned-cultural nationalist who ultimately adopted a Marxist-Leninist-Maoist political ideology evidenced most visibly through the transformation of CAP into the Revolutionary Communist League (RCL) in 1976. Through his many dramatic ideological and personal changes during the 1950s, 60s, and 70s, Baraka’s particular concerns with black liberation while rooted in Newark, New Jersey, were always consciously informed by issues related to black internationalism.

Despite his well-publicized break with Black Nationalism (or cultural nationalism), Baraka’s Black Marxist political stance was one that remained culturally informed by, translated, and performed for African Americans. His radical poetic and political praxes were two sides of the same spatial project that aimed to inform and move both performer and audience in the direction of black liberation. Through his theorization and performance of a black transnational esthetic, notably evidenced in his book Blues People: Negro Music in White America, his poetry and performance, and his institutional development of all-black cultural and political institutions, Baraka sounded the radical tradition of black internationalism. In the process, he worked to shape and reshape African Americans on the ground politically and in the cultural imagination.

Over the past fifty years, literary scholars have examined important aspects of Baraka’s esthetic approach Writing in 1978, poet Nathaniel Mackey astutely traces the continuity of the conflicting principles of black music (“the accessible and esoteric”) within Baraka’s poetry throughout the perceived discontinuity of his poetic and ideological progression In this same vein, he identifies the Projective verse roots of Baraka’s changing same ethos. The changing same, or the notion that one’s essential self or one’s basic attitudes remain essentially the same yet are expressed differently over time due to shifting contexts, is highlighted by Mackey to link the impulses and themes of Baraka’s earliest Beat-era poetry to his later Black Nationalist-era poetry and to his latest Black Marxist poetry. Lastly, Mackey emphasizes the “the primacy of process” in all of Baraka’s poetry, best expressed in the title of his poem “Hunting Is Not Those Heads on the Wall,” as essential to understanding the oeuvre of Baraka’s poetics To this last point, scholars such as Kimberly Benston and Meta DuEwa Jones have also explored Baraka’s privileging of process over product in their respective studies of Baraka’s poetry and performance

In 1986, William Harris likens the process of Baraka’s poetic and social transformation to that of jazz revision; as a result, he characterizes Baraka’s performative method as a jazz esthetic. This esthetic, Harris argues, is a “procedure that uses jazz variations as paradigms for the conversion of white poetic and social ideas into black ones. In other words, Baraka transforms and creates new forms to destroy old ones. In a later study specific to the influence of free jazz within Baraka’s innovative writing, Harris argues further that he captures the changing same of the black musical tradition through his incorporation of older black sounds (the blues) into the revelatory power of new sounds (free jazz). In this process, Baraka not only revises but just as importantly extends the tradition Most recently, James Smethurst explores Baraka’s artistic development amidst the backdrop of Newark as an emblem of black modernity while arguing that his Black Marxist period, “rather than one of fallow criticism, contained some of the strongest … work he ever produced.

During this same time period, historians and political scientists have also traced his contributions to black political development during the apex and nadir of the Black Power era in U.S. history Writing in 1999, Komozi Woodard situates Baraka’s individual process of transformation from apolitical avant-garde poet to Black Nationalist to Pan-African Nationalist within a larger communal process of African-descended community identity formation that was fostered by twin cultural and political movements: the Black Arts Movement and the Modern Black Convention Movement. Woodard locates the murder of Malcolm X in 1965 as the turning point that inspired Baraka to move to Harlem following Malcolm X’s personal example of “ethical reconstruction and cultural revitalization” of the African American community While Woodard characterizes Baraka as “the Father of the Black Arts Movement,” it is in this era of cultural revitalization that Baraka joined forces with influential artists, intellectuals, and community activists such as Sonia Sanchez, Larry Neal, Kwame Ture (Stokely Carmichael), Harold Cruse, Ed Bullins, Jayne Cortez, Marvin X, and his future wife, Amina, seeking black liberation These twin movements were also inextricably tied to the transnational Black Liberation Movement spurring local, national, and international cooperation among African-descended peoples throughout the diaspora.

As Woodard, Robin Kelley and Betsy Esch, and Robeson Taj Frazier all show, local and national cultural organization begat local and national political organization, which reflected the hopes, concerns, goals, and objectives of black internationalism, under the rubric of Pan-African Nationalism. This new internationalism took shape institutionally in the U.S. context namely in the form of CAP. Initially established in 1970 to help organize the upcoming Black Power Conference, Frazier explains that CAP developed into a national organization due to the decline of the Black Power movement. From 1970 to 1973, he contends that Black Power was replaced by Pan-Africanism, at least in terms of nationalist rhetoric, “which called for the liberation of all peoples of African descent across the diaspora. He also notes that “the group to frame CAP’s development, future work, and ideology was the Committee for Unified New Ark (CFUN), led by … Amiri Baraka. Following CFUN’s electoral success in the spring and summer of 1970, which led to Kenneth Gibson becoming Newark’s first black mayor, CFUN transformed into CAP-Newark and Baraka came to be recognized as the national leader of the Pan-African Nationalist Movement, assuming leadership as Chairman of CAP beginning in 1972. Serving in this capacity, as Kelley and Esch show, Baraka looked abroad to national African leaders and Maoist China for inspiration to affect radical institutional change at home in Newark

Despite this significant scholarship, Baraka’s contributions to black internationalism are partitioned along disciplinary lines, and these analyses tend to compartmentalize his ideological stances and thus overlook or fail to account for his unique cultural and political significance as both a major artist and a major political figure. Understanding the interdisciplinary nature of Baraka’s notion of the changing same is critical for understanding these contributions. By focusing on the changing same of his esthetic method, this article will demonstrate the consistent staging of what I call a black transnational esthetic, an institutionalized theory and praxis that pervaded his cultural and political work throughout his life.

Through an analysis of Baraka’s own poetry and performance, this essay demonstrates how his cultural practices and political activism were instrumental not only in developing black international consciousness but also in mobilizing local political power. While much is made of his “ever-evolving” ideological self, this article will further demonstrate that Baraka’s black transnational esthetic undergirded his cultural work beginning with the publication of Blues People in 1963. If literature, as the poet Ezra Pound once opined, is news that stays news, then Baraka’s esthetic, a comprehensive multimodal approach at once musical, literary, political, performative, and institutional, was rooted in bringing the news of black internationalism to the forefront of the black urban working-class consciousness in the United States. It is in this transnational context that Baraka’s rise to influence as both artist and activist would take shape.

Black Is a Country

In the African American experience of the mid-twentieth century, cultural modes of expression became a primary front in a war of position against a modern western nation-state that marginalized its racialized subjects through ideology and cultural hegemony. This experience has been but one local iteration of a broader black transnational process grounded in the cultural and political practices of western imperialism. Accordingly, African American artists associated with and inspired by the Black Arts Movement practiced and articulated subversive panAfrican politics through poetry, drama, dance, and the popular vocal and instrumental sounds of the blues, jazz, and R&B. For Amiri Baraka, the poet, playwright, jazz critic, activist, and founder of BARTS, his own subjective experience can be most productively examined when viewed as a microcosm of a greater transnational cultural struggle rooted in diasporic blackness beset by political disenfranchisement.

Many African Americans during the mid-twentieth century (and much earlier) were institutionally deprived of basic human dignity and the full rights of national citizenship in a formally and informally segregated society, and they looked to Africa to imagine and attain a form of self-respect and sense of national belonging. In emerging transnational social movements of heightened cultural and political consciousness, blackness was transformed from stigma into strength. Beginning with the New Negro Renaissance in the U.S. and Jane Nardal’s foundational 1928 essay “Internationalism Noir” that heralded Francophone Negritude and African American Black Power, Africa was the fulcrum for twin esthetic and political movements wherein African-descended people were able to access a global sense of belonging, pride, and dignity that had been denied at the local level. In this communal and cultural process of becoming, marked by political desires of subjective longing and self-identification, Baraka’s black transnational esthetic stands out.

Baraka’s esthetic practices were ultimately a reaction to and adaptation of this hegemony of western discourse that was initiated by key moments of international contact. His travels throughout Puerto Rico and Cuba between 1954 and 1960 heightened his awareness of anticolonial struggles and provided him with a cultural and political perspective in which he could better understand the intimate relationship between blackness and empire. In Black Empire: The Masculine Global Imaginary of Caribbean Intellectuals on The United States, 1914-1962, Michelle Ann Stephens explores the relationship between blackness and empire by privileging the role of Caribbean thinkers for the intellectual work that comprises the formal theorizing of a black transnational imaginary. According to Stephens, this particular masculinist imaginary is fundamentally conceived via a spatialized blackness burdened by the national

These material conditions of empire serve to organize black transnational political thought, thereby creating the conditions for black solidarities to emerge across nation, language, gender, and class. Within the multinational cast of Pan-African intellectuals, Stephens argues Caribbean men were positioned best to understand “that the colony was the very site of empire’s hybridity, while the nation was being constructed as the site of imagining community through national homogeneity. Through his ability to travel within the islands, Baraka was able to access “empire as a discourse with multiple forms,” which Stephens argues “has been the Caribbean intellectual’s experience of and contribution to the twentieth-century global imaginary. In this context, Baraka grounded his political consciousness within a distinctly radical black international tradition.

In the Caribbean, Baraka was exposed to African Americans and Caribbean national leaders, artists, and intellectuals who expanded his view on the influence of U.S. imperialism. Stationed in Puerto Rico at Ramey Air Base, Baraka befriended a group of fellow black officers, The Ramey Air Force Base Intellectuals Salon, as he called it, who bonded over artistic tastes and shared experiences. His salon friends kept him connected to black life on the island through music: “Cut off as we were-… the music was a connection to black life. Beyond Puerto Rico, Baraka first traveled to Cuba as a member of the Air Force in 1955 and described Havana as “the vice capital of the world,” indicative of the debilitating effects of U.S. neocolonialism on the island Traveling to Cuba a second time as part of the Fair Play for Cuba Committee in July 1960, Baraka was exposed to a cast of multinational artists and activists that challenged him, such as Cuban Youth Congress member Rubi Betancourt and Mexican poet Jaime Shelly, and those who inspired him, such as Cuban nationalist leader Fidel Castro and African American civil rights activist Robert Williams. Through The Crusader, a newsletter published by the Monroe NAACP under his direction, Williams became the first prominent African American who directly linked “the Cuban Revolution to the struggle for black liberation in the United States. As a former U.S. military member, Baraka identified with Williams and his support for black liberation, Castro, and Cuban sovereignty, explaining years later, “You have to understand, Robert Williams changed my whole life. Together Castro and Williams provided Baraka with a masculinist model to emulate in order to counter the debilitating effects of racialized western imperialism. Yet despite the critical role the Caribbean played in Baraka’s burgeoning transnational political consciousness, it was an event on the African continent that brought the politics of black internationalism into clear relief for him while living in the U.S.

Baraka’s career as a black political activist effectively began in 1961 following the assassination of the Prime Minister of the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), Patrice Lumumba, on 17 January 1961. Lumumba’s fall served as radical touchstone for Baraka to develop his transnational critique. In his 1962 essay, “Black Is a Country,” Baraka reflects on the lessons of nationalism imparted upon him through Castro and Lumumba. He argues that these two men “are pointing out dramatically the road our own struggle must take. In America, Black is a country. The Cubans are attacked by this country because they refuse to let themselves be used solely to further the Industrial interests of this country,” and similarly, “Lumumba was killed because he resisted the designs of the neo-colonialists to continue to make money from the labors of the African. These passages demonstrate Baraka’s understanding of the economic motivations for western powers’ resistance to Castro’s Cuba and their responsibility for Lumumba’s downfall.

Furthermore, these nationalist struggles enabled him to link American anti-racist struggles with Global South anticolonial and anti-imperialist struggles. Baraka connects the segregated politics of American apartheid (“the black man has been separated and made to live in his own country of color”) to the larger colonial and global implications (“the Negro’s struggle in America is only a microcosm of the struggle of new countries all over the world”) This linking of segregation in the U.S. context to (neo)colonialism abroad reflects his recognition of the international implications of western imperialism via global capitalism. This passage also recalls the global vision of W.E.B. Du Bois, who in 1906 wrote “the Negro problem in America is but a local phase of a world problem. Lumumba’s death and the resulting “Black Is a Country” essay mark the beginning of the African American poet situating himself within the larger transnational identity formation of blackness. For Baraka, the development via formal theorizing of his groundbreaking black transnational esthetic is first evidenced in his critically acclaimed ethnomusicological history and criticism, Blues People, and his embodiment of this ethos would first appear in his performance of his poem “Black Dada Nihilismus” the following year.

From Blues People to Black Dada Nihilismus

Blues People locates African American musical practice as an extension of subjectively black political thought, which runs counter to mainstream white culture within the colonial regime of western modernity. Baraka argues that African American music must be understood as “the result of certain attitudes, certain specific ways of thinking about the world” and that this “music changed as [African Americans] changed, reflecting shifting attitudes or (and this is equally important) consistent attitudes within changed contexts. And it is why the music changed that seems most important to me Here Baraka identifies the transnational political nature of black art and the ways in which black music in the U.S. is continually reproduced and re-sounded. This passage also articulates Baraka’s central claim in Blues People that remains imbued with an analytic quality that still resonates.

At its most influential, Blues People probes the important psychic and philosophical origins of both popular and radical black musical forms and ties them to his original theoretical concept of the changing same This foundational theorization of culture as processual production (i.e., consistent attitudes within changed contexts) situates black diasporic identity, performance, history, tradition, and culture as indicative of a process, a verb rather than a noun. This changing same names the interplay between the reaction and adaptation to the lived experience and feeling that shaped black art in both form and content: an art form born in response to the material repression of black citizenship associated with the class and caste hierarchy of white western imperialism—or what Cedric Robinson calls racial capitalism.

The changing same of a transnationally repressed black political subjectivity as understood in the U.S. context is expressed culturally in each successive idiom, which equates roughly to the corresponding “free” black political experience of a particular historical period. This dialectal process is evident when viewing the development of the blues alongside the racial terror of post-Reconstruction white redemption; swing jazz at the height of the economic prosperity of the Roaring Twenties, the Great Migration, and New Negro optimism; bebop jazz during the leaner Double V World War II years; free jazz and rhythm and blues alongside postwar mass organized African American agitation for civil rights enfranchisement and calls for Black Power; and hip hop alongside post-civil rights deindustrialization, neoliberal disinvestment, and mass criminalization of black life. On one hand, Baraka’s notion of the changing same emphasizes black agency in speaking to or against forms of physical and psychological oppression that African-descended people living in the West have experienced since the inception of the European slave trade. On the other hand, this concept deals with the physical and psychological oppression that is doled out by the transnationally white supremacist power structure of racial capitalism. The changing same as heuristic captures this dialectical synthesis between the various transmuting forms of white supremacist cultural and political repression which contributes to, shapes, and informs the “new things” of black musical expression and corresponding black political movements or lived realities.

Blues People frames black music as an anti-modern discourse adapting to and reacting against the cultural mores of the western world. Baraka argues that “in the west only the artifact can be beautiful, mere expression cannot be thought to be. In this sense, to champion the anti-modern or nonwestern is to emphasize the quality of artistic expression over the commercial quantity of the artifact. As Mackey explains, Baraka privileges the primacy of process within the production of culture, not as a means to an end, a noun/commodity, but as an end unto itself that valorizes use value, as a verb, as the artistic stroke against exchange value. The tenth chapter of Blues People, entitled “Swing: From Verb to Noun,” encapsulates this point. Baraka argues that as swing jazz of the 1920s and 1930s becomes popularized, commercialized, and indeed whitened for popular consumption, it loses its vital quality. In other words, as swing is reduced to exchange commodity (noun as economic subjugation of human life), the great force of feeling in the movement (verb as liberatory potential of the human spirit) is rendered use-less.

Swing as noun means the negation of the blues impulse that gave jazz its scope of cultural import and emotional validity. Baraka argues that “Swing, the verb, meant a simple reaction to the music (and as it developed in a verb usage, a way of reacting to anything in life). As it was formalized, and the term and the music taken further out of context, swing became a noun that meant a commercial popular music in cheap imitation of a kind of Afro American music. To mainstream white audiences during the interwar years, the swing of syncopated polyrhythms was animalistic and unrefined. They favored the style of Paul Whiteman for his dismissal of syncopation and de-emphasis of the Africanist roots of jazz Baraka would later characterize bebop’s emergence of the 1940s as thus “the reemphasis of the non-western tradition. It is in this context that each successive mode of black expressive music, or “new thing,” must be viewed as both an adaptation to and reaction against these hegemonic cultural attitudes which are part and parcel of white western market forces.

The legacy of the rise of the bebop form in the 1940s would prove instructive to Baraka’s artistic and political aspirations in this regard. Bebop was a response to swing as noun, the latter a form which relied on “commercial formulas and musically conservative white tastes [that] dominated jazz performance by the 1930s” which resulted in, jazz historian Kathy Ogren argues, “costing jazz its vitality. As an esthetic response to the white impulse to contain and repress both the polyrhythmic syncopation and the perceived racial invasion of the Great Migration it symbolized, bebop, according to Baraka, “showed up to restore jazz Jazz, as noun, was in a crisis and bebop, as verb, sought to restore its artistic value by reasserting its African roots. Bebop was thus a return to the practice of jazz as verb. For Baraka, bebop represented the “willfully harsh, anti-assimilationist sound” par excellence that reasserted nonwestern concepts of music through its “hegemony of polyrhythms and the subjugation of melody closer to an African way of making music. Bebop represented an anti-commodity art form rooted in a blues impulse shaped by black workers, and between its practitioners and devoted fans, it formed a culture of anti-western nonconformity which, as Baraka points out, told its mainstream white American audience that “I don’t care if you listen to my music or not. It is precisely this attitude of defiant self and collective assertion of both artist playing within the ensemble and artist leading the audience toward liberatory revolution that Baraka sought to reproduce within his own poetry and performance following the publication of Blues People.

Baraka’s esthetic approach revealed a newfound commitment to willfully harsh, unearthly sounds evidenced in his poem “Black Dada Nihilismus” and its performance. This poem’s title invokes Black Dada, African god of abundance, in juxtaposition with Dada as the European modernist art movement, and Nihilismus, a subjective and social sense of one being full of disbelief in life’s meaning, religious, or moral purpose. “Black Dada Nihilismus” performs the internalized cultural conflict of the racialized subject growing up in the West, but never being accepted by it. This poem in turn rejects the West and its emphasis on the logic and reason of the market that rationalizes racialized death by summoning the virtuous African spirit. “Black Dada Nihilismus” stages the tension of the chasm that lies between the African continent and the western hemisphere. This audible tension is textually presented as “Black scream/and chant, scream, and dull, un/earthly//hollering. Dada, bilious/what ugliness, learned/in the dome … /of the lost/nihil German killers. In this passage, Baraka summons the African souls lost to the unspeakable violence of the middle passage of western modernity. This poem ultimately marks the changing same summoning, and personal embodiment, of a new mode, of Baraka seeking a new name, a new way of writing, a new way of speech, a new black sound, above all else–a new black art and political movement that draws on, revises, and extends the radical tradition of black internationalism.

This transformative individual and collective cultural ethos is embodied in his declaration in the liner notes to The New Wave of Jazz: “New Black Music is this: Find the self, then kill it. Mackey explains that this phrase in the context of a musical ensemble meant “in the course of improvising and getting to the point where you can play free music, you have to find yourself. You have to find out what your sound is. He also links this musical attitude to the political organizing that took place during the civil rights movement which called into question the western regime of white supremacy and how it shaped and produced black subjects. In this context of “sociopolitical ensembling,” he explains how one “had to look at the extent to which you were compliant with that shaping. The self that you had found yourself to be was, in some way, a creation of that regime. Then killing it would mean fashioning a new self that would be in conflict with that regime and that wants to bring about the destruction of that regime. For Baraka, black music animated the self and the collective culture and therefore vibrant music and culture become both a precondition to, and a model of, revolutionary change.

“Black Dada Nihilismus” is an extension of Blues People wherein Baraka constructs a new progressive historical method that mythologizes black music as key to unlocking the potential of black liberation in the western world. Citing Baraka’s 1964 performance with the New York Art Quartet, Benston demonstrates that Baraka ritually enacts the finding and killing of self. It is in this performance, Benston argues, whereby the poem’s “ethos of collective resistance and engagement is given determinate form, bridging the distance it also marks between representation and action. Within the discourse of the poem, Baraka finds himself within the context and the modality of the ensemble and ritualistically kills himself (as LeRoi Jones) and is reborn as Black Dada Nihilismus, the soon-to-be-named Amiri Baraka. As his voice becomes one piece within the fabric of the ensemble/ community, this performance constitutes a sonic re-articulation of blackness which unifies the theory of Blues People with Black Dada Nihilismus’s self-transmutation to the aural enactment of rupture as declaration of a unified self. Baraka’s New York Art Quartet performance symbolized ensemble as model for political praxis, and his blend of poetic with the political serves as the hallmark of his enduring artistic career. From this perspective, BARTS represented Baraka’s initial institutionalization of his black transnational esthetic.

Black Transnationalism

The pivotal movement in Baraka’s progression from avant-garde poet to cultural nationalist was the assassination of Malcolm X at the Audubon Ballroom in Harlem on 19 February 1965. Prior to this moment, he had been seeking to transmute the proto-nationalist statements of Blues People and “Black Dada Nihilismus” into a praxis appropriate for black liberation. Now inspired by Malcolm X’s lived example and insulted by his violent murder, Baraka embraced New Black Nationalism and relocated uptown to Harlem. Like influential radical intellectuals in the black transnational tradition who preceded him, this ideological move signified his understanding of western imperialism as a discourse with multiple forms. To this end, he established BARTS to challenge and resist these various discursive levels within the arena of cultural representation. Transnational cultural practices are primarily concerned with developing the self through the construct of developing a community real or imagined. It is in this image of a transnationally black political and cultural communion where Baraka’s esthetic practices are linked to a particular masculine global imaginary.

Beginning in the spring of 1965, Baraka became the preeminent Black transnationalist of the Black Power era. In this sense, his performance of black transnationalism proved a reformulation of Marcus Garvey’s brand as spearheaded by his United Negro Improvement Association (UNIA) first founded in Jamaica in 1914 but made popular in the U.S. with the establishment of its Harlem chapter in 1917. Transnationalism, defined by Stephens, is “an actual political and cultural discourse that has throughout the twentieth century theorized issues of Black Nationalism and statehood by placing them within a global geopolitical context Black transnationalism then, again following Stephens, “references the construction of both the global imaginary that drew from the masculinist rhetoric of sovereignty essential to both imperial and national visions of state and an alternative set of tropes and symbols representing clues to alternative ways of imagining black freedom, alternatives deviated from the paradigms of empire. In this regard, Garvey’s circumatlantic performance of black transnationalism proves to be instructive.

Garvey’s conception of race as a transnation is rooted in his global vision and performance of a black state. Stephens asserts, “Garvey’s black empire was a vision of the race as a transnation” and his performance of a black state signified “a circumatlantic performance of black transnationality. Garvey paraded an imperial black state complete with epaulets and wide-brimmed hats, wherein he fashioned western elements of imperial ideology to suit his own political and representational claims. As a well-regarded dramatist, Baraka took a cue from Garvey’s Liberty Hall performance and staged his own particular vision and black transnational performance complete with Afrocentric costuming in the form of kufi, dashiki, and sandals.

Most significantly, both Garvey and Baraka moved beyond vision and performance by developing all-black institutions. Garvey’s influence on Baraka can be traced through the influence and example of Malcolm X. As the children of UNIA members, it was Garvey’s example of institution-based change (along with Elijah Muhammad’s own Nation of Islam) that inspired Malcolm X to create the Organization of African American Unity (OAAU) and Muslim Mosque, Inc. Here a direct line of institution-based activism rooted within the African Diaspora can be traced from Garvey to Malcolm X to Baraka. Moreover, it is in understanding Garvey’s and Baraka’s emphasis on movement within the larger tradition of radical black transnationalism that Baraka’s efforts are most fruitfully considered in comparison to Garvey. As Stephens claims, and in consideration of Garvey’s circumatlantic black transnationality, the strength of Garvey’s revolutionary vision lies not in constructing a back-to-Africa movement but rather by emphasizing and providing black mobility in an imperially colonial world that proscribed boundaries and behaviors of its black colonial subjects. Through the implementation of steamship of the Black Star Line, she argues that “the most pressing problem [Garvey] saw was the restriction of mobility of the black subject throughout the national states and colonial territories of modernity. Baraka too was concerned with black mobility; however, he harnessed global black cultural consciousness via his performing arts institutions as an organizing principle for local and national political mobilization. By personally demonstrating his will to change 'a la “Black Dada Nihilismus,” he aimed to similarly instruct his fellow black Americans how to move.

Following the death of Malcolm X and the subsequent collapse of his OAAU, Baraka was unmatched in the U.S. in developing institutional expressions of black transnationalism, and like Garvey, he placed his greatest faith in building and leading all-black institutions. From 1914 to 1923, Garvey established the UNIA and Black Star Line. From 1965 to 1976, Baraka inaugurated the Black Arts Movement via his establishment of BARTS in Harlem in 1965, and along with Amina Baraka’s integral work, Spirit House in Newark in 1966. Of equal significance, he also played a pivotal role in the development of the Black Power Convention Movement through his establishment of all-black political organizations in Newark such as UB in 1967 and CFUN in 1968, as well as his leadership of CAP beginning in 1972 throughout the duration of its existence.

Baraka’s emphasis on institutional community space was indicative of, and consistent with, black diasporic organizational strategies. As Robin J. Hayes explains, “emancipated spaces” operating within the broader spectrum of “institutions indigenous to the African Diaspora” are key to developing a transnational counterpublic. She describes these kinds of spaces as “physically and intellectually safe areas within the African Diaspora that are organized by antiracist activists, such as conferences, salons, or more intimate gatherings, where frank and earnest interpersonal dialogues between activists of African descent can take place. Baraka’s political activism and community organizing can be viewed as a logical extension of his theorization within Blues People that considered bebop and the places it was developed as virtuous for their providing a space for African Americans to redefine themselves against the formal esthetic strictures of white western hegemony. Baraka was also aligned with Garvey in his institution of a black periodical: Garvey’s UNIA published Negro World while Baraka’s CFUN published Black Newark beginning in 1968 and CAP published In Unity and Struggle beginning in 1974.

Baraka’s performance activism and political organizing during this time are well documented, but what is less understood is his articulation of black internationalist politics via his own community press. Whereas previous studies of Baraka examine his esthetic approach or his prolific political organizing, most have neglected the pedagogical and political imperative that pervades these periodicals Collectively, these newspapers provide an alternative perspective on Baraka’s cultural and political practices, and chart his engagement with black internationalism, as well as trace the shift in his own ideological approaches to black liberation.

Through poetry, performance, and all-black institutions including his newspaper, Baraka performed a black transnational esthetic. Rooted in what Cedric Johnson terms “domestic Pan-Africanism,” it emphasized the importance of working locally within a broader global framework While Johnson’s notion of domestic Pan-Africanism speaks to the political concerns of organizing for effective group power, domestic Pan-Africanism was very much a core operating principle of the creative and cultural work associated with Spirit House. The hallmark of Baraka’s black transnational esthetic is a pedagogical performance of self-transformation, or vanguardism through performance activism, which blends consciousness-raising with political action.

While he typically executed this practice on stage or in a classroom, Baraka also incorporated this performance activism into his newspapers. In Black Newark’s inaugural 1968 issue, an advertisement for Spirit House features Baraka’s “SOS” poem. At the center of this advertisement is a picture of a group of African Americans dressed in Afrocentric attire, and above this picture is the poem printed in its entirety. “SOS” signals the call for the New Black Nation: “Calling black people/Calling all black people, man woman child/Wherever you are, calling you, urgent, come in/Black People, come in, wherever you are, urgent, calling/you, calling all black people/calling all black people, come in, black people, come/on in. This short poem is a call to black people to enlist themselves in their own liberation in their own communities. Immediately below this picture states “Come into the Spirit House, 33 Stirling St., Newark, NJ. This example illustrates that Black Newark effectively blurs the line between art and action in its exhortation of community members to enter the Baraka’s community arts institution to begin and/or further their cultural and political education. Through a comprehensive multimodal performance, Baraka’s black transnational esthetic interpellated and moved his audience not only to political consciousness but also toward actual engagement. In this key regard, Black Newark critically furthers the aims of Baraka’s organizing esthetic.

From Black New Ark to Unity and Struggle

Baraka’s esthetic method was on full display through the development and leadership of all-black political institutions that took his changing same ethos of self transformation and translated it into collective political mobilization at the local and national level. He argued that “a major part of our work must be institution building … in expressions of concrete Pan-Africanism … a nation is simply a large institution. From BARTS to Spirit House and from UB to CFUN and to CAP, this passage reflects the consistent tone of Baraka’s cultural work seeking to raise the metaphorical and metaphysical Black Nation through racially conscious cultural and political institutions. His embrace of Pan-African Nationalism was based on the basic acknowledgement “that we are an African people, despite our slavery or colonization by Europeans or dispersal throughout countries of the world. PanAfricanism is thus the global expression of Black Nationalism. To this end, his stewardship of CAP was instrumental to the national development of Black Power via domestic Pan-African political organization resulting in a variety of African American-owned institutions and political actions.

Baraka’s emphasis on Pan-African Nationalism was also leading him into new ideological directions that had been previously unthinkable only a few months prior. In 1970, as a card-carrying member of Ron Karenga’s Kawaida doctrine brand of cultural nationalism, he belittled Marxism-Leninism as a “white boy” ideology that only offered African Americans “the Identity, Purpose and Direction of the white boy. As such, he rejected Huey Newton and the Black Panther Party’s brand of revolutionary nationalism because of its foundational belief that Marxist critiques of capitalist development were the key to unlocking black liberation. Instead, he favored Karenga’s style of ethical reconstruction in the form of the “Nguzo Saba,” or the seven principles that could discipline the black masses in an African-based cultural program to achieve black liberation As a result, Baraka modeled Spirit House and CFUN (and then with CAP) on Karenga’s Los Angeles-based cultural nationalist organization, US (as opposed to “them”). Yet between 1972 and 1974, he began slowly moving away from cultural nationalism in the direction of revolutionary nationalism (i.e., Marxism-Leninism-Maoism). Amiri Baraka’s last major ideological shift was spurred in part by his wife Amina, who was openly critical of the male supremacy of Kawaida-based cultural nationalism.

Amina Baraka had long been a Newark-based artist, activist, organizer, and leader independent of her husband; therefore, she wielded influence within the cultural organizations they instituted and collaborated in. As former CAP member Michael Simanga explains, Amina “was a serious and influential leader in CAP who contributed to its ideological, organizational, and programmatic development,” and her position in CAP leadership “had a direct and transformative impact” for the organization overall As the only woman on CAP’s executive council, she led the fight against the marginalization of women within the liberation movement by cultural nationalists, including her own husband. Simanga attests that the “challenge to the ideology and practice of the organization was encouraged and led by Amina Baraka, who was also waging the same struggle in her own marriage with the organization’s leader Imamu Baraka.

In addition to her advocacy of black women, she also advocated for the broadening of the theoretical basis of the organization’s revolutionary studies. Simanga explains further that “CAP was clearly growing closer ideologically to the African and Diaspora Liberation Movements, which were allied with socialist countries and influenced by their ideologies. Amina was among those in the organization who not only welcomed but encouraged the direction in which CAP was moving. Amiri would later recall that “once I had begun to grasp and understand that cultural nationalism was a dead end and seriously to study Marxism, it was Amina who encouraged this study and pressed for its public dissemination to the organization as a whole. Thanks to Amina Baraka’s influence, Amiri Baraka looked toward Africa for practical political models where he found active endorsement of socialist ideology by African political leaders.

Under Amiri Baraka’s leadership, CAP embraced African national leaders such as Amilcar Cabral and Julius Nyerere and saw the latter’s style of African socialism as the most effective strategy to implement community control in Newark. Following the ideological lead of its chairman, CAP’s official position on socialism in 1972 advocated for Nyerere’s progressive Tanzanian government and its program of Ujamaa (cooperative economics). CAP characterized this program as “a living model of positive development that black people all over the world can learn from, that socialism, is an ‘attitude,’ a way of addressing the world.’ Baraka and CAP-Newark modeled their proposed North Ward Kawaida Towers housing development project after Nyerere’s Ujamaa villages that sought to improve Tanzanian infrastructure and provide better services to its inhabitants As he studied Pan-African scholarship and African leadership, Baraka’s ideological reorientation played out on the pages of his newly renamed newspaper Black NewArk. “New Ark” as a phrase became Baraka’s way of likening black Newarkers to crusading passengers on a biblical vessel toward redemption.

Black NewArk is notable in its mobilization of a Pan-African identity tied to political mobilization and reveals the broad scope of Baraka’s grassroots organizing. The April 1972 issue advertised the upcoming African Liberation Day March that would take place in various cities throughout North America and the Caribbean in May with the article entitled, “We Must Mobilize This article urges “all black people, all Africans in the western hemisphere to come together … to move the struggle to yet higher levels. Inspired by liberation struggles in Mozambique, Guinea-Bissau, and Angola, U.S. activist Owusu Sadaukai (Howard Fuller) organized a demonstration, Africa Liberation Day (ALD), in support of these independence movements. These demonstrations became annual events buttressed by the Africa Liberation Support Committee (ALSC). As a progression toward this kind of African-descended political mobilization, Black NewArk asks its readers to tune in to local media outlets for the latest in all-black cultural programming. One advertisement entitled “Together We Will Win” lists three ways one can engage in Baraka’s program of black self-determination: by reading Black NewArk (“READ”), by listening to the local WNJR radio station Mondays at 9:05 pm (“LISTEN”), and by tuning in to local television Channel 47 (UHF) Saturdays at 4:30 pm (“WATCH”) Baraka’s multimodal approach toward local and national mobilization reflects his embrace of Pan-African Nationalism. Baraka’s ideological shift was further solidified by the murder of Amilcar Cabral and his subsequent travels to the African continent.

On 20 January 1973, Amilcar Cabral, Secretary-General of the African Party for the Independence of Guinea-Bissau (PAIGC), was assassinated. Cabral’s death was covered on the front page of Black NewArk, and on its back page, in his RAISE! column, Baraka described traveling to Guinea to attend his funeral. Cabral’s writings on the role of culture and revolutionary social movements, his death, and this trip to attend his funeral proved profound for Baraka. Prior to visiting Africa, Baraka explained that “I was reading Nkrumah and Cabral and Mao” and his travels to Africa facilitated his turn away from cultural nationalism to MarxismLeninism-Maoism “For Nkrumah and Cabral,” he realized “the enemy of Africa was imperialism, not just white people. Baraka would later explain how “our exposure to a real Africa, a contemporary Africa, also helped changed our worldview. This cultural and ideological sea change was reflected on the pages of Black NewArk and in its new iteration called Unity and Struggle.

Baraka’s “new” newspaper held true to the changing same ethos outlined in Blues People that traces the dialectic between white political repression and black cultural production as well as black liberation movements, the latter reflected in the very title of Baraka’s “new” newspaper. In its first issue for February-March 1974, Unity and Struggle advertised for a fundraiser entitled “The New Birth In Concert. While The New Birth was a soul, funk, and rock music band, it proved an apt metaphor for the new direction of Baraka’s periodical, poetry, and political ideology. Yet while there was a new name and it distanced itself from cultural nationalism, Baraka’s RAISE! column restates his consistent commitment to “an indigenous ideology of national liberation for Afrikans in North America. This passage reveals that despite Baraka’s ideological progressions, he maintained an unswerving commitment to black self-determination at home and abroad.

Unity and Struggle continued to highlight local and international liberation struggles and key activist events, most notably the Sixth Pan-African Congress (6PAC) to be held in Dar Es Salaam, Tanzania, in June 1974 and hosted by President Julius Nyerere. In terms of practical political outcomes for the U.S. delegation, 6PAC fell short of clear accomplishments, yet for Baraka, it only confirmed his proper turn to scientific socialism. As he left the conference, he felt “the revolutionary line that we are taking and the line we must soon develop must speak very clearly to the need to build socialism. For better or for worse, 6PAC represented the beginning of the end of Baraka’s political influence.

On his 40th birthday, 7 October 1974, Amiri, with Amina, announced that they had officially renounced cultural nationalism in favor of scientific socialism. This day also formally ended the CAP traditional holiday of celebrating his birthday, “Leo Baraka.” Inspired by the example of Ron Karenga and US, Baraka had done much to encourage his own cult of personality within CAP, and now he actively tried to deconstruct this style of leadership. These developments were reflected in the October 1974 first edition with a column entitled “CAP: Going Through Changes. From 1976 onward, Amiri Baraka became an avowed communist and CAP formally changed its name to the Revolutionary Communist League (RCL) that reflected Baraka’s commitment to Marxist-Leninist-Maoist theory and practice. This was also reported on and explained on the front page of Unity and Struggle’s June issue

CAP’s transformation into the RCL signified Baraka’s understanding of the primacy of pan-ethnic class struggle against the prerogatives of transnational capital. In 1975, CAP aligned with the Revolutionary Workers League (RWL), formerly known as the ALSC. As Frazier explains, the RWL was part of a Marxist umbrella group known as the Revolutionary Wing “that brought them together with the Puerto Rican, Asian American, and Mexican American socialist groups. Furthermore, Frazier notes that in 1978, “the RCL merged with the I Wor Kuen and the Chicano August Twenty-Ninth Movement to create the US League for Revolutionary Struggle. Taken together, these Marxist organizational alliances and mergers reflected Baraka’s commitment to Marxism-Leninism-Maoism as well as the necessity of pan-ethnic and pan-nationalist solidarity against the forces of capitalist globalization. Although Baraka would later disavow support for Maoism given China’s economic relationships on the African continent, he would consider himself a small c-communist for the rest of his life. Bereft of his old political clout, despite his public disavowal of cultural nationalism in favor of Marxist-Leninism-Maoism, Baraka’s poetry and performances continued to sound the call toward the radical transformation of the black proletariat.

The Sound Approach

From the publication of Blues People to the very end, Baraka’s devotion to and promotion of the causes and concerns of black internationalism represent his defining unchanging feature. One exemplary poem, “Wailers,” from his Black Marxist period demonstrates this point. “Wailers” was written in 1981 following the deaths that year of both Larry Neal, his longtime Black Arts Movement collaborator, and Bob Marley. In this poem Baraka plays on the homonym of wailing as moaning catharsis and whaling as in hunting giant sea mammals. True to his changing same ethos, Baraka embodies poetry in motion through his sonic reemphasis and re-articulation of “Wailers” as verb. To wail is to cry, and to moan, to sing or shout in grief, pain, or anger, and this poem “Wailers” represents the performer’s signature demand of the dramatic transformation of self.

Baraka uses Marley’s band’s name as an apt projection of all black transnational political subjectivity working against collective racial terror and economic oppression. He proclaims that “We could dig Melville on his ship/confronting the huge white mad beast/speeding death cross the sea to we/But we whalers. We can kill whales. In this passage, Baraka’s audibly performative will to transform himself from “wailer” to “whaler” via wailing transcends the transformation of the single performer and signals the will to collective change. Through imploration, the artist works to inform, inspire, and move his audience toward collectively organized movements for social justice, from wailing to whaling.

By championing Marley, the Jamaican reggae star, Baraka further demonstrates the revolutionary potential of collective transformation of African-descended peoples. He continues: “Hail to you Bob, man! We will ask your question all our lives./Could You Be Loved? I and I understand. We see the world/Eyes and eyes say Yes to transformation. In this passage, Baraka lays bare, or renders visible, his performance of the individual transformation of the conscious black self (“I and I understand”) to his audience in effort to inspire their own collective (“Eyes and eyes”) transmutation. Aside from this explicit call for singular and collective transformation (the “I” of the performer leading by way of example for the “eyes” of the audience), Baraka furthermore seeks collective diasporic validation of black life through his play on the song title of one of Marley’s most popular hits. This poem then is not only a commemoration of the lives of Neal and Marley but is also an urgent call to action. Baraka summons his listeners to join in a communal catharsis of black sound and movement—wailing and whaling. He demands collective action through his insistence to “Call me. I’ll call you. We call we. Through this collective interpellation of black subjectivity as organized by the dehumanizing processes of racialized capitalist development, Baraka hails his fellow black transnational subjects through audible wailing.

“Wailers” typifies Baraka’s esthetic method of political consolidation as a kind of black urban renewal. He implores his listeners to heed his call with signature Barakan staccato braggadocio: “Call Me Bud Powell. You wanna imitate this?/ Listen. Spree dee deet spree deee whee spredeee whee deee/My calling card. The dialectic of silence./The Sound approach./Life one day will be filled even further with we numbers we song/But primitive place now, we wailing be kept underground. In this passage through his invocation of the jazz pianist Powell, Baraka signifies on the staccato jazz rhythm of Blues People. Staccato is a form of musical articulation wherein musical notes are played in shorter duration followed by silence, and Baraka’s naming of his poetic and political praxis as the dialectic of silence and sound symbolically highlights the contrast between inaction and action, noun and verb, and knowledge and movement. Baraka’s emphatic performance in “Wailers” recalls “Black Dada Nihilismus” in its re-sounding re-articulation and redefinition of the political epistemology of black performance.

This sound approach indeed served as Baraka’s calling card, and this poem and its performance crystallizes Baraka’s lifelong commitment to re-sounding the black radical tradition. To have heard Baraka perform his poetry was to hear a conjuring of black voices past, present, and future challenging our contemporary and future political reality. Throughout his life, despite the changing contexts, his consistent attitude was always mobilization for global black liberation. Like Du Bois before him, Baraka came to see the black worker as representing the revolutionary vanguard. He argued, “we are the vanguard because we are at the bottom, and when we raise to stand up straight everything stacked upon us topples. Baraka’s understanding of the place of the black worker in objective history reflected his Marxist-Leninist-Maoist theoretical underpinnings for the primacy of struggle at the level of culture. In this sense, Baraka’s black transnational esthetic undergirded his cultural work, and it was typified by his re-sounding blackness: a sonic re-articulation of the radical possibility of organized black international social and political thought and activism.