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The Sonorous Criticism of Amiri Baraka Bard College Bard Digital Commons Senior Projects Spring 2020 Bard Undergraduate Senior Projects Spring 2020 "Yells of Life in Constant Change": The Sonorous Criticism of Amiri Baraka Jack Luis McKeon Bard College, [email protected] Follow this and additional works at: https://digitalcommons.bard.edu/senproj_s2020 Part of the American Literature Commons This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 4.0 License. Recommended Citation McKeon, Jack Luis, ""Yells of Life in Constant Change": The Sonorous Criticism of Amiri Baraka" (2020). Senior Projects Spring 2020. 317. https://digitalcommons.bard.edu/senproj_s2020/317 This Open Access work is protected by copyright and/or related rights. It has been provided to you by Bard College's Stevenson Library with permission from the rights-holder(s). You are free to use this work in any way that is permitted by the copyright and related rights. For other uses you need to obtain permission from the rights- holder(s) directly, unless additional rights are indicated by a Creative Commons license in the record and/or on the work itself. For more information, please contact [email protected]. “Yells of Life in Constant Change”: The Sonorous Criticism of Amiri Baraka Senior Project Submitted to The Division of Languages and Literature of Bard College by Jack McKeon Annandale-on-Hudson, New York May 2020 McKeon 1 Acknowledgements This project would not have come to fruition without the love and support of friends, family, peers, and professors. I would like to thank my project board, Alex Benson, Marisa Libbon, and Matthew Mutter, each of whom have taught me an overwhelming amount about what it means to study and critique literature. Alex, whose lessons caused me to question how I approached the task of reading and whose work inspired the arc of this project. His counsel through the first half of this project gave me the guidance to push ahead and the confidence I needed to challenge myself. Marisa, who has been a source of inspiration in this project, and who was always patient and encouraging as I reached for the next idea. Matt, whose teaching inspired me to make the greatest choice of my college career — to become a literature major! Your advice, encouragement, and unceasing curiosity pushed me to keep working through these questions even when I felt like I had gone as far as I could. I would like to thank and congratulate my classmates in this year's Literature Colloquium, all of whom inspired me and made Monday nights a bit more eventful. Specifically, I’d like to thank Julia Eifert, my first friend at Bard and my library neighbor, who was always ready to think through difficult questions (and share gossip). I’d like to thank John Coltrane, Buck Owens, and Merle Haggard … just because. Finally, I thank Amiri Baraka, whose work I continue to fall deeper in love with as time goes on. I hope this project does service to his work. Lastly, this project is dedicated to my mom, Jackie, and my sister, Maura; the strongest people I’ve ever known. McKeon 2 Table of Contents Introduction 3 Chapter One: “We are Bodies Responding Different”: 20 Amiri’s Blues for the West Chapter Two: Blues People, Black Music, and the Stakes of Jazz Criticism 49 ​ ​ Chapter Three: “Pop pow pow Boom!! The Flame. The Flame.”: 92 ​ ​ Newark 1967, a Textual Riot Works Cited 129 McKeon 3 Introduction Few American poets have been more controversial, and less understood, than Amiri Baraka. A writer and musician active from the late 1950s until his death in 2013; an activist who at times advocated for the murder of all white people; a close friend of many queer artists who nonetheless frequently employed homophobic rhetoric in his prose: Amiri Baraka is all of these things, yet at times it feels like he is much more or even something different entirely. He was a writer deeply skeptical of inherited theories of aesthetics who managed to push at the theoretical fringes of criticism while also producing beautiful prose. My experience with and knowledge of Baraka’s work stretches over a five year period, though I never intended to dedicate my senior project to his work. I was given a copy of his Dutchman and The Slave by a teacher in my high school and for years he only existed in my ​ mind as the author of two jarring plays. I remembered his anger, if nothing more. It was three years later in the fall of my junior year that Baraka re-inserted himself in my life. While enduring what will hopefully remain one of the most difficult times in my life, I read his “Way Out West” for Marisa Libbon’s Literature 103 course and sections of Blues People for Ann Lauterbach’s ​ ​ course on the New York School. At a time where everything seemed to be moving faster than I could understand, Baraka’s writing allowed me to slow down. His writing gave me something to cling to, a moment of suspension in the beauty of his poetry and in the vibrancy of his inquiry. Still, I gave little thought to Baraka. As he writes in “Way Out West”, I was “merely /coming into things by degrees” (SOS 26). ​ ​ McKeon 4 This project supposes that there is something to be heard within Amiri Baraka’s writing, that his authorial “voice” is more significant than we often suppose voice or tone to express in text. I seek to rectify what I see as a wrong that has been committed, without intention or malevolence, to the written work of Amiri Baraka. I see a failure in only studying Baraka’s most popular or infamous works such as Blues People, Dutchman, or his first poetry collection ​ ​ ​ ​ Preface to a Twenty Volume Suicide Note. Not only does one risk only seeing Baraka as one ​ thing — critic, playwright, or poet — but reading just one “kind” of Baraka text denies the reader the ability to see his larger goals. This project asserts that Baraka used several literary forms in order to move towards a voice that mixed critical rigor, poetic beauty, and the language of black popular culture. I choose to orient my study on finding various modalities of sound within Baraka’s language as a way to draw an overarching linkage of his work in the 1960s and 1970s. I believe that this method may offer a way to justify or contextualize the ubiquity of Baraka’s literary production and his constant genre-switching. For example, in 1965 alone Baraka published a novella, a collection of essays, a manifesto on theater, and recorded several of his poems with the New York Art Quartet for their eponymous album. On top of these, Baraka published countless music reviews for publications such as Downbeat and The Cricket, many of ​ ​ ​ ​ which remain difficult to locate, and iterations of essays that would appear later in Raise Race ​ Rays Raze: Essays Since 1965. ​ As is the nature of a project of this length, many works that have been read and studied for this study exist as invisible actors, inspirations that for issues of time and focus do not feature within the arguments I build in the following three chapters. Before beginning a project on Amiri Baraka, I knew I had a desire to write a project concerned with sound or aurality in American McKeon 5 literature. I didn’t know who I wanted to focus on or what time period I wanted to study, but I had an interest in exploring these ideas as they pertained to the construction of race in literature. These ideas stem from Alex Benson’s Soundscapes in American Literature seminar conducted in the spring of 2019. This course introduced me to the idea of listening to a text, and challenged me to reassess the ways in which I attempt to inhabit the texts I study. Two works that influenced this nascent project, texts which I read before much of what this project eventually was built on, were Pierre Schaeffer’s essay “Acousmatics” from the anthology Audio Culture: Readings in ​ Modern Music and Jennifer Lynn Stoever’s The Sonic Color Line: Race and the Cultural Politics ​ ​ of Listening. Returning to these texts at the conclusion of this project I realize that though they ​ do not appear in my chapters, the ideas posited by Schaeffer and Stoever have inspired the interventions I have tried to make in the work of Amiri Baraka. In “Acousmatics,” Schaeffer writes about the material culture of recording technologies. His example uses the magnetic tape used in cassettes and in reel-to-reel analog recording, but we can think of his points in the more modern (yet still outdated) technology of the CD. Schaeffer writes, “Although it is materialized by the magnetic tape, the object, as we are defining it, is not on the tape either. What is on the tape is only the magnetic trace of a signal: a sonorous support or an acoustic ​ ​ ​ signal. … The object is not an object except to our listening, it is ​ relative to it. … Coming from a world in which we are able to intervene, the sonorous object is nonetheless contained entirely in ​ our perceptive consciousness” (Schaeffer 79). ​ Schaeffer’s perception of sonic recording, that the object we study is something different than the object that holds it, and that we in turn can hold in the tactile sense, opens up a deeper dimensions to the question of inquiry that, in his understanding, challenges the very ways in which we make sense of the things put in front of us.
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