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Context
Baraka and his contemporaries show distinctly modernist trends in their works, which are also distinctly colored by the Civil Rights Movement era through which they lived and in which many -- including Baraka himself -- began their literary and intellectual careers. Baraka's own upbringing as the son of relatively well-off African-American parents, his experiences in higher education and in the military, and the details of his later life and relationships all had profound effects on his writing and his concepts of selfhood as an African-American male. In a very direct manner, this thesis will be focused on exploring the context of Baraka's work in order to more clearly understand his theories on race...
Historical analysis will also be conducted via primary and secondary sources, providing general background information on the different eras of Baraka's ongoing life and work. In this manner a comprehensive understanding of his views and concepts can be acquired.
His own work was also published in a wide variety of literary magazines several of which were prestigious and nationally respected. His publication and involvement in publishing impressive accomplishments for an African-American man in the United States in the 1960's (Woodward, 1999). In 1957 he moved to Greenwich Village in New York and became interested in both in jazz and the Beat Movement. The following year he began the Totem
In fact, he identified himself entirely with it, even in his own self-reflection. In the reflective poem "leroy," published in 1969 under his newly adopted name Amiri Baraka, a nostalgic comment on his mother becomes a lofty vision of himself as the bearer of black wisdom -- that "strong nigger feeling" (5) -- from his ancestors forward to the next generation. He refers to this legacy that he is