Brick City Vanguard: Amiri Baraka, Black Music, Black Modernity

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.

Author: James Smethurst
Publisher: University of Massachusetts Press
Published: 05/29/2020
Pages: 216
Binding Type: Paperback
Weight: 0.80lbs
Size: 8.90h x 6.00w x 0.70d
ISBN13: 9781625345158
ISBN10: 1625345151
BISAC Categories:
- Social Science | Ethnic Studies | American | African American & Black Studies
- Music | History & Criticism | General
- History | African American & Black

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.