Table of Contents

 

 

 

Acknowledgements                                                                                              IV

 

Abstract                                                                                                                 V

 

 

 

Chapter One: Introduction                                                                                  1

 

 

1.1 General Background                                                                                     1

 

 

1.2 Statement of the Problem                                                                              7

 

1.3 Objectives and Significance of the Study                                                     13

 

1.3.1 Significance of the Study                                                                      13

 

1.3.2 Hypothesis                                                                                             15

 

1.3.3 Purpose of the Study                                                                             16

 

1.3.4 Research Questions                                                                                17

 

1.4 Literature Review                                                                                          19

 

 

1.5 Methodology and Approach                                                                         27

 

 

1.5.1 Definition of Key Terms                                                                          30

 

 

1.5.2 Limitation and Delimitation                                                                     35

 

 

1.6 Organization of the Study                                                                             36

 

 

 

Chapter Two: Political Criticism and Cultural Materialism                       40

 

2.1 Marxism and Political Criticism                                                                    42

 

2.2 Hegemony                                                                                                       51

 

2.3 Ideology                                                                                                           55

 

2.4 Cultural Materialism                                                                                      59

 

2.4.1 Raymond Williams and the Birth of Cultural Materialism                      62

 

2.4.2 Michel Foucault and the Influence on Cultural Materialism                    64

 

2.4.2.1 The Definition of Power: Traditional and Modern                               65

 

2.4.2.2 Panopticism                                                                                           70

 

 

2.4.2.3 Power and Resistance                                                                           75

 

2.4.3 The Dissident Reading of Literature                                                        78

 

 

 

Chapter Three: A Bohemian Poet and Novelist                                               89

 

3.1 Ideological Issues in Beat Poetry of Young Amiri Baraka                         91

 

3.2 The System of Dante’s Hell: An Outsider among Outsiders                        103

 

3.2.1 Challenging the Discourse of Fiction Writing:

 

Creating a Dissident Voice                                                                 118

 

3.2.2 Radical Unconventional Characterization:

 

Involvement in a Subculture                                                               123

 

3.2.3 A Confused Alien in Search of Meaning:

 

Political and Cultural Context                                                                        126

 

 

 

Chapter Four: Cursing the White Race                                                132

 

4.1 Baraka’s Harlem Poetry                                                                                133

 

4.2 Trying to Find a New Black Identity                                                            145

 

4.3 African-American Drama and Baraka’s Profound Role                           152

 

4.3.1 Dutchman: The Circular Story of the White and Blackness                    158

 

4.3.2 The Slave: The Play of Racial Vandalism                                    172

 

 

 

Chapter Five: Constructing a Dissident Subculture                                       187

 

5.1 African American Poetry and the Role of Amiri Baraka                          188

 

5.1.1 Black Nationalist Poetry: Redefinition and Enrichment

 

of Black Identity                                                                                        193

 

5.1.2 Shaping a Black Dissident Subculture                                                     221

 

5.1.3 Imamu Amiri Baraka: A Spiritual Leader among Black Americans        228

 

5.2 Revolutionary Playwright: Fighting with the White World                       230

 

5.2.1 Experimental Death Unit #1: Planning a Revolution                               232

 

5.2.2 A Black Mass: The Intense Hatred of White as the Secondary Race      240

 

5.2.3 Great Goodness of Life: The White Race as a Panoptic Force                 251

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Chapter Six: Universal Dissidence                                                                     262

 

6.1 Baraka’s Late Political Poetry and the Global Resistance                         264

 

6.2 Tales of the Out and the Gone: Social and Cultural Short Stories              286

 

6.2.1 “War Stories”: Sociopolitical Matters in America

 

during the 1970s and 1980s                                                                289

 

6.2.1.1 “New & Old”, “Neo-American” and “Mondongo”: Marxist Stories    290

 

6.2.1.2 “From War Stories”: What is True Democracy?                                   303

 

6.2.2 “Tales of the Out and the Gone”: Revolutionary Disorder                      306

 

6.2.2.1 “The Rejected Buppie”: Racial Assimilation and Absurdity                309

 

6.2.2.2 Universal Rottenness and the Appreciation of

 

Black Music and Culture                                                                    311

 

6.2.2.3 “Conrad Loomis and the Clothes Ray”: Playing with Language         316

 

6.2.2.4 “Dream Comics”: Etymological Dissection                                          319

 

6.2.2.5 “Post- and Pre-Mortem Dialogue”: 9/11 Conspiracy Theories              321

 

 

 

Chapter Seven: Conclusion                                                                                  327

 

7.1 Summing up                                                                                                    327

 

7.2 Findings and Implications                                                                             339

 

7.3 Suggestions for Further Research                                                                348

 

 

 

Bibliography                                                                                                            352

 

 

 

Appendix                                                                                                                   363

 

Figure 1                                                                                                                  363

 

Figure 2                                                                                                                  364

 

Figure 3                                                                                                                  365

 

Figure 4                                                                                                                  366

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Chapter One

 

 

Introduction

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

1.1 General Background

 

In order to get a clear picture of Baraka’s ideology in his literary texts, the researcher intends to begin by Baraka’s biography. Imamu Amiri Baraka (October 7, 1934 – January 9, 2014), also known as Amiri Baraka and Everett LeRoi Jones, the writer of over fourteen volumes of poetry, dramatist (over twenty plays, three jazz operas), essayist (producer of seven volumes of nonfiction), fiction writer (two novels and several volumes of collected short stories), actor, movie director, and political activist, is a unique force in American literature[1]. He is considered by many to be one of the most influential and preeminent African-American literary figures of our time; for instance, Paul Vangelisti asserts “along with Ezra Pound, may be one of the most significant and least understood American poets

 

 

 

of our century” (Vangelisti xi). In 2002, scholar Molefi Kete Asante registered Imamu Amiri Baraka on his list of 100 Greatest African Americans.

 

His practice as a cultural activist redefined the role of the modern American poet and playwright. He was best known for his powerful contribution, as writer and theorist, to the “Black Arts Movement” of the 1960s—Baraka is known as the founder of this movement. To mix the open forms of Black Mountain School poetry, the 1950s Beats and with the rhetorical and musical traditions of Black culture; he explosively expanded an urgent and aggressive African-American poetry and poetics. Literary historian and critic Arnold Rampersad recognizes Baraka as the main modernizing influence on Black poetry and names him, along with Langston Hughes (1902 – 1967) and others, as one of the eight writers “who have remarkably affected the course of African-American literary culture” (Harris xviii). Langston Hughes’s example and influence on Baraka was extensive and profound, and these two poets are plainly in sympathy in terms of formal experimentation, commitment to audience, and historical consciousness, even to the extent that Hughes’s “Broadcast to the West Indies” (1943) seems to make possible Baraka’s “SOS” (1967), and Baraka’s “When We’ll Worship Jesus” (1975) becomes a later 20th-century treatment of Hughes’s “Goodbye Christ” (1932). Other impacts on Imamu Amiri Baraka’s literary works include Black music especially blues and jazz music and Black American musicians, and the theory and practice of politicized Black American authors, as well as Frederick Douglass (1818 – 1895), W. E. B. DuBois (1868 – 1963), Aimé Césaire (1913 – 2008), and Malcolm X (1925 – 1965) (Kimmelman 30). As a creative and powerful poet since the announcement of his first poems collection, Preface to a Twenty Volume Suicide Note (1961), Amiri Baraka is also considered as a celebrated playwright, essayist, music critic, fiction writer, political activist, movie director, and editor.