It’s Nation Time: The Demonic Poethic of Amiri Baraka’s New Ark

Authors : Kate SİKLOSİ

Pages : 73-96

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Publication Date : 2019-11-01

Article Type : Research Paper

Abstract :This article examines the work of Amiri Baraka during the 1960s and 70s using a fused geographic and poetic lens that is inflected by Katherine McKittrick’s insert ignore into journalissuearticles values(via Sylvia Wynter); concept of “demonic ground.” In works such as It’s Nation Time insert ignore into journalissuearticles values(1970); and In Our Terribleness insert ignore into journalissuearticles values(1970);, Baraka articulates an imagined, communal, demonic black urban nation and mirrors this vision back to his community so they may uprise from the deliberate invisibility and geographic dispossession at the hands of the white establishment. Through its imperative balance of poetic action with transformative activism beyond the page in post-rebellion New Ark, Baraka’s demonic poethic demonstrates how space is inherently alterable, and how uneven geographies may be contested and transformed in art and in social practice.
Keywords : Amiri Baraka, poetry, poetics, geography, postwar, social transformation