Amiri Baraka in the Trajectory

¶ … Amiri Baraka in the trajectory and changes of his personal biography as well as in the broader schema of the American and English literary traditions. His works, his biography, and a the historical currents of the Civil Rights Movement and its aftermath, as well as the current of literary genre were all (and arguably still are) in constant dialogue with each other through complex patterns of influence. The thesis proposed herein will attempt to make explicit some of these complex connections through a use of diverse sources and types of information related to Baraka and the period of his work.

The thesis proposed herein will specifically attempt to deconstruct concepts of race and identity in the literary works of Amiri Baraka. These are to be seen as highly subjective, transformative, and ever-changing concepts, and as such bear a strong relationship to the specific contexts of their use and conceptualization. Baraka's impact on the Civil Rights Movement and the African-American -- as well as the purely American and even the universal -- literary canon is difficult to overstate; his play, poems, and essays have proven not only formative for Baraka's own generations, but for several subsequent generations of young minds, as well. Baraka's own assessment of his life, the historical circumstances that can objectively be applied to his biography, and his other works will all be examined to illuminate the meaning(s) of race and identity -- and the ultimate lack of meaning attached to these concepts in any real sense -- as it appears in the works of Baraka.

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 and identity, making further discussion of this context here rather redundant and premature.