Amiri Baraka: The Politics and Art of a Black Intellectual
Best known as a militant black nationalist writer and activist in the 1960s Black Power movement, Baraka had previously achieved some notoriety as LeRoi Jones in the Beat movement in the late 1950s, after a troubled academic start at Howard University and a difficult stint in the U.S. Air Force.Watts (Heroism and the Black Intellectual), a professor of American studies and political science at Trinity College, examines the themes of "outsiderness" and intellectual restlessness in Baraka's dalliance with Greenwich Village bohemia and his interracial marriage to author Hettie Jones. His growing distaste for white liberalism after a 1960 trip to Cuba and his subsequent plunge into the incendiary black nationalist politics of the mid-1960s led to his eventual rejection of white society except for its publishers. Often using old material and interviews to buttress his pointed opinions about Baraka's highly productive and influential writing career as well as his turbulent personal life, Watts depicts Baraka as a brilliant but sometimes derivative artist, and an intense yet changeable man who is also a bit of an opportunist, skilled at creating racial polarization. Readers familiar with Baraka's carefully constructed public image and his highly politicized literary output may be surprised by Watts's account of the writer's supposed willfulness, self-absorption and unrelenting quest to remain an artistic and political outsider regardless of the emotional and even artistic costs. Unfortunately, Watts didn't interview Baraka, or any of his close former associates, which may explain why Baraka remains something of an enigma here. Still, Watts takes a decisive step toward deciphering the persona of a leading American writer.Copyright 2001 Cahners Business Information, Inc.