Read complete books and articles on: Imamu Amiri Baraka (LeRoi Jones)

Baraka, Amiri - amērē bəräˈkə, 1934–, American poet, playwright, and political activist, b. Newark, N.J., as LeRoi Jones, studied at Rutgers Univ., Howard Univ. (B.A., 1954). He gained notoriety in 1964 when four of his plays—Dutchman,The Toilet,The Baptism, and The Slave—were produced Off-Broadway in New York City. A provocative political analyst, he has written many works that express a strident anger toward the racism of mainstream white American society. His volumes of poems include Preface to a Twenty Volume Suicide Note (1961), Selected Poetry (1979), Transbluesency: The Selected Poems of Amiri Baraka/LeRoi Jones, 1961–1995 (1995), and Eulogies (1996); among his many plays are The Motion of History and Other Plays (1978) and Election-Machine Warehouse (1996); his volumes of essays include Blues People: Negro Music in White America (1963, repr. 1980) and Daggers and Javelins (1984). With his second wife, Amina Baraka, he edited Confirmation: An Anthology of African-American Women (1983). His collected fiction was published in 2000.

Baraka has been intensely involved with the African-American community. He founded Harlem's Black Arts Repertory Theatre in 1965, three years later establishing the Black Community Development and Defense Organization, and starting the Black National Political Convention in 1972. He has also taught at a number of colleges and universities. In 2002 Baraka was named New Jersey's third poet laureate. However, one of his poems suggested Israel had foreknowledge of the 2001 terrorist attack on the World Trade Center and led to furious controversy in the state. Demands for Baraka's resignation failed, as did attempts to fire him, but in 2003 the state legislature removed him by eliminating the poet laureate post.

See his memoirs, The Autobiography of Amiri Baraka/LeRoi Jones (1984, rev. ed. 1997); C. Reilly, ed., Conversations with Amiri Baraka (1994); studies by T. R. Hudson (1973), W. Sollors (1978), W. J. Harris (1987), K. Woodard (1999), and J. G. Watts (2001).

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15 of the Best Books and Articles on: Imamu Amiri Baraka (LeRoi Jones)

as selected by Questia librarians

1.

To Raise, Destroy, and Create: The Poetry, Drama, and Fiction of Imamu Amiri Baraka (Le Roi Jones) » Read Now
by Henry C. Lacey. 214 pgs.

Collections: Literature, Entire Library

A study of the works of Imamu Amiri Baraka written between 1960 and 1970. Baraka is represented as an example of black America searching for identity, purpose and direction. This search, examined by Lacey, is embodied by Baraka's achievements.
2.

Blues People: Negro Music in White America » Read Now
by LeRoi Jones (Imamu Amiri Baraka). 244 pgs.

Collections: Entire Library
3.

The Moderns: An Anthology of New Writing in America » Read Now
by Imamu Amiri Baraka (LeRoi Jones). 351 pgs.

Collections: Literature, Entire Library
4.

Preface to a Twenty Volume Suicide Note » Read Now
by Le Roi Jones. 48 pgs.

Collections: Literature, Entire Library
5.

The Trembling Lamb ("The System of Dante's Inferno" by LeRoi Jones begins on p. 29) » Read Now
by John Fles. 48 pgs.

Collections: Literature, Entire Library
6.

African American Autobiographers: A Sourcebook ("Amiri Baraka (Leroi Jones)" begins on p. 37) » Read Now
by Emmanuel S. Nelson. 416 pgs.

Collections: Literature, Entire Library

Chronicling the autobiographical tradition in African American literature from the 18th century to the present, this volume features 66 authors from Maya Angelou to Malcolm X. Alphabetized entries, written by expert contributors, include concise biographies, overviews of autobiographical works and...
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Chronicling the autobiographical tradition in African American literature from the 18th century to the present, this volume features 66 authors from Maya Angelou to Malcolm X. Alphabetized entries, written by expert contributors, include concise biographies, overviews of autobiographical works and themes, reviews of critical receptions, and bibliographies.
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7.

Scars of Conquest/Masks of Resistance: The Invention of Cultural Identities in African, African-American, and Caribbean Drama (Chap. 4 "Leroi Jones/Amiri Baraka: The Motion of History") » Read Now
by Tejumola Olaniyan. 196 pgs.

Collections: Literature, Entire Library

This original work redefines and broadens our understanding of the drama of the English-speaking African diaspora. Looking closely at the work of Amiri Baraka, Nobel prize-winners Wole Soyinka and Derek Walcott, and Ntozake Shange, the author contends that the refashioning of the collective cultural...
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This original work redefines and broadens our understanding of the drama of the English-speaking African diaspora. Looking closely at the work of Amiri Baraka, Nobel prize-winners Wole Soyinka and Derek Walcott, and Ntozake Shange, the author contends that the refashioning of the collective cultural self in black drama originates from the complex intersection of three discourses: Eurocentric, Afrocentric, and Post-Afrocentric. From blackface minstrelsy to the Trinidad Carnival, from the Black Aesthetic to the South African Black Consciousness theatres and the scholarly debate on the (non)existence of African drama, Olaniyan cogently maps the terrains of a cultural struggle and underscores a peculiar situation in which the inferiorization of black performance forms is most often a shorthand for subordinating black culture and corporeality. Drawing on insights from contemporary theory and cultural studies, and offering detailed readings of the above writers, Olaniyan shows how they occupy the interface between the Afrocentric and a liberating Post-Afrocentric space where black theatrical-cultural difference could be envisioned as a site of multiple articulations: race, class, gender, genre, and language.
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8.

The Paradox of Experience: Black Art and Black Idiom in the Work of Amiri Baraka, in African American Review » Read Now
by Patrick Roney. 21 pgs.

Collections: Entire Library
9.

Modern Black American Poets and Dramatists ("Imamu Amiri Baraka" begins on p. 15) » Read Now
by Harold Bloom. 182 pgs.

Collections: Literature, Entire Library
10.

"Pat Your Foot and Turn the Corner": Amiri Baraka, the Black Arts Movement, and the Poetics of a Popular Avant-Garde, in African American Review » Read Now
by James Smethurst. 10 pgs.

Collections: Literature, Entire Library
11.

Uptown Conversation: The New Jazz Studies ("'How You Sound??' Amiri Baraka Writes Free Jazz" begins on p. 312) » Read Now
by Robert G. O'Meally, Brent Hayes Edwards, Farah Jasmine Griffin. 428 pgs.

Collections: Entire Library
12.

Amiri Baraka Analyzes How He Writes, in African American Review » Read Now
by Kalamu ya Salaam. 26 pgs.

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...cultural production the work of William Burroughs, Amiri Baraka, Andy Warhol and the social formation of subjects...Deleuzian reading of race and ethical becoming-other in...
13.

Realism and the American Dramatic Tradition (Chap. Fourteen "The Limits of African-American Political Realism: Baraka's Dutchman and Wilson's Ma Rainey's Black Bottom") » Read Now
by William W. Demastes. 292 pgs.

Collections: Literature, Entire Library

...within the feminist agenda. Eric Bergesen and I turn to two contemporary African-American playwrights, LeRoi Jones/Amiri Baraka and August Wilson, who are identified as...
14.

Alterity Politics: Ethics and Performative Subjectivity (Chap. 6 "Becoming-Black: Repetition and Difference In Baraka's Blues People and Reed's Mumbo Jumbo") » Read Now
by Jeffrey T. Nealon. 208 pgs.

Collections: Philosophy, Psychology, Entire Library
15.

In the Tradition: Amiri Baraka, Black Liberation, and Avant-Garde Praxis in the U.S, in African American Review » Read Now
by Daniel Won-gu Kim. 19 pgs.

Collections: Literature, Entire Library