Slide 1

Negritude and the Black
Arts Movement

QuickTime™ and a
xvid decompressor
are needed to see this picture.

“Sellout” by LG Damas
I feel ridiculous/ in their shoes/ their
dinner jackets/ their starched
shirts/ and detachable collars/
their monocles and/ their bowler
hats
……………….
QuickTime™ and a
xvid decompressor
are needed to see this picture.

I feel ridiculous/ among them/ like an
accomplice/ among them/ like a
pimp/ like a murderer among
them/ my hands hideously red/
with the blood of their/ ci-vi-li-zation

Black Art and Black Aesthetics: Poesis as Politics
Points

Black Art

1)

Does this poem
conform to
formal norms?
Which ones?

2)

Where do you
turn when you
can’t get out of
the Bubble?

Larry Neal Defines the B.A.M. Project
1)

2)

To align the projects of
the black artist and
political activist
To fashion a collective
goal: the destruction of
double consciousness

Amiri Baraka (1934- )
born Leroi Jones
Bohemian, Black Power Advocate, Communist
Preface to a Twenty Volume Suicide Note, poems, 1961
Blues People: Black People in White America, 1963
Dutchman and the Slavedrama, 1964
The system of Dante’s hell, novel, 1965
Home: Social Essays, 1965
A Black Mass (1966
Tales, 1967
Black Magic, poems, 1969
Four Black Revolutionary Plays, 1969
Slave Ship, 1970
It's Nation Time, poems, 1970
Raise Race Rays Raize: Essays Since 1965, 1971
Hard Facts, poems, 1975
The Motion of History and Other Plays, 1978
Poetry for the Advanced, 1979
reggae or not!, 1981
Daggers and Javelins: Essays 1974-1979, 1984
The Autobiography of LeRoi Jones/Amiri Baraka, 1984
The Music: Reflections on Jazz and Blues, 1987
Transbluesency: The Selected Poems of Amiri Baraka/LeRoi Jones, 1995
Wise, Why’s Y’s, essays, 1995
Funk Lore: New Poems, 1996.
Somebody Blew Up America, 2001
The Book of Monk, 2005
Tales of the Out & the Gone, 2006
Billy Harper: Blueprints of Jazz, Volume 2, Audio CD, 2008
Ancient Music

Dutchman
A Modern Myth of Black Assimilation

QuickTime™ and a
xvid decompressor
are needed to see this picture.

Major Themes
Race and Racism: Assimilation, Self-hatred
Violence and Cruelty: The violence of white oppression
that murders blacks in a literal and figurative sense.
Passivity: A by-product of assimilation that, for Baraka,
makes a community stagnant, incapable of
producing leaders or innovators. And yet, it is a
passivity whose transgression results in selfdestruction (perhaps of a positive variety, but more
than likely not)
Sexism: Emasculation, The Siren/Fury archetypal
devouring female
Allegory
a subway “heaped in modern myth”
Symbolic Associations and Locales
The Story of Adam and Eve, The Flying Dutchman,
Dutch Slave Ships, the subway or “flying underbelly
of the city”

Tainted Forms of Expression
CLAY Are you angry about anything? Did I say something wrong?
LULA Everything you say is wrong. [Mock smile] That's what makes you so
attractive. Ha. In that funnybook jacket with all the buttons. [More animate,
taking hold of his jacket] What've you got that jacket and tie on in all this heat
for? And why're you wearing a jacket and tie like that? Did your people ever
burn witches or start revolutions over the price of tea? Boy, those narrowshoulder clothes come from a tradition you ought to feel oppressed by. A
three-button suit. What right do you have to be wearing a three-button suit
and striped tie? Your grandfather was a slave, he didn't go to Harvard.
CLAY My grandfather was a night watchman.
LULA And you went to a colored college where everybody thought they
were Averell Harriman.
CLAY All except me.
LULA And who did you think you were? Who do you think you are now?
CLAY [Laughs as if to make light of the whole trend of the conversation]
Well, in college I thought I was Baudelaire. But I've slowed down since.
LULA I bet you never once thought you were a black nigger. [Mock serious,
then she howls with laughter. CLAY is stunned but after initial reaction, he
quickly tries to appreciate the humor. LULA almost shrieks] A black
Baudelaire.

Talking Points:
1)Costume Prescribed
modes of revolt.
2)Black Baudelaire:
The Relationship
Between the Black
Artists of the 60s and
Extant Poetic Forms
3)Symbolism: Black
Baudelaires and Black
Niggers
4)“I bet you never
once thought you
were a black nigger”.

“Cultural Strangulation”
by
Addison Gayle

Cultural Strangulation
“There is no White aesthetic”

The Agenda:
To Defend the Positing of a Black Aesthetic

Let us proposes Greece as the logical starting point, bearing in mind
Will Durrant’s observation that “all of Western Civilization is but a
footnote to Plato,” and take Plato as the first writer to attempt a
systematic aesthetic [….] However, Plato defines beauty in ambiguous
terms leaving the problem of more secular, circumscribred, secular
definition to philosophers, poets, and critics […] these aestheticians
have been white, there, it is not surprising that, symbolically and
literally, the have defined beauty in terms of whiteness,

The Argument:
1)The failure to recognize a separate black
aesthetic is not only out of step with current
leftist moves forward in the field of race
relations, but is also the outgrowth of a
failure to come to terms with what might
constitute a White Aesthetic.
2)This White Aesthetic is as older than the
“race problem,” but its privileging of light
over dark was mapped onto race relations.
3)Given the legacy of racism in America and
that Occidental aesthetic are tainted by
racism, the black aesthetic must be defined
oppositionally. This opposition can be
embodied in the phrase “Black is Beautiful”
a slogan during the Black Power Movement.

The Ironic and Oppositional Position of Black Aesthetics

3) Hence, in the American realm,
the entire realm of aesthetics is
poisoned by a racism that comes
to the fore every time it
evaluates an object of Black Art.
4) And, the Black artist is forced into
a corner. To answer to the
demands of traditional aesthetics
is to allow white critics to dictate
the expression of Black
experience (which can result in a
re-instantiation of racism)
5) Hence, the only option other
than assimilation, calls for an
iconoclastic set of principles
embodied in the phrase “Black is
Beautiful”

Exploding the Raisin
A Cry for What Kind of Revolt-The Shuffle
LULA [Her voice takes on a different, more businesslike quality] I've heard enough.
CLAY [Reaching for his books] I bet you have. I guess I better collect my stuff and get off this train. Looks like we
won't be acting out that little pageant you outlined before.
LULA No. We won't. You're right about that, at least.
[She turns to look quickly around the rest of the car] All right!
[The others respond]
CLAY [Bending across the girl to retrieve his belongings] Sorry, baby, I don't think we could make it.
[As he is bending over her, the girl brings up a small knife and plunges it into CLAY's chest. Twice. He slumps across
her knees, his mouth working stupidly]
LULA Sorry is right.
[Turning to the others in the car who have already gotten up from their seats] Sorry is the rightest thing you've said.
Get this man off me! Hurry, now!
[ The others come and drag CLAY's body down the aisle] Open the door and throw his body out. They throw him off]
And all of you get off at the next stop. LULA busies herself straightening her things. Getting everything in order. She
takes out a notebook and makes a quick scribbling note. Drops it in her bag. The train apparently stops and all the
others get off, leaving her alone in the coach.
Very soon a young Negro of about twenty comes into the coach, with a couple of books under his arm. He sits a few
seats in back of LULA. When he is seated she turns and gives him a long slow look. He looks up from his book and
drops the book on his lap. Then an old Negro conductor comes into the car, doing a sort of restrained soft shoe, and
half mumbling the words of some song. He looks at the young man, briefly, with a quick greeting]
CONDUCTOR Hey, brother!
YOUNG NEGRO Hey
[The conductor continues down the aisle with his little dance and the mumbled song. LULA turns to stare at him and
follows his movements down the aisle. The conductor tips his hat when he reaches her seat, and continues out the
car]
Curtain

Theoretical Approaches to
Black Drama
The History of Black Drama The
consists of innovative
(infinite?) deformative
(nation based discursive
strategies of masking and
sounding) discursive
strategies that are always
mixtures of the mastery of
form and the deformation
of mastery

the mastery of form

deformation of
mastery

Houston Bakeresque
QuickTime™ and a
xvid decompressor
are needed to see this picture.

Acting Black and Double Consciousness
You don’t know anything except what’s
there for you to see.

QuickTime™ and a
xvid decompressor
are needed to see this picture.

CLAY [Pushing her against the seat] I'm not telling you again, Tallulah Bankhead! Luxury. In your face and your fingers. You telling me what I ought to do.
[Sudden scream frightening the whole coach] Well, don't! Don't you tell me anything! If I'm a middle-class fake white man . . . let me be. And let me be in the way
I want.
[Through his teeth] I'll rip your lousy breasts off! Let me be who I feel like being. Uncle Tom. Thomas. Whoever. It's none of your business. You don't know
anything except what's there for you to see. An act. Lies. Device. Not the pure heart, the pumping black heart. You don't ever know that. And I sit here, in
this buttoned-up suit, to keep myself from cutting all your throats. I mean wantonly. You great liberated whore! You fuck some black man, and right away
you're an expert on black people. What a lotta shit that is. The only thing you know is that you come if he bangs you hard enough. And that's all. The belly
rub? You wanted to do the belly rub? Shit, you don't even know how. You don't know how. That ol' dipty-dip shit you do, rolling your ass like an elephant.
That's not my kind of belly rub. Belly rub is not Queens. Belly rub is dark places, with big hats and overcoats held up with one arm. Belly rub hates you.
Old bald-headed four-eyed ofays popping their fingers . . . and don't know yet what they're doing. They say, "I love Bessie Smith." And don't even
understand that Bessie Smith is saying, "Kiss my ass, kiss my black unruly ass." Before love, suffering, desire, anything you can explain, she's saying,
and very plainly, "Kiss my black ass." And if you don't know that, it's you that's doing the kissing. Charlie Parker? Charlie Parker. All the hip white boys
scream for Bird. And Bird saying, "Up your ass, feebleminded ofay! Up your ass." And they sit there talking about the tortured genius of Charlie Parker.
Bird would've played not a note of music if he just walked up to East Sixty-seventh Street and killed the first ten white people he saw. Not a note! And I'm
the great would-be poet. Yes. That's right! Poet. Some kind of bastard literature . . . all it needs is a simple knife thrust. Just let me bleed you, you loud
whore, and one poem vanished. A whole people of neurotics, struggling to keep from being sane. And the only thing that would cure the neurosis would be
your murder. Simple as that. I mean if I murdered you, then other white people would begin to understand me. You understand? No. I guess not. If Bessie
Smith had killed some white people she wouldn't have needed that music. She could have talked very straight and plain about the world. No metaphors.
No grunts. No wiggles in the dark of her soul. Just straight two and two are four. Money. Power. Luxury. Like that. All of them. Crazy niggers turning their
backs on sanity. When all it needs is that simple act. Murder. Just murder! Would make us all sane.
[Suddenly weary] Ahhh. Shit. But who needs it? I'd rather be a fool. Insane. Safe with my words, and no deaths, and clean, hard thoughts, urging me to new
conquests. My people's madness. Hah! That's a laugh. My people. They don't need me to claim them. They got legs and arms of their own. Personal
insanities. Mirrors. They don't need all those words. They don't need any defense. But listen, though, one more thing. And you tell this to your father, who's
probably the kind of man who needs to know at once. So he can plan ahead. Tell him not to preach so much rationalism and cold logic to these niggers.
Let them alone. Let them sing curses at you in code and see your filth as simple lack of style. Don't make the mistake, through some irresponsible surge
of Christian charity, of talking too much about the advantages of Western rationalism, or the great intellectual legacy of the white man, or maybe they'll
begin to listen. And then, maybe one day, you'll find they actually do understand exactly what you are talking about, all these fantasy people. All these
blues people. And on that day, as sure as shit, when you really believe you can "accept" them into your fold, as half-white trusties late of the subject
peoples. With no more blues, except the very old ones, and not a watermelon in sight, the great missionary heart will have triumphed, and all of those excoons will be stand-up Western men, with eyes for clean hard useful lives, sober, pious and sane, and they'll murder you. They'll murder you, and have
very rational explanations. Very much like your own. They'll cut your throats, and drag you out to the edge of your cities so the flesh can fall away from
your bones, in sanitary isolation.

Talking Points:
1)Intra-Group Knowledge in Cultural Production: Doubly Conscious Performing
2)Acting vs. Being Black and the Problem of Performing for Two Audiences
3)Artistic and Rational Revolution
4)History of Struggle and the History of Black Cultural Production

Toasting
Black Internationalism, Nationalism, Folklore, and the
Signifying Monkey
Way down in the jungle deep,
The bad ass lion stepped on the signifyin monkey's feet.
The monkey said, "Muthafucka, can't you see?
Why, you standin on my goddamn feet!"
The lion said, "I ain't heard a word you said."
Said, "If you say three more I'll be steppin on yo muthafuckin head!"
Now, the monkey lived in the jungle in an old oak tree.
Bullshittin the lion everyday of the week.
Why, everyday before the sun go down,
The lion would kick his all through the jungle town.
But the monkey got wise and started usin his wit.
Said, "I'm gon' put a stop to this ole ass kickin shit!"
So he ran up on the lion the very next day.
Said, "Oh Mr. lion, there's a big, bad muthafucka comin your way.
And when you meet, it's gonna be a goddamn sin,
And wherever you meet some ass is bound to bend."
Said, "he's somebody that you don't know,
He just broke a-loose from the Ringlin Brother's show."
Said, "Baby, he talked about your people in a helluva way!
He talked about your people till my hair turned gray!
He said your daddy's a freak and your momma's a whore.
Said he spotted you running through the jungle sellin asshole from door to door!
Said your sister did the damndest trick.
She got down so low and sucked a earthworm's dick.
Said he spotted yo niece behind the tree,
Screwin a muthafuckin flea!
He said he saw yo aunt sittin on the fence
Givin a goddamn zebra a french.
Then he talked about yo mammy and yo sister Lou,
Then he start talkin about how good yo grandmaw screw.

QuickTime™ and a
xvid decompressor
are needed to see this picture.


Slide 2

Negritude and the Black
Arts Movement

QuickTime™ and a
xvid decompressor
are needed to see this picture.

“Sellout” by LG Damas
I feel ridiculous/ in their shoes/ their
dinner jackets/ their starched
shirts/ and detachable collars/
their monocles and/ their bowler
hats
……………….
QuickTime™ and a
xvid decompressor
are needed to see this picture.

I feel ridiculous/ among them/ like an
accomplice/ among them/ like a
pimp/ like a murderer among
them/ my hands hideously red/
with the blood of their/ ci-vi-li-zation

Black Art and Black Aesthetics: Poesis as Politics
Points

Black Art

1)

Does this poem
conform to
formal norms?
Which ones?

2)

Where do you
turn when you
can’t get out of
the Bubble?

Larry Neal Defines the B.A.M. Project
1)

2)

To align the projects of
the black artist and
political activist
To fashion a collective
goal: the destruction of
double consciousness

Amiri Baraka (1934- )
born Leroi Jones
Bohemian, Black Power Advocate, Communist
Preface to a Twenty Volume Suicide Note, poems, 1961
Blues People: Black People in White America, 1963
Dutchman and the Slavedrama, 1964
The system of Dante’s hell, novel, 1965
Home: Social Essays, 1965
A Black Mass (1966
Tales, 1967
Black Magic, poems, 1969
Four Black Revolutionary Plays, 1969
Slave Ship, 1970
It's Nation Time, poems, 1970
Raise Race Rays Raize: Essays Since 1965, 1971
Hard Facts, poems, 1975
The Motion of History and Other Plays, 1978
Poetry for the Advanced, 1979
reggae or not!, 1981
Daggers and Javelins: Essays 1974-1979, 1984
The Autobiography of LeRoi Jones/Amiri Baraka, 1984
The Music: Reflections on Jazz and Blues, 1987
Transbluesency: The Selected Poems of Amiri Baraka/LeRoi Jones, 1995
Wise, Why’s Y’s, essays, 1995
Funk Lore: New Poems, 1996.
Somebody Blew Up America, 2001
The Book of Monk, 2005
Tales of the Out & the Gone, 2006
Billy Harper: Blueprints of Jazz, Volume 2, Audio CD, 2008
Ancient Music

Dutchman
A Modern Myth of Black Assimilation

QuickTime™ and a
xvid decompressor
are needed to see this picture.

Major Themes
Race and Racism: Assimilation, Self-hatred
Violence and Cruelty: The violence of white oppression
that murders blacks in a literal and figurative sense.
Passivity: A by-product of assimilation that, for Baraka,
makes a community stagnant, incapable of
producing leaders or innovators. And yet, it is a
passivity whose transgression results in selfdestruction (perhaps of a positive variety, but more
than likely not)
Sexism: Emasculation, The Siren/Fury archetypal
devouring female
Allegory
a subway “heaped in modern myth”
Symbolic Associations and Locales
The Story of Adam and Eve, The Flying Dutchman,
Dutch Slave Ships, the subway or “flying underbelly
of the city”

Tainted Forms of Expression
CLAY Are you angry about anything? Did I say something wrong?
LULA Everything you say is wrong. [Mock smile] That's what makes you so
attractive. Ha. In that funnybook jacket with all the buttons. [More animate,
taking hold of his jacket] What've you got that jacket and tie on in all this heat
for? And why're you wearing a jacket and tie like that? Did your people ever
burn witches or start revolutions over the price of tea? Boy, those narrowshoulder clothes come from a tradition you ought to feel oppressed by. A
three-button suit. What right do you have to be wearing a three-button suit
and striped tie? Your grandfather was a slave, he didn't go to Harvard.
CLAY My grandfather was a night watchman.
LULA And you went to a colored college where everybody thought they
were Averell Harriman.
CLAY All except me.
LULA And who did you think you were? Who do you think you are now?
CLAY [Laughs as if to make light of the whole trend of the conversation]
Well, in college I thought I was Baudelaire. But I've slowed down since.
LULA I bet you never once thought you were a black nigger. [Mock serious,
then she howls with laughter. CLAY is stunned but after initial reaction, he
quickly tries to appreciate the humor. LULA almost shrieks] A black
Baudelaire.

Talking Points:
1)Costume Prescribed
modes of revolt.
2)Black Baudelaire:
The Relationship
Between the Black
Artists of the 60s and
Extant Poetic Forms
3)Symbolism: Black
Baudelaires and Black
Niggers
4)“I bet you never
once thought you
were a black nigger”.

“Cultural Strangulation”
by
Addison Gayle

Cultural Strangulation
“There is no White aesthetic”

The Agenda:
To Defend the Positing of a Black Aesthetic

Let us proposes Greece as the logical starting point, bearing in mind
Will Durrant’s observation that “all of Western Civilization is but a
footnote to Plato,” and take Plato as the first writer to attempt a
systematic aesthetic [….] However, Plato defines beauty in ambiguous
terms leaving the problem of more secular, circumscribred, secular
definition to philosophers, poets, and critics […] these aestheticians
have been white, there, it is not surprising that, symbolically and
literally, the have defined beauty in terms of whiteness,

The Argument:
1)The failure to recognize a separate black
aesthetic is not only out of step with current
leftist moves forward in the field of race
relations, but is also the outgrowth of a
failure to come to terms with what might
constitute a White Aesthetic.
2)This White Aesthetic is as older than the
“race problem,” but its privileging of light
over dark was mapped onto race relations.
3)Given the legacy of racism in America and
that Occidental aesthetic are tainted by
racism, the black aesthetic must be defined
oppositionally. This opposition can be
embodied in the phrase “Black is Beautiful”
a slogan during the Black Power Movement.

The Ironic and Oppositional Position of Black Aesthetics

3) Hence, in the American realm,
the entire realm of aesthetics is
poisoned by a racism that comes
to the fore every time it
evaluates an object of Black Art.
4) And, the Black artist is forced into
a corner. To answer to the
demands of traditional aesthetics
is to allow white critics to dictate
the expression of Black
experience (which can result in a
re-instantiation of racism)
5) Hence, the only option other
than assimilation, calls for an
iconoclastic set of principles
embodied in the phrase “Black is
Beautiful”

Exploding the Raisin
A Cry for What Kind of Revolt-The Shuffle
LULA [Her voice takes on a different, more businesslike quality] I've heard enough.
CLAY [Reaching for his books] I bet you have. I guess I better collect my stuff and get off this train. Looks like we
won't be acting out that little pageant you outlined before.
LULA No. We won't. You're right about that, at least.
[She turns to look quickly around the rest of the car] All right!
[The others respond]
CLAY [Bending across the girl to retrieve his belongings] Sorry, baby, I don't think we could make it.
[As he is bending over her, the girl brings up a small knife and plunges it into CLAY's chest. Twice. He slumps across
her knees, his mouth working stupidly]
LULA Sorry is right.
[Turning to the others in the car who have already gotten up from their seats] Sorry is the rightest thing you've said.
Get this man off me! Hurry, now!
[ The others come and drag CLAY's body down the aisle] Open the door and throw his body out. They throw him off]
And all of you get off at the next stop. LULA busies herself straightening her things. Getting everything in order. She
takes out a notebook and makes a quick scribbling note. Drops it in her bag. The train apparently stops and all the
others get off, leaving her alone in the coach.
Very soon a young Negro of about twenty comes into the coach, with a couple of books under his arm. He sits a few
seats in back of LULA. When he is seated she turns and gives him a long slow look. He looks up from his book and
drops the book on his lap. Then an old Negro conductor comes into the car, doing a sort of restrained soft shoe, and
half mumbling the words of some song. He looks at the young man, briefly, with a quick greeting]
CONDUCTOR Hey, brother!
YOUNG NEGRO Hey
[The conductor continues down the aisle with his little dance and the mumbled song. LULA turns to stare at him and
follows his movements down the aisle. The conductor tips his hat when he reaches her seat, and continues out the
car]
Curtain

Theoretical Approaches to
Black Drama
The History of Black Drama The
consists of innovative
(infinite?) deformative
(nation based discursive
strategies of masking and
sounding) discursive
strategies that are always
mixtures of the mastery of
form and the deformation
of mastery

the mastery of form

deformation of
mastery

Houston Bakeresque
QuickTime™ and a
xvid decompressor
are needed to see this picture.

Acting Black and Double Consciousness
You don’t know anything except what’s
there for you to see.

QuickTime™ and a
xvid decompressor
are needed to see this picture.

CLAY [Pushing her against the seat] I'm not telling you again, Tallulah Bankhead! Luxury. In your face and your fingers. You telling me what I ought to do.
[Sudden scream frightening the whole coach] Well, don't! Don't you tell me anything! If I'm a middle-class fake white man . . . let me be. And let me be in the way
I want.
[Through his teeth] I'll rip your lousy breasts off! Let me be who I feel like being. Uncle Tom. Thomas. Whoever. It's none of your business. You don't know
anything except what's there for you to see. An act. Lies. Device. Not the pure heart, the pumping black heart. You don't ever know that. And I sit here, in
this buttoned-up suit, to keep myself from cutting all your throats. I mean wantonly. You great liberated whore! You fuck some black man, and right away
you're an expert on black people. What a lotta shit that is. The only thing you know is that you come if he bangs you hard enough. And that's all. The belly
rub? You wanted to do the belly rub? Shit, you don't even know how. You don't know how. That ol' dipty-dip shit you do, rolling your ass like an elephant.
That's not my kind of belly rub. Belly rub is not Queens. Belly rub is dark places, with big hats and overcoats held up with one arm. Belly rub hates you.
Old bald-headed four-eyed ofays popping their fingers . . . and don't know yet what they're doing. They say, "I love Bessie Smith." And don't even
understand that Bessie Smith is saying, "Kiss my ass, kiss my black unruly ass." Before love, suffering, desire, anything you can explain, she's saying,
and very plainly, "Kiss my black ass." And if you don't know that, it's you that's doing the kissing. Charlie Parker? Charlie Parker. All the hip white boys
scream for Bird. And Bird saying, "Up your ass, feebleminded ofay! Up your ass." And they sit there talking about the tortured genius of Charlie Parker.
Bird would've played not a note of music if he just walked up to East Sixty-seventh Street and killed the first ten white people he saw. Not a note! And I'm
the great would-be poet. Yes. That's right! Poet. Some kind of bastard literature . . . all it needs is a simple knife thrust. Just let me bleed you, you loud
whore, and one poem vanished. A whole people of neurotics, struggling to keep from being sane. And the only thing that would cure the neurosis would be
your murder. Simple as that. I mean if I murdered you, then other white people would begin to understand me. You understand? No. I guess not. If Bessie
Smith had killed some white people she wouldn't have needed that music. She could have talked very straight and plain about the world. No metaphors.
No grunts. No wiggles in the dark of her soul. Just straight two and two are four. Money. Power. Luxury. Like that. All of them. Crazy niggers turning their
backs on sanity. When all it needs is that simple act. Murder. Just murder! Would make us all sane.
[Suddenly weary] Ahhh. Shit. But who needs it? I'd rather be a fool. Insane. Safe with my words, and no deaths, and clean, hard thoughts, urging me to new
conquests. My people's madness. Hah! That's a laugh. My people. They don't need me to claim them. They got legs and arms of their own. Personal
insanities. Mirrors. They don't need all those words. They don't need any defense. But listen, though, one more thing. And you tell this to your father, who's
probably the kind of man who needs to know at once. So he can plan ahead. Tell him not to preach so much rationalism and cold logic to these niggers.
Let them alone. Let them sing curses at you in code and see your filth as simple lack of style. Don't make the mistake, through some irresponsible surge
of Christian charity, of talking too much about the advantages of Western rationalism, or the great intellectual legacy of the white man, or maybe they'll
begin to listen. And then, maybe one day, you'll find they actually do understand exactly what you are talking about, all these fantasy people. All these
blues people. And on that day, as sure as shit, when you really believe you can "accept" them into your fold, as half-white trusties late of the subject
peoples. With no more blues, except the very old ones, and not a watermelon in sight, the great missionary heart will have triumphed, and all of those excoons will be stand-up Western men, with eyes for clean hard useful lives, sober, pious and sane, and they'll murder you. They'll murder you, and have
very rational explanations. Very much like your own. They'll cut your throats, and drag you out to the edge of your cities so the flesh can fall away from
your bones, in sanitary isolation.

Talking Points:
1)Intra-Group Knowledge in Cultural Production: Doubly Conscious Performing
2)Acting vs. Being Black and the Problem of Performing for Two Audiences
3)Artistic and Rational Revolution
4)History of Struggle and the History of Black Cultural Production

Toasting
Black Internationalism, Nationalism, Folklore, and the
Signifying Monkey
Way down in the jungle deep,
The bad ass lion stepped on the signifyin monkey's feet.
The monkey said, "Muthafucka, can't you see?
Why, you standin on my goddamn feet!"
The lion said, "I ain't heard a word you said."
Said, "If you say three more I'll be steppin on yo muthafuckin head!"
Now, the monkey lived in the jungle in an old oak tree.
Bullshittin the lion everyday of the week.
Why, everyday before the sun go down,
The lion would kick his all through the jungle town.
But the monkey got wise and started usin his wit.
Said, "I'm gon' put a stop to this ole ass kickin shit!"
So he ran up on the lion the very next day.
Said, "Oh Mr. lion, there's a big, bad muthafucka comin your way.
And when you meet, it's gonna be a goddamn sin,
And wherever you meet some ass is bound to bend."
Said, "he's somebody that you don't know,
He just broke a-loose from the Ringlin Brother's show."
Said, "Baby, he talked about your people in a helluva way!
He talked about your people till my hair turned gray!
He said your daddy's a freak and your momma's a whore.
Said he spotted you running through the jungle sellin asshole from door to door!
Said your sister did the damndest trick.
She got down so low and sucked a earthworm's dick.
Said he spotted yo niece behind the tree,
Screwin a muthafuckin flea!
He said he saw yo aunt sittin on the fence
Givin a goddamn zebra a french.
Then he talked about yo mammy and yo sister Lou,
Then he start talkin about how good yo grandmaw screw.

QuickTime™ and a
xvid decompressor
are needed to see this picture.


Slide 3

Negritude and the Black
Arts Movement

QuickTime™ and a
xvid decompressor
are needed to see this picture.

“Sellout” by LG Damas
I feel ridiculous/ in their shoes/ their
dinner jackets/ their starched
shirts/ and detachable collars/
their monocles and/ their bowler
hats
……………….
QuickTime™ and a
xvid decompressor
are needed to see this picture.

I feel ridiculous/ among them/ like an
accomplice/ among them/ like a
pimp/ like a murderer among
them/ my hands hideously red/
with the blood of their/ ci-vi-li-zation

Black Art and Black Aesthetics: Poesis as Politics
Points

Black Art

1)

Does this poem
conform to
formal norms?
Which ones?

2)

Where do you
turn when you
can’t get out of
the Bubble?

Larry Neal Defines the B.A.M. Project
1)

2)

To align the projects of
the black artist and
political activist
To fashion a collective
goal: the destruction of
double consciousness

Amiri Baraka (1934- )
born Leroi Jones
Bohemian, Black Power Advocate, Communist
Preface to a Twenty Volume Suicide Note, poems, 1961
Blues People: Black People in White America, 1963
Dutchman and the Slavedrama, 1964
The system of Dante’s hell, novel, 1965
Home: Social Essays, 1965
A Black Mass (1966
Tales, 1967
Black Magic, poems, 1969
Four Black Revolutionary Plays, 1969
Slave Ship, 1970
It's Nation Time, poems, 1970
Raise Race Rays Raize: Essays Since 1965, 1971
Hard Facts, poems, 1975
The Motion of History and Other Plays, 1978
Poetry for the Advanced, 1979
reggae or not!, 1981
Daggers and Javelins: Essays 1974-1979, 1984
The Autobiography of LeRoi Jones/Amiri Baraka, 1984
The Music: Reflections on Jazz and Blues, 1987
Transbluesency: The Selected Poems of Amiri Baraka/LeRoi Jones, 1995
Wise, Why’s Y’s, essays, 1995
Funk Lore: New Poems, 1996.
Somebody Blew Up America, 2001
The Book of Monk, 2005
Tales of the Out & the Gone, 2006
Billy Harper: Blueprints of Jazz, Volume 2, Audio CD, 2008
Ancient Music

Dutchman
A Modern Myth of Black Assimilation

QuickTime™ and a
xvid decompressor
are needed to see this picture.

Major Themes
Race and Racism: Assimilation, Self-hatred
Violence and Cruelty: The violence of white oppression
that murders blacks in a literal and figurative sense.
Passivity: A by-product of assimilation that, for Baraka,
makes a community stagnant, incapable of
producing leaders or innovators. And yet, it is a
passivity whose transgression results in selfdestruction (perhaps of a positive variety, but more
than likely not)
Sexism: Emasculation, The Siren/Fury archetypal
devouring female
Allegory
a subway “heaped in modern myth”
Symbolic Associations and Locales
The Story of Adam and Eve, The Flying Dutchman,
Dutch Slave Ships, the subway or “flying underbelly
of the city”

Tainted Forms of Expression
CLAY Are you angry about anything? Did I say something wrong?
LULA Everything you say is wrong. [Mock smile] That's what makes you so
attractive. Ha. In that funnybook jacket with all the buttons. [More animate,
taking hold of his jacket] What've you got that jacket and tie on in all this heat
for? And why're you wearing a jacket and tie like that? Did your people ever
burn witches or start revolutions over the price of tea? Boy, those narrowshoulder clothes come from a tradition you ought to feel oppressed by. A
three-button suit. What right do you have to be wearing a three-button suit
and striped tie? Your grandfather was a slave, he didn't go to Harvard.
CLAY My grandfather was a night watchman.
LULA And you went to a colored college where everybody thought they
were Averell Harriman.
CLAY All except me.
LULA And who did you think you were? Who do you think you are now?
CLAY [Laughs as if to make light of the whole trend of the conversation]
Well, in college I thought I was Baudelaire. But I've slowed down since.
LULA I bet you never once thought you were a black nigger. [Mock serious,
then she howls with laughter. CLAY is stunned but after initial reaction, he
quickly tries to appreciate the humor. LULA almost shrieks] A black
Baudelaire.

Talking Points:
1)Costume Prescribed
modes of revolt.
2)Black Baudelaire:
The Relationship
Between the Black
Artists of the 60s and
Extant Poetic Forms
3)Symbolism: Black
Baudelaires and Black
Niggers
4)“I bet you never
once thought you
were a black nigger”.

“Cultural Strangulation”
by
Addison Gayle

Cultural Strangulation
“There is no White aesthetic”

The Agenda:
To Defend the Positing of a Black Aesthetic

Let us proposes Greece as the logical starting point, bearing in mind
Will Durrant’s observation that “all of Western Civilization is but a
footnote to Plato,” and take Plato as the first writer to attempt a
systematic aesthetic [….] However, Plato defines beauty in ambiguous
terms leaving the problem of more secular, circumscribred, secular
definition to philosophers, poets, and critics […] these aestheticians
have been white, there, it is not surprising that, symbolically and
literally, the have defined beauty in terms of whiteness,

The Argument:
1)The failure to recognize a separate black
aesthetic is not only out of step with current
leftist moves forward in the field of race
relations, but is also the outgrowth of a
failure to come to terms with what might
constitute a White Aesthetic.
2)This White Aesthetic is as older than the
“race problem,” but its privileging of light
over dark was mapped onto race relations.
3)Given the legacy of racism in America and
that Occidental aesthetic are tainted by
racism, the black aesthetic must be defined
oppositionally. This opposition can be
embodied in the phrase “Black is Beautiful”
a slogan during the Black Power Movement.

The Ironic and Oppositional Position of Black Aesthetics

3) Hence, in the American realm,
the entire realm of aesthetics is
poisoned by a racism that comes
to the fore every time it
evaluates an object of Black Art.
4) And, the Black artist is forced into
a corner. To answer to the
demands of traditional aesthetics
is to allow white critics to dictate
the expression of Black
experience (which can result in a
re-instantiation of racism)
5) Hence, the only option other
than assimilation, calls for an
iconoclastic set of principles
embodied in the phrase “Black is
Beautiful”

Exploding the Raisin
A Cry for What Kind of Revolt-The Shuffle
LULA [Her voice takes on a different, more businesslike quality] I've heard enough.
CLAY [Reaching for his books] I bet you have. I guess I better collect my stuff and get off this train. Looks like we
won't be acting out that little pageant you outlined before.
LULA No. We won't. You're right about that, at least.
[She turns to look quickly around the rest of the car] All right!
[The others respond]
CLAY [Bending across the girl to retrieve his belongings] Sorry, baby, I don't think we could make it.
[As he is bending over her, the girl brings up a small knife and plunges it into CLAY's chest. Twice. He slumps across
her knees, his mouth working stupidly]
LULA Sorry is right.
[Turning to the others in the car who have already gotten up from their seats] Sorry is the rightest thing you've said.
Get this man off me! Hurry, now!
[ The others come and drag CLAY's body down the aisle] Open the door and throw his body out. They throw him off]
And all of you get off at the next stop. LULA busies herself straightening her things. Getting everything in order. She
takes out a notebook and makes a quick scribbling note. Drops it in her bag. The train apparently stops and all the
others get off, leaving her alone in the coach.
Very soon a young Negro of about twenty comes into the coach, with a couple of books under his arm. He sits a few
seats in back of LULA. When he is seated she turns and gives him a long slow look. He looks up from his book and
drops the book on his lap. Then an old Negro conductor comes into the car, doing a sort of restrained soft shoe, and
half mumbling the words of some song. He looks at the young man, briefly, with a quick greeting]
CONDUCTOR Hey, brother!
YOUNG NEGRO Hey
[The conductor continues down the aisle with his little dance and the mumbled song. LULA turns to stare at him and
follows his movements down the aisle. The conductor tips his hat when he reaches her seat, and continues out the
car]
Curtain

Theoretical Approaches to
Black Drama
The History of Black Drama The
consists of innovative
(infinite?) deformative
(nation based discursive
strategies of masking and
sounding) discursive
strategies that are always
mixtures of the mastery of
form and the deformation
of mastery

the mastery of form

deformation of
mastery

Houston Bakeresque
QuickTime™ and a
xvid decompressor
are needed to see this picture.

Acting Black and Double Consciousness
You don’t know anything except what’s
there for you to see.

QuickTime™ and a
xvid decompressor
are needed to see this picture.

CLAY [Pushing her against the seat] I'm not telling you again, Tallulah Bankhead! Luxury. In your face and your fingers. You telling me what I ought to do.
[Sudden scream frightening the whole coach] Well, don't! Don't you tell me anything! If I'm a middle-class fake white man . . . let me be. And let me be in the way
I want.
[Through his teeth] I'll rip your lousy breasts off! Let me be who I feel like being. Uncle Tom. Thomas. Whoever. It's none of your business. You don't know
anything except what's there for you to see. An act. Lies. Device. Not the pure heart, the pumping black heart. You don't ever know that. And I sit here, in
this buttoned-up suit, to keep myself from cutting all your throats. I mean wantonly. You great liberated whore! You fuck some black man, and right away
you're an expert on black people. What a lotta shit that is. The only thing you know is that you come if he bangs you hard enough. And that's all. The belly
rub? You wanted to do the belly rub? Shit, you don't even know how. You don't know how. That ol' dipty-dip shit you do, rolling your ass like an elephant.
That's not my kind of belly rub. Belly rub is not Queens. Belly rub is dark places, with big hats and overcoats held up with one arm. Belly rub hates you.
Old bald-headed four-eyed ofays popping their fingers . . . and don't know yet what they're doing. They say, "I love Bessie Smith." And don't even
understand that Bessie Smith is saying, "Kiss my ass, kiss my black unruly ass." Before love, suffering, desire, anything you can explain, she's saying,
and very plainly, "Kiss my black ass." And if you don't know that, it's you that's doing the kissing. Charlie Parker? Charlie Parker. All the hip white boys
scream for Bird. And Bird saying, "Up your ass, feebleminded ofay! Up your ass." And they sit there talking about the tortured genius of Charlie Parker.
Bird would've played not a note of music if he just walked up to East Sixty-seventh Street and killed the first ten white people he saw. Not a note! And I'm
the great would-be poet. Yes. That's right! Poet. Some kind of bastard literature . . . all it needs is a simple knife thrust. Just let me bleed you, you loud
whore, and one poem vanished. A whole people of neurotics, struggling to keep from being sane. And the only thing that would cure the neurosis would be
your murder. Simple as that. I mean if I murdered you, then other white people would begin to understand me. You understand? No. I guess not. If Bessie
Smith had killed some white people she wouldn't have needed that music. She could have talked very straight and plain about the world. No metaphors.
No grunts. No wiggles in the dark of her soul. Just straight two and two are four. Money. Power. Luxury. Like that. All of them. Crazy niggers turning their
backs on sanity. When all it needs is that simple act. Murder. Just murder! Would make us all sane.
[Suddenly weary] Ahhh. Shit. But who needs it? I'd rather be a fool. Insane. Safe with my words, and no deaths, and clean, hard thoughts, urging me to new
conquests. My people's madness. Hah! That's a laugh. My people. They don't need me to claim them. They got legs and arms of their own. Personal
insanities. Mirrors. They don't need all those words. They don't need any defense. But listen, though, one more thing. And you tell this to your father, who's
probably the kind of man who needs to know at once. So he can plan ahead. Tell him not to preach so much rationalism and cold logic to these niggers.
Let them alone. Let them sing curses at you in code and see your filth as simple lack of style. Don't make the mistake, through some irresponsible surge
of Christian charity, of talking too much about the advantages of Western rationalism, or the great intellectual legacy of the white man, or maybe they'll
begin to listen. And then, maybe one day, you'll find they actually do understand exactly what you are talking about, all these fantasy people. All these
blues people. And on that day, as sure as shit, when you really believe you can "accept" them into your fold, as half-white trusties late of the subject
peoples. With no more blues, except the very old ones, and not a watermelon in sight, the great missionary heart will have triumphed, and all of those excoons will be stand-up Western men, with eyes for clean hard useful lives, sober, pious and sane, and they'll murder you. They'll murder you, and have
very rational explanations. Very much like your own. They'll cut your throats, and drag you out to the edge of your cities so the flesh can fall away from
your bones, in sanitary isolation.

Talking Points:
1)Intra-Group Knowledge in Cultural Production: Doubly Conscious Performing
2)Acting vs. Being Black and the Problem of Performing for Two Audiences
3)Artistic and Rational Revolution
4)History of Struggle and the History of Black Cultural Production

Toasting
Black Internationalism, Nationalism, Folklore, and the
Signifying Monkey
Way down in the jungle deep,
The bad ass lion stepped on the signifyin monkey's feet.
The monkey said, "Muthafucka, can't you see?
Why, you standin on my goddamn feet!"
The lion said, "I ain't heard a word you said."
Said, "If you say three more I'll be steppin on yo muthafuckin head!"
Now, the monkey lived in the jungle in an old oak tree.
Bullshittin the lion everyday of the week.
Why, everyday before the sun go down,
The lion would kick his all through the jungle town.
But the monkey got wise and started usin his wit.
Said, "I'm gon' put a stop to this ole ass kickin shit!"
So he ran up on the lion the very next day.
Said, "Oh Mr. lion, there's a big, bad muthafucka comin your way.
And when you meet, it's gonna be a goddamn sin,
And wherever you meet some ass is bound to bend."
Said, "he's somebody that you don't know,
He just broke a-loose from the Ringlin Brother's show."
Said, "Baby, he talked about your people in a helluva way!
He talked about your people till my hair turned gray!
He said your daddy's a freak and your momma's a whore.
Said he spotted you running through the jungle sellin asshole from door to door!
Said your sister did the damndest trick.
She got down so low and sucked a earthworm's dick.
Said he spotted yo niece behind the tree,
Screwin a muthafuckin flea!
He said he saw yo aunt sittin on the fence
Givin a goddamn zebra a french.
Then he talked about yo mammy and yo sister Lou,
Then he start talkin about how good yo grandmaw screw.

QuickTime™ and a
xvid decompressor
are needed to see this picture.


Slide 4

Negritude and the Black
Arts Movement

QuickTime™ and a
xvid decompressor
are needed to see this picture.

“Sellout” by LG Damas
I feel ridiculous/ in their shoes/ their
dinner jackets/ their starched
shirts/ and detachable collars/
their monocles and/ their bowler
hats
……………….
QuickTime™ and a
xvid decompressor
are needed to see this picture.

I feel ridiculous/ among them/ like an
accomplice/ among them/ like a
pimp/ like a murderer among
them/ my hands hideously red/
with the blood of their/ ci-vi-li-zation

Black Art and Black Aesthetics: Poesis as Politics
Points

Black Art

1)

Does this poem
conform to
formal norms?
Which ones?

2)

Where do you
turn when you
can’t get out of
the Bubble?

Larry Neal Defines the B.A.M. Project
1)

2)

To align the projects of
the black artist and
political activist
To fashion a collective
goal: the destruction of
double consciousness

Amiri Baraka (1934- )
born Leroi Jones
Bohemian, Black Power Advocate, Communist
Preface to a Twenty Volume Suicide Note, poems, 1961
Blues People: Black People in White America, 1963
Dutchman and the Slavedrama, 1964
The system of Dante’s hell, novel, 1965
Home: Social Essays, 1965
A Black Mass (1966
Tales, 1967
Black Magic, poems, 1969
Four Black Revolutionary Plays, 1969
Slave Ship, 1970
It's Nation Time, poems, 1970
Raise Race Rays Raize: Essays Since 1965, 1971
Hard Facts, poems, 1975
The Motion of History and Other Plays, 1978
Poetry for the Advanced, 1979
reggae or not!, 1981
Daggers and Javelins: Essays 1974-1979, 1984
The Autobiography of LeRoi Jones/Amiri Baraka, 1984
The Music: Reflections on Jazz and Blues, 1987
Transbluesency: The Selected Poems of Amiri Baraka/LeRoi Jones, 1995
Wise, Why’s Y’s, essays, 1995
Funk Lore: New Poems, 1996.
Somebody Blew Up America, 2001
The Book of Monk, 2005
Tales of the Out & the Gone, 2006
Billy Harper: Blueprints of Jazz, Volume 2, Audio CD, 2008
Ancient Music

Dutchman
A Modern Myth of Black Assimilation

QuickTime™ and a
xvid decompressor
are needed to see this picture.

Major Themes
Race and Racism: Assimilation, Self-hatred
Violence and Cruelty: The violence of white oppression
that murders blacks in a literal and figurative sense.
Passivity: A by-product of assimilation that, for Baraka,
makes a community stagnant, incapable of
producing leaders or innovators. And yet, it is a
passivity whose transgression results in selfdestruction (perhaps of a positive variety, but more
than likely not)
Sexism: Emasculation, The Siren/Fury archetypal
devouring female
Allegory
a subway “heaped in modern myth”
Symbolic Associations and Locales
The Story of Adam and Eve, The Flying Dutchman,
Dutch Slave Ships, the subway or “flying underbelly
of the city”

Tainted Forms of Expression
CLAY Are you angry about anything? Did I say something wrong?
LULA Everything you say is wrong. [Mock smile] That's what makes you so
attractive. Ha. In that funnybook jacket with all the buttons. [More animate,
taking hold of his jacket] What've you got that jacket and tie on in all this heat
for? And why're you wearing a jacket and tie like that? Did your people ever
burn witches or start revolutions over the price of tea? Boy, those narrowshoulder clothes come from a tradition you ought to feel oppressed by. A
three-button suit. What right do you have to be wearing a three-button suit
and striped tie? Your grandfather was a slave, he didn't go to Harvard.
CLAY My grandfather was a night watchman.
LULA And you went to a colored college where everybody thought they
were Averell Harriman.
CLAY All except me.
LULA And who did you think you were? Who do you think you are now?
CLAY [Laughs as if to make light of the whole trend of the conversation]
Well, in college I thought I was Baudelaire. But I've slowed down since.
LULA I bet you never once thought you were a black nigger. [Mock serious,
then she howls with laughter. CLAY is stunned but after initial reaction, he
quickly tries to appreciate the humor. LULA almost shrieks] A black
Baudelaire.

Talking Points:
1)Costume Prescribed
modes of revolt.
2)Black Baudelaire:
The Relationship
Between the Black
Artists of the 60s and
Extant Poetic Forms
3)Symbolism: Black
Baudelaires and Black
Niggers
4)“I bet you never
once thought you
were a black nigger”.

“Cultural Strangulation”
by
Addison Gayle

Cultural Strangulation
“There is no White aesthetic”

The Agenda:
To Defend the Positing of a Black Aesthetic

Let us proposes Greece as the logical starting point, bearing in mind
Will Durrant’s observation that “all of Western Civilization is but a
footnote to Plato,” and take Plato as the first writer to attempt a
systematic aesthetic [….] However, Plato defines beauty in ambiguous
terms leaving the problem of more secular, circumscribred, secular
definition to philosophers, poets, and critics […] these aestheticians
have been white, there, it is not surprising that, symbolically and
literally, the have defined beauty in terms of whiteness,

The Argument:
1)The failure to recognize a separate black
aesthetic is not only out of step with current
leftist moves forward in the field of race
relations, but is also the outgrowth of a
failure to come to terms with what might
constitute a White Aesthetic.
2)This White Aesthetic is as older than the
“race problem,” but its privileging of light
over dark was mapped onto race relations.
3)Given the legacy of racism in America and
that Occidental aesthetic are tainted by
racism, the black aesthetic must be defined
oppositionally. This opposition can be
embodied in the phrase “Black is Beautiful”
a slogan during the Black Power Movement.

The Ironic and Oppositional Position of Black Aesthetics

3) Hence, in the American realm,
the entire realm of aesthetics is
poisoned by a racism that comes
to the fore every time it
evaluates an object of Black Art.
4) And, the Black artist is forced into
a corner. To answer to the
demands of traditional aesthetics
is to allow white critics to dictate
the expression of Black
experience (which can result in a
re-instantiation of racism)
5) Hence, the only option other
than assimilation, calls for an
iconoclastic set of principles
embodied in the phrase “Black is
Beautiful”

Exploding the Raisin
A Cry for What Kind of Revolt-The Shuffle
LULA [Her voice takes on a different, more businesslike quality] I've heard enough.
CLAY [Reaching for his books] I bet you have. I guess I better collect my stuff and get off this train. Looks like we
won't be acting out that little pageant you outlined before.
LULA No. We won't. You're right about that, at least.
[She turns to look quickly around the rest of the car] All right!
[The others respond]
CLAY [Bending across the girl to retrieve his belongings] Sorry, baby, I don't think we could make it.
[As he is bending over her, the girl brings up a small knife and plunges it into CLAY's chest. Twice. He slumps across
her knees, his mouth working stupidly]
LULA Sorry is right.
[Turning to the others in the car who have already gotten up from their seats] Sorry is the rightest thing you've said.
Get this man off me! Hurry, now!
[ The others come and drag CLAY's body down the aisle] Open the door and throw his body out. They throw him off]
And all of you get off at the next stop. LULA busies herself straightening her things. Getting everything in order. She
takes out a notebook and makes a quick scribbling note. Drops it in her bag. The train apparently stops and all the
others get off, leaving her alone in the coach.
Very soon a young Negro of about twenty comes into the coach, with a couple of books under his arm. He sits a few
seats in back of LULA. When he is seated she turns and gives him a long slow look. He looks up from his book and
drops the book on his lap. Then an old Negro conductor comes into the car, doing a sort of restrained soft shoe, and
half mumbling the words of some song. He looks at the young man, briefly, with a quick greeting]
CONDUCTOR Hey, brother!
YOUNG NEGRO Hey
[The conductor continues down the aisle with his little dance and the mumbled song. LULA turns to stare at him and
follows his movements down the aisle. The conductor tips his hat when he reaches her seat, and continues out the
car]
Curtain

Theoretical Approaches to
Black Drama
The History of Black Drama The
consists of innovative
(infinite?) deformative
(nation based discursive
strategies of masking and
sounding) discursive
strategies that are always
mixtures of the mastery of
form and the deformation
of mastery

the mastery of form

deformation of
mastery

Houston Bakeresque
QuickTime™ and a
xvid decompressor
are needed to see this picture.

Acting Black and Double Consciousness
You don’t know anything except what’s
there for you to see.

QuickTime™ and a
xvid decompressor
are needed to see this picture.

CLAY [Pushing her against the seat] I'm not telling you again, Tallulah Bankhead! Luxury. In your face and your fingers. You telling me what I ought to do.
[Sudden scream frightening the whole coach] Well, don't! Don't you tell me anything! If I'm a middle-class fake white man . . . let me be. And let me be in the way
I want.
[Through his teeth] I'll rip your lousy breasts off! Let me be who I feel like being. Uncle Tom. Thomas. Whoever. It's none of your business. You don't know
anything except what's there for you to see. An act. Lies. Device. Not the pure heart, the pumping black heart. You don't ever know that. And I sit here, in
this buttoned-up suit, to keep myself from cutting all your throats. I mean wantonly. You great liberated whore! You fuck some black man, and right away
you're an expert on black people. What a lotta shit that is. The only thing you know is that you come if he bangs you hard enough. And that's all. The belly
rub? You wanted to do the belly rub? Shit, you don't even know how. You don't know how. That ol' dipty-dip shit you do, rolling your ass like an elephant.
That's not my kind of belly rub. Belly rub is not Queens. Belly rub is dark places, with big hats and overcoats held up with one arm. Belly rub hates you.
Old bald-headed four-eyed ofays popping their fingers . . . and don't know yet what they're doing. They say, "I love Bessie Smith." And don't even
understand that Bessie Smith is saying, "Kiss my ass, kiss my black unruly ass." Before love, suffering, desire, anything you can explain, she's saying,
and very plainly, "Kiss my black ass." And if you don't know that, it's you that's doing the kissing. Charlie Parker? Charlie Parker. All the hip white boys
scream for Bird. And Bird saying, "Up your ass, feebleminded ofay! Up your ass." And they sit there talking about the tortured genius of Charlie Parker.
Bird would've played not a note of music if he just walked up to East Sixty-seventh Street and killed the first ten white people he saw. Not a note! And I'm
the great would-be poet. Yes. That's right! Poet. Some kind of bastard literature . . . all it needs is a simple knife thrust. Just let me bleed you, you loud
whore, and one poem vanished. A whole people of neurotics, struggling to keep from being sane. And the only thing that would cure the neurosis would be
your murder. Simple as that. I mean if I murdered you, then other white people would begin to understand me. You understand? No. I guess not. If Bessie
Smith had killed some white people she wouldn't have needed that music. She could have talked very straight and plain about the world. No metaphors.
No grunts. No wiggles in the dark of her soul. Just straight two and two are four. Money. Power. Luxury. Like that. All of them. Crazy niggers turning their
backs on sanity. When all it needs is that simple act. Murder. Just murder! Would make us all sane.
[Suddenly weary] Ahhh. Shit. But who needs it? I'd rather be a fool. Insane. Safe with my words, and no deaths, and clean, hard thoughts, urging me to new
conquests. My people's madness. Hah! That's a laugh. My people. They don't need me to claim them. They got legs and arms of their own. Personal
insanities. Mirrors. They don't need all those words. They don't need any defense. But listen, though, one more thing. And you tell this to your father, who's
probably the kind of man who needs to know at once. So he can plan ahead. Tell him not to preach so much rationalism and cold logic to these niggers.
Let them alone. Let them sing curses at you in code and see your filth as simple lack of style. Don't make the mistake, through some irresponsible surge
of Christian charity, of talking too much about the advantages of Western rationalism, or the great intellectual legacy of the white man, or maybe they'll
begin to listen. And then, maybe one day, you'll find they actually do understand exactly what you are talking about, all these fantasy people. All these
blues people. And on that day, as sure as shit, when you really believe you can "accept" them into your fold, as half-white trusties late of the subject
peoples. With no more blues, except the very old ones, and not a watermelon in sight, the great missionary heart will have triumphed, and all of those excoons will be stand-up Western men, with eyes for clean hard useful lives, sober, pious and sane, and they'll murder you. They'll murder you, and have
very rational explanations. Very much like your own. They'll cut your throats, and drag you out to the edge of your cities so the flesh can fall away from
your bones, in sanitary isolation.

Talking Points:
1)Intra-Group Knowledge in Cultural Production: Doubly Conscious Performing
2)Acting vs. Being Black and the Problem of Performing for Two Audiences
3)Artistic and Rational Revolution
4)History of Struggle and the History of Black Cultural Production

Toasting
Black Internationalism, Nationalism, Folklore, and the
Signifying Monkey
Way down in the jungle deep,
The bad ass lion stepped on the signifyin monkey's feet.
The monkey said, "Muthafucka, can't you see?
Why, you standin on my goddamn feet!"
The lion said, "I ain't heard a word you said."
Said, "If you say three more I'll be steppin on yo muthafuckin head!"
Now, the monkey lived in the jungle in an old oak tree.
Bullshittin the lion everyday of the week.
Why, everyday before the sun go down,
The lion would kick his all through the jungle town.
But the monkey got wise and started usin his wit.
Said, "I'm gon' put a stop to this ole ass kickin shit!"
So he ran up on the lion the very next day.
Said, "Oh Mr. lion, there's a big, bad muthafucka comin your way.
And when you meet, it's gonna be a goddamn sin,
And wherever you meet some ass is bound to bend."
Said, "he's somebody that you don't know,
He just broke a-loose from the Ringlin Brother's show."
Said, "Baby, he talked about your people in a helluva way!
He talked about your people till my hair turned gray!
He said your daddy's a freak and your momma's a whore.
Said he spotted you running through the jungle sellin asshole from door to door!
Said your sister did the damndest trick.
She got down so low and sucked a earthworm's dick.
Said he spotted yo niece behind the tree,
Screwin a muthafuckin flea!
He said he saw yo aunt sittin on the fence
Givin a goddamn zebra a french.
Then he talked about yo mammy and yo sister Lou,
Then he start talkin about how good yo grandmaw screw.

QuickTime™ and a
xvid decompressor
are needed to see this picture.


Slide 5

Negritude and the Black
Arts Movement

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xvid decompressor
are needed to see this picture.

“Sellout” by LG Damas
I feel ridiculous/ in their shoes/ their
dinner jackets/ their starched
shirts/ and detachable collars/
their monocles and/ their bowler
hats
……………….
QuickTime™ and a
xvid decompressor
are needed to see this picture.

I feel ridiculous/ among them/ like an
accomplice/ among them/ like a
pimp/ like a murderer among
them/ my hands hideously red/
with the blood of their/ ci-vi-li-zation

Black Art and Black Aesthetics: Poesis as Politics
Points

Black Art

1)

Does this poem
conform to
formal norms?
Which ones?

2)

Where do you
turn when you
can’t get out of
the Bubble?

Larry Neal Defines the B.A.M. Project
1)

2)

To align the projects of
the black artist and
political activist
To fashion a collective
goal: the destruction of
double consciousness

Amiri Baraka (1934- )
born Leroi Jones
Bohemian, Black Power Advocate, Communist
Preface to a Twenty Volume Suicide Note, poems, 1961
Blues People: Black People in White America, 1963
Dutchman and the Slavedrama, 1964
The system of Dante’s hell, novel, 1965
Home: Social Essays, 1965
A Black Mass (1966
Tales, 1967
Black Magic, poems, 1969
Four Black Revolutionary Plays, 1969
Slave Ship, 1970
It's Nation Time, poems, 1970
Raise Race Rays Raize: Essays Since 1965, 1971
Hard Facts, poems, 1975
The Motion of History and Other Plays, 1978
Poetry for the Advanced, 1979
reggae or not!, 1981
Daggers and Javelins: Essays 1974-1979, 1984
The Autobiography of LeRoi Jones/Amiri Baraka, 1984
The Music: Reflections on Jazz and Blues, 1987
Transbluesency: The Selected Poems of Amiri Baraka/LeRoi Jones, 1995
Wise, Why’s Y’s, essays, 1995
Funk Lore: New Poems, 1996.
Somebody Blew Up America, 2001
The Book of Monk, 2005
Tales of the Out & the Gone, 2006
Billy Harper: Blueprints of Jazz, Volume 2, Audio CD, 2008
Ancient Music

Dutchman
A Modern Myth of Black Assimilation

QuickTime™ and a
xvid decompressor
are needed to see this picture.

Major Themes
Race and Racism: Assimilation, Self-hatred
Violence and Cruelty: The violence of white oppression
that murders blacks in a literal and figurative sense.
Passivity: A by-product of assimilation that, for Baraka,
makes a community stagnant, incapable of
producing leaders or innovators. And yet, it is a
passivity whose transgression results in selfdestruction (perhaps of a positive variety, but more
than likely not)
Sexism: Emasculation, The Siren/Fury archetypal
devouring female
Allegory
a subway “heaped in modern myth”
Symbolic Associations and Locales
The Story of Adam and Eve, The Flying Dutchman,
Dutch Slave Ships, the subway or “flying underbelly
of the city”

Tainted Forms of Expression
CLAY Are you angry about anything? Did I say something wrong?
LULA Everything you say is wrong. [Mock smile] That's what makes you so
attractive. Ha. In that funnybook jacket with all the buttons. [More animate,
taking hold of his jacket] What've you got that jacket and tie on in all this heat
for? And why're you wearing a jacket and tie like that? Did your people ever
burn witches or start revolutions over the price of tea? Boy, those narrowshoulder clothes come from a tradition you ought to feel oppressed by. A
three-button suit. What right do you have to be wearing a three-button suit
and striped tie? Your grandfather was a slave, he didn't go to Harvard.
CLAY My grandfather was a night watchman.
LULA And you went to a colored college where everybody thought they
were Averell Harriman.
CLAY All except me.
LULA And who did you think you were? Who do you think you are now?
CLAY [Laughs as if to make light of the whole trend of the conversation]
Well, in college I thought I was Baudelaire. But I've slowed down since.
LULA I bet you never once thought you were a black nigger. [Mock serious,
then she howls with laughter. CLAY is stunned but after initial reaction, he
quickly tries to appreciate the humor. LULA almost shrieks] A black
Baudelaire.

Talking Points:
1)Costume Prescribed
modes of revolt.
2)Black Baudelaire:
The Relationship
Between the Black
Artists of the 60s and
Extant Poetic Forms
3)Symbolism: Black
Baudelaires and Black
Niggers
4)“I bet you never
once thought you
were a black nigger”.

“Cultural Strangulation”
by
Addison Gayle

Cultural Strangulation
“There is no White aesthetic”

The Agenda:
To Defend the Positing of a Black Aesthetic

Let us proposes Greece as the logical starting point, bearing in mind
Will Durrant’s observation that “all of Western Civilization is but a
footnote to Plato,” and take Plato as the first writer to attempt a
systematic aesthetic [….] However, Plato defines beauty in ambiguous
terms leaving the problem of more secular, circumscribred, secular
definition to philosophers, poets, and critics […] these aestheticians
have been white, there, it is not surprising that, symbolically and
literally, the have defined beauty in terms of whiteness,

The Argument:
1)The failure to recognize a separate black
aesthetic is not only out of step with current
leftist moves forward in the field of race
relations, but is also the outgrowth of a
failure to come to terms with what might
constitute a White Aesthetic.
2)This White Aesthetic is as older than the
“race problem,” but its privileging of light
over dark was mapped onto race relations.
3)Given the legacy of racism in America and
that Occidental aesthetic are tainted by
racism, the black aesthetic must be defined
oppositionally. This opposition can be
embodied in the phrase “Black is Beautiful”
a slogan during the Black Power Movement.

The Ironic and Oppositional Position of Black Aesthetics

3) Hence, in the American realm,
the entire realm of aesthetics is
poisoned by a racism that comes
to the fore every time it
evaluates an object of Black Art.
4) And, the Black artist is forced into
a corner. To answer to the
demands of traditional aesthetics
is to allow white critics to dictate
the expression of Black
experience (which can result in a
re-instantiation of racism)
5) Hence, the only option other
than assimilation, calls for an
iconoclastic set of principles
embodied in the phrase “Black is
Beautiful”

Exploding the Raisin
A Cry for What Kind of Revolt-The Shuffle
LULA [Her voice takes on a different, more businesslike quality] I've heard enough.
CLAY [Reaching for his books] I bet you have. I guess I better collect my stuff and get off this train. Looks like we
won't be acting out that little pageant you outlined before.
LULA No. We won't. You're right about that, at least.
[She turns to look quickly around the rest of the car] All right!
[The others respond]
CLAY [Bending across the girl to retrieve his belongings] Sorry, baby, I don't think we could make it.
[As he is bending over her, the girl brings up a small knife and plunges it into CLAY's chest. Twice. He slumps across
her knees, his mouth working stupidly]
LULA Sorry is right.
[Turning to the others in the car who have already gotten up from their seats] Sorry is the rightest thing you've said.
Get this man off me! Hurry, now!
[ The others come and drag CLAY's body down the aisle] Open the door and throw his body out. They throw him off]
And all of you get off at the next stop. LULA busies herself straightening her things. Getting everything in order. She
takes out a notebook and makes a quick scribbling note. Drops it in her bag. The train apparently stops and all the
others get off, leaving her alone in the coach.
Very soon a young Negro of about twenty comes into the coach, with a couple of books under his arm. He sits a few
seats in back of LULA. When he is seated she turns and gives him a long slow look. He looks up from his book and
drops the book on his lap. Then an old Negro conductor comes into the car, doing a sort of restrained soft shoe, and
half mumbling the words of some song. He looks at the young man, briefly, with a quick greeting]
CONDUCTOR Hey, brother!
YOUNG NEGRO Hey
[The conductor continues down the aisle with his little dance and the mumbled song. LULA turns to stare at him and
follows his movements down the aisle. The conductor tips his hat when he reaches her seat, and continues out the
car]
Curtain

Theoretical Approaches to
Black Drama
The History of Black Drama The
consists of innovative
(infinite?) deformative
(nation based discursive
strategies of masking and
sounding) discursive
strategies that are always
mixtures of the mastery of
form and the deformation
of mastery

the mastery of form

deformation of
mastery

Houston Bakeresque
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are needed to see this picture.

Acting Black and Double Consciousness
You don’t know anything except what’s
there for you to see.

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xvid decompressor
are needed to see this picture.

CLAY [Pushing her against the seat] I'm not telling you again, Tallulah Bankhead! Luxury. In your face and your fingers. You telling me what I ought to do.
[Sudden scream frightening the whole coach] Well, don't! Don't you tell me anything! If I'm a middle-class fake white man . . . let me be. And let me be in the way
I want.
[Through his teeth] I'll rip your lousy breasts off! Let me be who I feel like being. Uncle Tom. Thomas. Whoever. It's none of your business. You don't know
anything except what's there for you to see. An act. Lies. Device. Not the pure heart, the pumping black heart. You don't ever know that. And I sit here, in
this buttoned-up suit, to keep myself from cutting all your throats. I mean wantonly. You great liberated whore! You fuck some black man, and right away
you're an expert on black people. What a lotta shit that is. The only thing you know is that you come if he bangs you hard enough. And that's all. The belly
rub? You wanted to do the belly rub? Shit, you don't even know how. You don't know how. That ol' dipty-dip shit you do, rolling your ass like an elephant.
That's not my kind of belly rub. Belly rub is not Queens. Belly rub is dark places, with big hats and overcoats held up with one arm. Belly rub hates you.
Old bald-headed four-eyed ofays popping their fingers . . . and don't know yet what they're doing. They say, "I love Bessie Smith." And don't even
understand that Bessie Smith is saying, "Kiss my ass, kiss my black unruly ass." Before love, suffering, desire, anything you can explain, she's saying,
and very plainly, "Kiss my black ass." And if you don't know that, it's you that's doing the kissing. Charlie Parker? Charlie Parker. All the hip white boys
scream for Bird. And Bird saying, "Up your ass, feebleminded ofay! Up your ass." And they sit there talking about the tortured genius of Charlie Parker.
Bird would've played not a note of music if he just walked up to East Sixty-seventh Street and killed the first ten white people he saw. Not a note! And I'm
the great would-be poet. Yes. That's right! Poet. Some kind of bastard literature . . . all it needs is a simple knife thrust. Just let me bleed you, you loud
whore, and one poem vanished. A whole people of neurotics, struggling to keep from being sane. And the only thing that would cure the neurosis would be
your murder. Simple as that. I mean if I murdered you, then other white people would begin to understand me. You understand? No. I guess not. If Bessie
Smith had killed some white people she wouldn't have needed that music. She could have talked very straight and plain about the world. No metaphors.
No grunts. No wiggles in the dark of her soul. Just straight two and two are four. Money. Power. Luxury. Like that. All of them. Crazy niggers turning their
backs on sanity. When all it needs is that simple act. Murder. Just murder! Would make us all sane.
[Suddenly weary] Ahhh. Shit. But who needs it? I'd rather be a fool. Insane. Safe with my words, and no deaths, and clean, hard thoughts, urging me to new
conquests. My people's madness. Hah! That's a laugh. My people. They don't need me to claim them. They got legs and arms of their own. Personal
insanities. Mirrors. They don't need all those words. They don't need any defense. But listen, though, one more thing. And you tell this to your father, who's
probably the kind of man who needs to know at once. So he can plan ahead. Tell him not to preach so much rationalism and cold logic to these niggers.
Let them alone. Let them sing curses at you in code and see your filth as simple lack of style. Don't make the mistake, through some irresponsible surge
of Christian charity, of talking too much about the advantages of Western rationalism, or the great intellectual legacy of the white man, or maybe they'll
begin to listen. And then, maybe one day, you'll find they actually do understand exactly what you are talking about, all these fantasy people. All these
blues people. And on that day, as sure as shit, when you really believe you can "accept" them into your fold, as half-white trusties late of the subject
peoples. With no more blues, except the very old ones, and not a watermelon in sight, the great missionary heart will have triumphed, and all of those excoons will be stand-up Western men, with eyes for clean hard useful lives, sober, pious and sane, and they'll murder you. They'll murder you, and have
very rational explanations. Very much like your own. They'll cut your throats, and drag you out to the edge of your cities so the flesh can fall away from
your bones, in sanitary isolation.

Talking Points:
1)Intra-Group Knowledge in Cultural Production: Doubly Conscious Performing
2)Acting vs. Being Black and the Problem of Performing for Two Audiences
3)Artistic and Rational Revolution
4)History of Struggle and the History of Black Cultural Production

Toasting
Black Internationalism, Nationalism, Folklore, and the
Signifying Monkey
Way down in the jungle deep,
The bad ass lion stepped on the signifyin monkey's feet.
The monkey said, "Muthafucka, can't you see?
Why, you standin on my goddamn feet!"
The lion said, "I ain't heard a word you said."
Said, "If you say three more I'll be steppin on yo muthafuckin head!"
Now, the monkey lived in the jungle in an old oak tree.
Bullshittin the lion everyday of the week.
Why, everyday before the sun go down,
The lion would kick his all through the jungle town.
But the monkey got wise and started usin his wit.
Said, "I'm gon' put a stop to this ole ass kickin shit!"
So he ran up on the lion the very next day.
Said, "Oh Mr. lion, there's a big, bad muthafucka comin your way.
And when you meet, it's gonna be a goddamn sin,
And wherever you meet some ass is bound to bend."
Said, "he's somebody that you don't know,
He just broke a-loose from the Ringlin Brother's show."
Said, "Baby, he talked about your people in a helluva way!
He talked about your people till my hair turned gray!
He said your daddy's a freak and your momma's a whore.
Said he spotted you running through the jungle sellin asshole from door to door!
Said your sister did the damndest trick.
She got down so low and sucked a earthworm's dick.
Said he spotted yo niece behind the tree,
Screwin a muthafuckin flea!
He said he saw yo aunt sittin on the fence
Givin a goddamn zebra a french.
Then he talked about yo mammy and yo sister Lou,
Then he start talkin about how good yo grandmaw screw.

QuickTime™ and a
xvid decompressor
are needed to see this picture.


Slide 6

Negritude and the Black
Arts Movement

QuickTime™ and a
xvid decompressor
are needed to see this picture.

“Sellout” by LG Damas
I feel ridiculous/ in their shoes/ their
dinner jackets/ their starched
shirts/ and detachable collars/
their monocles and/ their bowler
hats
……………….
QuickTime™ and a
xvid decompressor
are needed to see this picture.

I feel ridiculous/ among them/ like an
accomplice/ among them/ like a
pimp/ like a murderer among
them/ my hands hideously red/
with the blood of their/ ci-vi-li-zation

Black Art and Black Aesthetics: Poesis as Politics
Points

Black Art

1)

Does this poem
conform to
formal norms?
Which ones?

2)

Where do you
turn when you
can’t get out of
the Bubble?

Larry Neal Defines the B.A.M. Project
1)

2)

To align the projects of
the black artist and
political activist
To fashion a collective
goal: the destruction of
double consciousness

Amiri Baraka (1934- )
born Leroi Jones
Bohemian, Black Power Advocate, Communist
Preface to a Twenty Volume Suicide Note, poems, 1961
Blues People: Black People in White America, 1963
Dutchman and the Slavedrama, 1964
The system of Dante’s hell, novel, 1965
Home: Social Essays, 1965
A Black Mass (1966
Tales, 1967
Black Magic, poems, 1969
Four Black Revolutionary Plays, 1969
Slave Ship, 1970
It's Nation Time, poems, 1970
Raise Race Rays Raize: Essays Since 1965, 1971
Hard Facts, poems, 1975
The Motion of History and Other Plays, 1978
Poetry for the Advanced, 1979
reggae or not!, 1981
Daggers and Javelins: Essays 1974-1979, 1984
The Autobiography of LeRoi Jones/Amiri Baraka, 1984
The Music: Reflections on Jazz and Blues, 1987
Transbluesency: The Selected Poems of Amiri Baraka/LeRoi Jones, 1995
Wise, Why’s Y’s, essays, 1995
Funk Lore: New Poems, 1996.
Somebody Blew Up America, 2001
The Book of Monk, 2005
Tales of the Out & the Gone, 2006
Billy Harper: Blueprints of Jazz, Volume 2, Audio CD, 2008
Ancient Music

Dutchman
A Modern Myth of Black Assimilation

QuickTime™ and a
xvid decompressor
are needed to see this picture.

Major Themes
Race and Racism: Assimilation, Self-hatred
Violence and Cruelty: The violence of white oppression
that murders blacks in a literal and figurative sense.
Passivity: A by-product of assimilation that, for Baraka,
makes a community stagnant, incapable of
producing leaders or innovators. And yet, it is a
passivity whose transgression results in selfdestruction (perhaps of a positive variety, but more
than likely not)
Sexism: Emasculation, The Siren/Fury archetypal
devouring female
Allegory
a subway “heaped in modern myth”
Symbolic Associations and Locales
The Story of Adam and Eve, The Flying Dutchman,
Dutch Slave Ships, the subway or “flying underbelly
of the city”

Tainted Forms of Expression
CLAY Are you angry about anything? Did I say something wrong?
LULA Everything you say is wrong. [Mock smile] That's what makes you so
attractive. Ha. In that funnybook jacket with all the buttons. [More animate,
taking hold of his jacket] What've you got that jacket and tie on in all this heat
for? And why're you wearing a jacket and tie like that? Did your people ever
burn witches or start revolutions over the price of tea? Boy, those narrowshoulder clothes come from a tradition you ought to feel oppressed by. A
three-button suit. What right do you have to be wearing a three-button suit
and striped tie? Your grandfather was a slave, he didn't go to Harvard.
CLAY My grandfather was a night watchman.
LULA And you went to a colored college where everybody thought they
were Averell Harriman.
CLAY All except me.
LULA And who did you think you were? Who do you think you are now?
CLAY [Laughs as if to make light of the whole trend of the conversation]
Well, in college I thought I was Baudelaire. But I've slowed down since.
LULA I bet you never once thought you were a black nigger. [Mock serious,
then she howls with laughter. CLAY is stunned but after initial reaction, he
quickly tries to appreciate the humor. LULA almost shrieks] A black
Baudelaire.

Talking Points:
1)Costume Prescribed
modes of revolt.
2)Black Baudelaire:
The Relationship
Between the Black
Artists of the 60s and
Extant Poetic Forms
3)Symbolism: Black
Baudelaires and Black
Niggers
4)“I bet you never
once thought you
were a black nigger”.

“Cultural Strangulation”
by
Addison Gayle

Cultural Strangulation
“There is no White aesthetic”

The Agenda:
To Defend the Positing of a Black Aesthetic

Let us proposes Greece as the logical starting point, bearing in mind
Will Durrant’s observation that “all of Western Civilization is but a
footnote to Plato,” and take Plato as the first writer to attempt a
systematic aesthetic [….] However, Plato defines beauty in ambiguous
terms leaving the problem of more secular, circumscribred, secular
definition to philosophers, poets, and critics […] these aestheticians
have been white, there, it is not surprising that, symbolically and
literally, the have defined beauty in terms of whiteness,

The Argument:
1)The failure to recognize a separate black
aesthetic is not only out of step with current
leftist moves forward in the field of race
relations, but is also the outgrowth of a
failure to come to terms with what might
constitute a White Aesthetic.
2)This White Aesthetic is as older than the
“race problem,” but its privileging of light
over dark was mapped onto race relations.
3)Given the legacy of racism in America and
that Occidental aesthetic are tainted by
racism, the black aesthetic must be defined
oppositionally. This opposition can be
embodied in the phrase “Black is Beautiful”
a slogan during the Black Power Movement.

The Ironic and Oppositional Position of Black Aesthetics

3) Hence, in the American realm,
the entire realm of aesthetics is
poisoned by a racism that comes
to the fore every time it
evaluates an object of Black Art.
4) And, the Black artist is forced into
a corner. To answer to the
demands of traditional aesthetics
is to allow white critics to dictate
the expression of Black
experience (which can result in a
re-instantiation of racism)
5) Hence, the only option other
than assimilation, calls for an
iconoclastic set of principles
embodied in the phrase “Black is
Beautiful”

Exploding the Raisin
A Cry for What Kind of Revolt-The Shuffle
LULA [Her voice takes on a different, more businesslike quality] I've heard enough.
CLAY [Reaching for his books] I bet you have. I guess I better collect my stuff and get off this train. Looks like we
won't be acting out that little pageant you outlined before.
LULA No. We won't. You're right about that, at least.
[She turns to look quickly around the rest of the car] All right!
[The others respond]
CLAY [Bending across the girl to retrieve his belongings] Sorry, baby, I don't think we could make it.
[As he is bending over her, the girl brings up a small knife and plunges it into CLAY's chest. Twice. He slumps across
her knees, his mouth working stupidly]
LULA Sorry is right.
[Turning to the others in the car who have already gotten up from their seats] Sorry is the rightest thing you've said.
Get this man off me! Hurry, now!
[ The others come and drag CLAY's body down the aisle] Open the door and throw his body out. They throw him off]
And all of you get off at the next stop. LULA busies herself straightening her things. Getting everything in order. She
takes out a notebook and makes a quick scribbling note. Drops it in her bag. The train apparently stops and all the
others get off, leaving her alone in the coach.
Very soon a young Negro of about twenty comes into the coach, with a couple of books under his arm. He sits a few
seats in back of LULA. When he is seated she turns and gives him a long slow look. He looks up from his book and
drops the book on his lap. Then an old Negro conductor comes into the car, doing a sort of restrained soft shoe, and
half mumbling the words of some song. He looks at the young man, briefly, with a quick greeting]
CONDUCTOR Hey, brother!
YOUNG NEGRO Hey
[The conductor continues down the aisle with his little dance and the mumbled song. LULA turns to stare at him and
follows his movements down the aisle. The conductor tips his hat when he reaches her seat, and continues out the
car]
Curtain

Theoretical Approaches to
Black Drama
The History of Black Drama The
consists of innovative
(infinite?) deformative
(nation based discursive
strategies of masking and
sounding) discursive
strategies that are always
mixtures of the mastery of
form and the deformation
of mastery

the mastery of form

deformation of
mastery

Houston Bakeresque
QuickTime™ and a
xvid decompressor
are needed to see this picture.

Acting Black and Double Consciousness
You don’t know anything except what’s
there for you to see.

QuickTime™ and a
xvid decompressor
are needed to see this picture.

CLAY [Pushing her against the seat] I'm not telling you again, Tallulah Bankhead! Luxury. In your face and your fingers. You telling me what I ought to do.
[Sudden scream frightening the whole coach] Well, don't! Don't you tell me anything! If I'm a middle-class fake white man . . . let me be. And let me be in the way
I want.
[Through his teeth] I'll rip your lousy breasts off! Let me be who I feel like being. Uncle Tom. Thomas. Whoever. It's none of your business. You don't know
anything except what's there for you to see. An act. Lies. Device. Not the pure heart, the pumping black heart. You don't ever know that. And I sit here, in
this buttoned-up suit, to keep myself from cutting all your throats. I mean wantonly. You great liberated whore! You fuck some black man, and right away
you're an expert on black people. What a lotta shit that is. The only thing you know is that you come if he bangs you hard enough. And that's all. The belly
rub? You wanted to do the belly rub? Shit, you don't even know how. You don't know how. That ol' dipty-dip shit you do, rolling your ass like an elephant.
That's not my kind of belly rub. Belly rub is not Queens. Belly rub is dark places, with big hats and overcoats held up with one arm. Belly rub hates you.
Old bald-headed four-eyed ofays popping their fingers . . . and don't know yet what they're doing. They say, "I love Bessie Smith." And don't even
understand that Bessie Smith is saying, "Kiss my ass, kiss my black unruly ass." Before love, suffering, desire, anything you can explain, she's saying,
and very plainly, "Kiss my black ass." And if you don't know that, it's you that's doing the kissing. Charlie Parker? Charlie Parker. All the hip white boys
scream for Bird. And Bird saying, "Up your ass, feebleminded ofay! Up your ass." And they sit there talking about the tortured genius of Charlie Parker.
Bird would've played not a note of music if he just walked up to East Sixty-seventh Street and killed the first ten white people he saw. Not a note! And I'm
the great would-be poet. Yes. That's right! Poet. Some kind of bastard literature . . . all it needs is a simple knife thrust. Just let me bleed you, you loud
whore, and one poem vanished. A whole people of neurotics, struggling to keep from being sane. And the only thing that would cure the neurosis would be
your murder. Simple as that. I mean if I murdered you, then other white people would begin to understand me. You understand? No. I guess not. If Bessie
Smith had killed some white people she wouldn't have needed that music. She could have talked very straight and plain about the world. No metaphors.
No grunts. No wiggles in the dark of her soul. Just straight two and two are four. Money. Power. Luxury. Like that. All of them. Crazy niggers turning their
backs on sanity. When all it needs is that simple act. Murder. Just murder! Would make us all sane.
[Suddenly weary] Ahhh. Shit. But who needs it? I'd rather be a fool. Insane. Safe with my words, and no deaths, and clean, hard thoughts, urging me to new
conquests. My people's madness. Hah! That's a laugh. My people. They don't need me to claim them. They got legs and arms of their own. Personal
insanities. Mirrors. They don't need all those words. They don't need any defense. But listen, though, one more thing. And you tell this to your father, who's
probably the kind of man who needs to know at once. So he can plan ahead. Tell him not to preach so much rationalism and cold logic to these niggers.
Let them alone. Let them sing curses at you in code and see your filth as simple lack of style. Don't make the mistake, through some irresponsible surge
of Christian charity, of talking too much about the advantages of Western rationalism, or the great intellectual legacy of the white man, or maybe they'll
begin to listen. And then, maybe one day, you'll find they actually do understand exactly what you are talking about, all these fantasy people. All these
blues people. And on that day, as sure as shit, when you really believe you can "accept" them into your fold, as half-white trusties late of the subject
peoples. With no more blues, except the very old ones, and not a watermelon in sight, the great missionary heart will have triumphed, and all of those excoons will be stand-up Western men, with eyes for clean hard useful lives, sober, pious and sane, and they'll murder you. They'll murder you, and have
very rational explanations. Very much like your own. They'll cut your throats, and drag you out to the edge of your cities so the flesh can fall away from
your bones, in sanitary isolation.

Talking Points:
1)Intra-Group Knowledge in Cultural Production: Doubly Conscious Performing
2)Acting vs. Being Black and the Problem of Performing for Two Audiences
3)Artistic and Rational Revolution
4)History of Struggle and the History of Black Cultural Production

Toasting
Black Internationalism, Nationalism, Folklore, and the
Signifying Monkey
Way down in the jungle deep,
The bad ass lion stepped on the signifyin monkey's feet.
The monkey said, "Muthafucka, can't you see?
Why, you standin on my goddamn feet!"
The lion said, "I ain't heard a word you said."
Said, "If you say three more I'll be steppin on yo muthafuckin head!"
Now, the monkey lived in the jungle in an old oak tree.
Bullshittin the lion everyday of the week.
Why, everyday before the sun go down,
The lion would kick his all through the jungle town.
But the monkey got wise and started usin his wit.
Said, "I'm gon' put a stop to this ole ass kickin shit!"
So he ran up on the lion the very next day.
Said, "Oh Mr. lion, there's a big, bad muthafucka comin your way.
And when you meet, it's gonna be a goddamn sin,
And wherever you meet some ass is bound to bend."
Said, "he's somebody that you don't know,
He just broke a-loose from the Ringlin Brother's show."
Said, "Baby, he talked about your people in a helluva way!
He talked about your people till my hair turned gray!
He said your daddy's a freak and your momma's a whore.
Said he spotted you running through the jungle sellin asshole from door to door!
Said your sister did the damndest trick.
She got down so low and sucked a earthworm's dick.
Said he spotted yo niece behind the tree,
Screwin a muthafuckin flea!
He said he saw yo aunt sittin on the fence
Givin a goddamn zebra a french.
Then he talked about yo mammy and yo sister Lou,
Then he start talkin about how good yo grandmaw screw.

QuickTime™ and a
xvid decompressor
are needed to see this picture.


Slide 7

Negritude and the Black
Arts Movement

QuickTime™ and a
xvid decompressor
are needed to see this picture.

“Sellout” by LG Damas
I feel ridiculous/ in their shoes/ their
dinner jackets/ their starched
shirts/ and detachable collars/
their monocles and/ their bowler
hats
……………….
QuickTime™ and a
xvid decompressor
are needed to see this picture.

I feel ridiculous/ among them/ like an
accomplice/ among them/ like a
pimp/ like a murderer among
them/ my hands hideously red/
with the blood of their/ ci-vi-li-zation

Black Art and Black Aesthetics: Poesis as Politics
Points

Black Art

1)

Does this poem
conform to
formal norms?
Which ones?

2)

Where do you
turn when you
can’t get out of
the Bubble?

Larry Neal Defines the B.A.M. Project
1)

2)

To align the projects of
the black artist and
political activist
To fashion a collective
goal: the destruction of
double consciousness

Amiri Baraka (1934- )
born Leroi Jones
Bohemian, Black Power Advocate, Communist
Preface to a Twenty Volume Suicide Note, poems, 1961
Blues People: Black People in White America, 1963
Dutchman and the Slavedrama, 1964
The system of Dante’s hell, novel, 1965
Home: Social Essays, 1965
A Black Mass (1966
Tales, 1967
Black Magic, poems, 1969
Four Black Revolutionary Plays, 1969
Slave Ship, 1970
It's Nation Time, poems, 1970
Raise Race Rays Raize: Essays Since 1965, 1971
Hard Facts, poems, 1975
The Motion of History and Other Plays, 1978
Poetry for the Advanced, 1979
reggae or not!, 1981
Daggers and Javelins: Essays 1974-1979, 1984
The Autobiography of LeRoi Jones/Amiri Baraka, 1984
The Music: Reflections on Jazz and Blues, 1987
Transbluesency: The Selected Poems of Amiri Baraka/LeRoi Jones, 1995
Wise, Why’s Y’s, essays, 1995
Funk Lore: New Poems, 1996.
Somebody Blew Up America, 2001
The Book of Monk, 2005
Tales of the Out & the Gone, 2006
Billy Harper: Blueprints of Jazz, Volume 2, Audio CD, 2008
Ancient Music

Dutchman
A Modern Myth of Black Assimilation

QuickTime™ and a
xvid decompressor
are needed to see this picture.

Major Themes
Race and Racism: Assimilation, Self-hatred
Violence and Cruelty: The violence of white oppression
that murders blacks in a literal and figurative sense.
Passivity: A by-product of assimilation that, for Baraka,
makes a community stagnant, incapable of
producing leaders or innovators. And yet, it is a
passivity whose transgression results in selfdestruction (perhaps of a positive variety, but more
than likely not)
Sexism: Emasculation, The Siren/Fury archetypal
devouring female
Allegory
a subway “heaped in modern myth”
Symbolic Associations and Locales
The Story of Adam and Eve, The Flying Dutchman,
Dutch Slave Ships, the subway or “flying underbelly
of the city”

Tainted Forms of Expression
CLAY Are you angry about anything? Did I say something wrong?
LULA Everything you say is wrong. [Mock smile] That's what makes you so
attractive. Ha. In that funnybook jacket with all the buttons. [More animate,
taking hold of his jacket] What've you got that jacket and tie on in all this heat
for? And why're you wearing a jacket and tie like that? Did your people ever
burn witches or start revolutions over the price of tea? Boy, those narrowshoulder clothes come from a tradition you ought to feel oppressed by. A
three-button suit. What right do you have to be wearing a three-button suit
and striped tie? Your grandfather was a slave, he didn't go to Harvard.
CLAY My grandfather was a night watchman.
LULA And you went to a colored college where everybody thought they
were Averell Harriman.
CLAY All except me.
LULA And who did you think you were? Who do you think you are now?
CLAY [Laughs as if to make light of the whole trend of the conversation]
Well, in college I thought I was Baudelaire. But I've slowed down since.
LULA I bet you never once thought you were a black nigger. [Mock serious,
then she howls with laughter. CLAY is stunned but after initial reaction, he
quickly tries to appreciate the humor. LULA almost shrieks] A black
Baudelaire.

Talking Points:
1)Costume Prescribed
modes of revolt.
2)Black Baudelaire:
The Relationship
Between the Black
Artists of the 60s and
Extant Poetic Forms
3)Symbolism: Black
Baudelaires and Black
Niggers
4)“I bet you never
once thought you
were a black nigger”.

“Cultural Strangulation”
by
Addison Gayle

Cultural Strangulation
“There is no White aesthetic”

The Agenda:
To Defend the Positing of a Black Aesthetic

Let us proposes Greece as the logical starting point, bearing in mind
Will Durrant’s observation that “all of Western Civilization is but a
footnote to Plato,” and take Plato as the first writer to attempt a
systematic aesthetic [….] However, Plato defines beauty in ambiguous
terms leaving the problem of more secular, circumscribred, secular
definition to philosophers, poets, and critics […] these aestheticians
have been white, there, it is not surprising that, symbolically and
literally, the have defined beauty in terms of whiteness,

The Argument:
1)The failure to recognize a separate black
aesthetic is not only out of step with current
leftist moves forward in the field of race
relations, but is also the outgrowth of a
failure to come to terms with what might
constitute a White Aesthetic.
2)This White Aesthetic is as older than the
“race problem,” but its privileging of light
over dark was mapped onto race relations.
3)Given the legacy of racism in America and
that Occidental aesthetic are tainted by
racism, the black aesthetic must be defined
oppositionally. This opposition can be
embodied in the phrase “Black is Beautiful”
a slogan during the Black Power Movement.

The Ironic and Oppositional Position of Black Aesthetics

3) Hence, in the American realm,
the entire realm of aesthetics is
poisoned by a racism that comes
to the fore every time it
evaluates an object of Black Art.
4) And, the Black artist is forced into
a corner. To answer to the
demands of traditional aesthetics
is to allow white critics to dictate
the expression of Black
experience (which can result in a
re-instantiation of racism)
5) Hence, the only option other
than assimilation, calls for an
iconoclastic set of principles
embodied in the phrase “Black is
Beautiful”

Exploding the Raisin
A Cry for What Kind of Revolt-The Shuffle
LULA [Her voice takes on a different, more businesslike quality] I've heard enough.
CLAY [Reaching for his books] I bet you have. I guess I better collect my stuff and get off this train. Looks like we
won't be acting out that little pageant you outlined before.
LULA No. We won't. You're right about that, at least.
[She turns to look quickly around the rest of the car] All right!
[The others respond]
CLAY [Bending across the girl to retrieve his belongings] Sorry, baby, I don't think we could make it.
[As he is bending over her, the girl brings up a small knife and plunges it into CLAY's chest. Twice. He slumps across
her knees, his mouth working stupidly]
LULA Sorry is right.
[Turning to the others in the car who have already gotten up from their seats] Sorry is the rightest thing you've said.
Get this man off me! Hurry, now!
[ The others come and drag CLAY's body down the aisle] Open the door and throw his body out. They throw him off]
And all of you get off at the next stop. LULA busies herself straightening her things. Getting everything in order. She
takes out a notebook and makes a quick scribbling note. Drops it in her bag. The train apparently stops and all the
others get off, leaving her alone in the coach.
Very soon a young Negro of about twenty comes into the coach, with a couple of books under his arm. He sits a few
seats in back of LULA. When he is seated she turns and gives him a long slow look. He looks up from his book and
drops the book on his lap. Then an old Negro conductor comes into the car, doing a sort of restrained soft shoe, and
half mumbling the words of some song. He looks at the young man, briefly, with a quick greeting]
CONDUCTOR Hey, brother!
YOUNG NEGRO Hey
[The conductor continues down the aisle with his little dance and the mumbled song. LULA turns to stare at him and
follows his movements down the aisle. The conductor tips his hat when he reaches her seat, and continues out the
car]
Curtain

Theoretical Approaches to
Black Drama
The History of Black Drama The
consists of innovative
(infinite?) deformative
(nation based discursive
strategies of masking and
sounding) discursive
strategies that are always
mixtures of the mastery of
form and the deformation
of mastery

the mastery of form

deformation of
mastery

Houston Bakeresque
QuickTime™ and a
xvid decompressor
are needed to see this picture.

Acting Black and Double Consciousness
You don’t know anything except what’s
there for you to see.

QuickTime™ and a
xvid decompressor
are needed to see this picture.

CLAY [Pushing her against the seat] I'm not telling you again, Tallulah Bankhead! Luxury. In your face and your fingers. You telling me what I ought to do.
[Sudden scream frightening the whole coach] Well, don't! Don't you tell me anything! If I'm a middle-class fake white man . . . let me be. And let me be in the way
I want.
[Through his teeth] I'll rip your lousy breasts off! Let me be who I feel like being. Uncle Tom. Thomas. Whoever. It's none of your business. You don't know
anything except what's there for you to see. An act. Lies. Device. Not the pure heart, the pumping black heart. You don't ever know that. And I sit here, in
this buttoned-up suit, to keep myself from cutting all your throats. I mean wantonly. You great liberated whore! You fuck some black man, and right away
you're an expert on black people. What a lotta shit that is. The only thing you know is that you come if he bangs you hard enough. And that's all. The belly
rub? You wanted to do the belly rub? Shit, you don't even know how. You don't know how. That ol' dipty-dip shit you do, rolling your ass like an elephant.
That's not my kind of belly rub. Belly rub is not Queens. Belly rub is dark places, with big hats and overcoats held up with one arm. Belly rub hates you.
Old bald-headed four-eyed ofays popping their fingers . . . and don't know yet what they're doing. They say, "I love Bessie Smith." And don't even
understand that Bessie Smith is saying, "Kiss my ass, kiss my black unruly ass." Before love, suffering, desire, anything you can explain, she's saying,
and very plainly, "Kiss my black ass." And if you don't know that, it's you that's doing the kissing. Charlie Parker? Charlie Parker. All the hip white boys
scream for Bird. And Bird saying, "Up your ass, feebleminded ofay! Up your ass." And they sit there talking about the tortured genius of Charlie Parker.
Bird would've played not a note of music if he just walked up to East Sixty-seventh Street and killed the first ten white people he saw. Not a note! And I'm
the great would-be poet. Yes. That's right! Poet. Some kind of bastard literature . . . all it needs is a simple knife thrust. Just let me bleed you, you loud
whore, and one poem vanished. A whole people of neurotics, struggling to keep from being sane. And the only thing that would cure the neurosis would be
your murder. Simple as that. I mean if I murdered you, then other white people would begin to understand me. You understand? No. I guess not. If Bessie
Smith had killed some white people she wouldn't have needed that music. She could have talked very straight and plain about the world. No metaphors.
No grunts. No wiggles in the dark of her soul. Just straight two and two are four. Money. Power. Luxury. Like that. All of them. Crazy niggers turning their
backs on sanity. When all it needs is that simple act. Murder. Just murder! Would make us all sane.
[Suddenly weary] Ahhh. Shit. But who needs it? I'd rather be a fool. Insane. Safe with my words, and no deaths, and clean, hard thoughts, urging me to new
conquests. My people's madness. Hah! That's a laugh. My people. They don't need me to claim them. They got legs and arms of their own. Personal
insanities. Mirrors. They don't need all those words. They don't need any defense. But listen, though, one more thing. And you tell this to your father, who's
probably the kind of man who needs to know at once. So he can plan ahead. Tell him not to preach so much rationalism and cold logic to these niggers.
Let them alone. Let them sing curses at you in code and see your filth as simple lack of style. Don't make the mistake, through some irresponsible surge
of Christian charity, of talking too much about the advantages of Western rationalism, or the great intellectual legacy of the white man, or maybe they'll
begin to listen. And then, maybe one day, you'll find they actually do understand exactly what you are talking about, all these fantasy people. All these
blues people. And on that day, as sure as shit, when you really believe you can "accept" them into your fold, as half-white trusties late of the subject
peoples. With no more blues, except the very old ones, and not a watermelon in sight, the great missionary heart will have triumphed, and all of those excoons will be stand-up Western men, with eyes for clean hard useful lives, sober, pious and sane, and they'll murder you. They'll murder you, and have
very rational explanations. Very much like your own. They'll cut your throats, and drag you out to the edge of your cities so the flesh can fall away from
your bones, in sanitary isolation.

Talking Points:
1)Intra-Group Knowledge in Cultural Production: Doubly Conscious Performing
2)Acting vs. Being Black and the Problem of Performing for Two Audiences
3)Artistic and Rational Revolution
4)History of Struggle and the History of Black Cultural Production

Toasting
Black Internationalism, Nationalism, Folklore, and the
Signifying Monkey
Way down in the jungle deep,
The bad ass lion stepped on the signifyin monkey's feet.
The monkey said, "Muthafucka, can't you see?
Why, you standin on my goddamn feet!"
The lion said, "I ain't heard a word you said."
Said, "If you say three more I'll be steppin on yo muthafuckin head!"
Now, the monkey lived in the jungle in an old oak tree.
Bullshittin the lion everyday of the week.
Why, everyday before the sun go down,
The lion would kick his all through the jungle town.
But the monkey got wise and started usin his wit.
Said, "I'm gon' put a stop to this ole ass kickin shit!"
So he ran up on the lion the very next day.
Said, "Oh Mr. lion, there's a big, bad muthafucka comin your way.
And when you meet, it's gonna be a goddamn sin,
And wherever you meet some ass is bound to bend."
Said, "he's somebody that you don't know,
He just broke a-loose from the Ringlin Brother's show."
Said, "Baby, he talked about your people in a helluva way!
He talked about your people till my hair turned gray!
He said your daddy's a freak and your momma's a whore.
Said he spotted you running through the jungle sellin asshole from door to door!
Said your sister did the damndest trick.
She got down so low and sucked a earthworm's dick.
Said he spotted yo niece behind the tree,
Screwin a muthafuckin flea!
He said he saw yo aunt sittin on the fence
Givin a goddamn zebra a french.
Then he talked about yo mammy and yo sister Lou,
Then he start talkin about how good yo grandmaw screw.

QuickTime™ and a
xvid decompressor
are needed to see this picture.


Slide 8

Negritude and the Black
Arts Movement

QuickTime™ and a
xvid decompressor
are needed to see this picture.

“Sellout” by LG Damas
I feel ridiculous/ in their shoes/ their
dinner jackets/ their starched
shirts/ and detachable collars/
their monocles and/ their bowler
hats
……………….
QuickTime™ and a
xvid decompressor
are needed to see this picture.

I feel ridiculous/ among them/ like an
accomplice/ among them/ like a
pimp/ like a murderer among
them/ my hands hideously red/
with the blood of their/ ci-vi-li-zation

Black Art and Black Aesthetics: Poesis as Politics
Points

Black Art

1)

Does this poem
conform to
formal norms?
Which ones?

2)

Where do you
turn when you
can’t get out of
the Bubble?

Larry Neal Defines the B.A.M. Project
1)

2)

To align the projects of
the black artist and
political activist
To fashion a collective
goal: the destruction of
double consciousness

Amiri Baraka (1934- )
born Leroi Jones
Bohemian, Black Power Advocate, Communist
Preface to a Twenty Volume Suicide Note, poems, 1961
Blues People: Black People in White America, 1963
Dutchman and the Slavedrama, 1964
The system of Dante’s hell, novel, 1965
Home: Social Essays, 1965
A Black Mass (1966
Tales, 1967
Black Magic, poems, 1969
Four Black Revolutionary Plays, 1969
Slave Ship, 1970
It's Nation Time, poems, 1970
Raise Race Rays Raize: Essays Since 1965, 1971
Hard Facts, poems, 1975
The Motion of History and Other Plays, 1978
Poetry for the Advanced, 1979
reggae or not!, 1981
Daggers and Javelins: Essays 1974-1979, 1984
The Autobiography of LeRoi Jones/Amiri Baraka, 1984
The Music: Reflections on Jazz and Blues, 1987
Transbluesency: The Selected Poems of Amiri Baraka/LeRoi Jones, 1995
Wise, Why’s Y’s, essays, 1995
Funk Lore: New Poems, 1996.
Somebody Blew Up America, 2001
The Book of Monk, 2005
Tales of the Out & the Gone, 2006
Billy Harper: Blueprints of Jazz, Volume 2, Audio CD, 2008
Ancient Music

Dutchman
A Modern Myth of Black Assimilation

QuickTime™ and a
xvid decompressor
are needed to see this picture.

Major Themes
Race and Racism: Assimilation, Self-hatred
Violence and Cruelty: The violence of white oppression
that murders blacks in a literal and figurative sense.
Passivity: A by-product of assimilation that, for Baraka,
makes a community stagnant, incapable of
producing leaders or innovators. And yet, it is a
passivity whose transgression results in selfdestruction (perhaps of a positive variety, but more
than likely not)
Sexism: Emasculation, The Siren/Fury archetypal
devouring female
Allegory
a subway “heaped in modern myth”
Symbolic Associations and Locales
The Story of Adam and Eve, The Flying Dutchman,
Dutch Slave Ships, the subway or “flying underbelly
of the city”

Tainted Forms of Expression
CLAY Are you angry about anything? Did I say something wrong?
LULA Everything you say is wrong. [Mock smile] That's what makes you so
attractive. Ha. In that funnybook jacket with all the buttons. [More animate,
taking hold of his jacket] What've you got that jacket and tie on in all this heat
for? And why're you wearing a jacket and tie like that? Did your people ever
burn witches or start revolutions over the price of tea? Boy, those narrowshoulder clothes come from a tradition you ought to feel oppressed by. A
three-button suit. What right do you have to be wearing a three-button suit
and striped tie? Your grandfather was a slave, he didn't go to Harvard.
CLAY My grandfather was a night watchman.
LULA And you went to a colored college where everybody thought they
were Averell Harriman.
CLAY All except me.
LULA And who did you think you were? Who do you think you are now?
CLAY [Laughs as if to make light of the whole trend of the conversation]
Well, in college I thought I was Baudelaire. But I've slowed down since.
LULA I bet you never once thought you were a black nigger. [Mock serious,
then she howls with laughter. CLAY is stunned but after initial reaction, he
quickly tries to appreciate the humor. LULA almost shrieks] A black
Baudelaire.

Talking Points:
1)Costume Prescribed
modes of revolt.
2)Black Baudelaire:
The Relationship
Between the Black
Artists of the 60s and
Extant Poetic Forms
3)Symbolism: Black
Baudelaires and Black
Niggers
4)“I bet you never
once thought you
were a black nigger”.

“Cultural Strangulation”
by
Addison Gayle

Cultural Strangulation
“There is no White aesthetic”

The Agenda:
To Defend the Positing of a Black Aesthetic

Let us proposes Greece as the logical starting point, bearing in mind
Will Durrant’s observation that “all of Western Civilization is but a
footnote to Plato,” and take Plato as the first writer to attempt a
systematic aesthetic [….] However, Plato defines beauty in ambiguous
terms leaving the problem of more secular, circumscribred, secular
definition to philosophers, poets, and critics […] these aestheticians
have been white, there, it is not surprising that, symbolically and
literally, the have defined beauty in terms of whiteness,

The Argument:
1)The failure to recognize a separate black
aesthetic is not only out of step with current
leftist moves forward in the field of race
relations, but is also the outgrowth of a
failure to come to terms with what might
constitute a White Aesthetic.
2)This White Aesthetic is as older than the
“race problem,” but its privileging of light
over dark was mapped onto race relations.
3)Given the legacy of racism in America and
that Occidental aesthetic are tainted by
racism, the black aesthetic must be defined
oppositionally. This opposition can be
embodied in the phrase “Black is Beautiful”
a slogan during the Black Power Movement.

The Ironic and Oppositional Position of Black Aesthetics

3) Hence, in the American realm,
the entire realm of aesthetics is
poisoned by a racism that comes
to the fore every time it
evaluates an object of Black Art.
4) And, the Black artist is forced into
a corner. To answer to the
demands of traditional aesthetics
is to allow white critics to dictate
the expression of Black
experience (which can result in a
re-instantiation of racism)
5) Hence, the only option other
than assimilation, calls for an
iconoclastic set of principles
embodied in the phrase “Black is
Beautiful”

Exploding the Raisin
A Cry for What Kind of Revolt-The Shuffle
LULA [Her voice takes on a different, more businesslike quality] I've heard enough.
CLAY [Reaching for his books] I bet you have. I guess I better collect my stuff and get off this train. Looks like we
won't be acting out that little pageant you outlined before.
LULA No. We won't. You're right about that, at least.
[She turns to look quickly around the rest of the car] All right!
[The others respond]
CLAY [Bending across the girl to retrieve his belongings] Sorry, baby, I don't think we could make it.
[As he is bending over her, the girl brings up a small knife and plunges it into CLAY's chest. Twice. He slumps across
her knees, his mouth working stupidly]
LULA Sorry is right.
[Turning to the others in the car who have already gotten up from their seats] Sorry is the rightest thing you've said.
Get this man off me! Hurry, now!
[ The others come and drag CLAY's body down the aisle] Open the door and throw his body out. They throw him off]
And all of you get off at the next stop. LULA busies herself straightening her things. Getting everything in order. She
takes out a notebook and makes a quick scribbling note. Drops it in her bag. The train apparently stops and all the
others get off, leaving her alone in the coach.
Very soon a young Negro of about twenty comes into the coach, with a couple of books under his arm. He sits a few
seats in back of LULA. When he is seated she turns and gives him a long slow look. He looks up from his book and
drops the book on his lap. Then an old Negro conductor comes into the car, doing a sort of restrained soft shoe, and
half mumbling the words of some song. He looks at the young man, briefly, with a quick greeting]
CONDUCTOR Hey, brother!
YOUNG NEGRO Hey
[The conductor continues down the aisle with his little dance and the mumbled song. LULA turns to stare at him and
follows his movements down the aisle. The conductor tips his hat when he reaches her seat, and continues out the
car]
Curtain

Theoretical Approaches to
Black Drama
The History of Black Drama The
consists of innovative
(infinite?) deformative
(nation based discursive
strategies of masking and
sounding) discursive
strategies that are always
mixtures of the mastery of
form and the deformation
of mastery

the mastery of form

deformation of
mastery

Houston Bakeresque
QuickTime™ and a
xvid decompressor
are needed to see this picture.

Acting Black and Double Consciousness
You don’t know anything except what’s
there for you to see.

QuickTime™ and a
xvid decompressor
are needed to see this picture.

CLAY [Pushing her against the seat] I'm not telling you again, Tallulah Bankhead! Luxury. In your face and your fingers. You telling me what I ought to do.
[Sudden scream frightening the whole coach] Well, don't! Don't you tell me anything! If I'm a middle-class fake white man . . . let me be. And let me be in the way
I want.
[Through his teeth] I'll rip your lousy breasts off! Let me be who I feel like being. Uncle Tom. Thomas. Whoever. It's none of your business. You don't know
anything except what's there for you to see. An act. Lies. Device. Not the pure heart, the pumping black heart. You don't ever know that. And I sit here, in
this buttoned-up suit, to keep myself from cutting all your throats. I mean wantonly. You great liberated whore! You fuck some black man, and right away
you're an expert on black people. What a lotta shit that is. The only thing you know is that you come if he bangs you hard enough. And that's all. The belly
rub? You wanted to do the belly rub? Shit, you don't even know how. You don't know how. That ol' dipty-dip shit you do, rolling your ass like an elephant.
That's not my kind of belly rub. Belly rub is not Queens. Belly rub is dark places, with big hats and overcoats held up with one arm. Belly rub hates you.
Old bald-headed four-eyed ofays popping their fingers . . . and don't know yet what they're doing. They say, "I love Bessie Smith." And don't even
understand that Bessie Smith is saying, "Kiss my ass, kiss my black unruly ass." Before love, suffering, desire, anything you can explain, she's saying,
and very plainly, "Kiss my black ass." And if you don't know that, it's you that's doing the kissing. Charlie Parker? Charlie Parker. All the hip white boys
scream for Bird. And Bird saying, "Up your ass, feebleminded ofay! Up your ass." And they sit there talking about the tortured genius of Charlie Parker.
Bird would've played not a note of music if he just walked up to East Sixty-seventh Street and killed the first ten white people he saw. Not a note! And I'm
the great would-be poet. Yes. That's right! Poet. Some kind of bastard literature . . . all it needs is a simple knife thrust. Just let me bleed you, you loud
whore, and one poem vanished. A whole people of neurotics, struggling to keep from being sane. And the only thing that would cure the neurosis would be
your murder. Simple as that. I mean if I murdered you, then other white people would begin to understand me. You understand? No. I guess not. If Bessie
Smith had killed some white people she wouldn't have needed that music. She could have talked very straight and plain about the world. No metaphors.
No grunts. No wiggles in the dark of her soul. Just straight two and two are four. Money. Power. Luxury. Like that. All of them. Crazy niggers turning their
backs on sanity. When all it needs is that simple act. Murder. Just murder! Would make us all sane.
[Suddenly weary] Ahhh. Shit. But who needs it? I'd rather be a fool. Insane. Safe with my words, and no deaths, and clean, hard thoughts, urging me to new
conquests. My people's madness. Hah! That's a laugh. My people. They don't need me to claim them. They got legs and arms of their own. Personal
insanities. Mirrors. They don't need all those words. They don't need any defense. But listen, though, one more thing. And you tell this to your father, who's
probably the kind of man who needs to know at once. So he can plan ahead. Tell him not to preach so much rationalism and cold logic to these niggers.
Let them alone. Let them sing curses at you in code and see your filth as simple lack of style. Don't make the mistake, through some irresponsible surge
of Christian charity, of talking too much about the advantages of Western rationalism, or the great intellectual legacy of the white man, or maybe they'll
begin to listen. And then, maybe one day, you'll find they actually do understand exactly what you are talking about, all these fantasy people. All these
blues people. And on that day, as sure as shit, when you really believe you can "accept" them into your fold, as half-white trusties late of the subject
peoples. With no more blues, except the very old ones, and not a watermelon in sight, the great missionary heart will have triumphed, and all of those excoons will be stand-up Western men, with eyes for clean hard useful lives, sober, pious and sane, and they'll murder you. They'll murder you, and have
very rational explanations. Very much like your own. They'll cut your throats, and drag you out to the edge of your cities so the flesh can fall away from
your bones, in sanitary isolation.

Talking Points:
1)Intra-Group Knowledge in Cultural Production: Doubly Conscious Performing
2)Acting vs. Being Black and the Problem of Performing for Two Audiences
3)Artistic and Rational Revolution
4)History of Struggle and the History of Black Cultural Production

Toasting
Black Internationalism, Nationalism, Folklore, and the
Signifying Monkey
Way down in the jungle deep,
The bad ass lion stepped on the signifyin monkey's feet.
The monkey said, "Muthafucka, can't you see?
Why, you standin on my goddamn feet!"
The lion said, "I ain't heard a word you said."
Said, "If you say three more I'll be steppin on yo muthafuckin head!"
Now, the monkey lived in the jungle in an old oak tree.
Bullshittin the lion everyday of the week.
Why, everyday before the sun go down,
The lion would kick his all through the jungle town.
But the monkey got wise and started usin his wit.
Said, "I'm gon' put a stop to this ole ass kickin shit!"
So he ran up on the lion the very next day.
Said, "Oh Mr. lion, there's a big, bad muthafucka comin your way.
And when you meet, it's gonna be a goddamn sin,
And wherever you meet some ass is bound to bend."
Said, "he's somebody that you don't know,
He just broke a-loose from the Ringlin Brother's show."
Said, "Baby, he talked about your people in a helluva way!
He talked about your people till my hair turned gray!
He said your daddy's a freak and your momma's a whore.
Said he spotted you running through the jungle sellin asshole from door to door!
Said your sister did the damndest trick.
She got down so low and sucked a earthworm's dick.
Said he spotted yo niece behind the tree,
Screwin a muthafuckin flea!
He said he saw yo aunt sittin on the fence
Givin a goddamn zebra a french.
Then he talked about yo mammy and yo sister Lou,
Then he start talkin about how good yo grandmaw screw.

QuickTime™ and a
xvid decompressor
are needed to see this picture.


Slide 9

Negritude and the Black
Arts Movement

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xvid decompressor
are needed to see this picture.

“Sellout” by LG Damas
I feel ridiculous/ in their shoes/ their
dinner jackets/ their starched
shirts/ and detachable collars/
their monocles and/ their bowler
hats
……………….
QuickTime™ and a
xvid decompressor
are needed to see this picture.

I feel ridiculous/ among them/ like an
accomplice/ among them/ like a
pimp/ like a murderer among
them/ my hands hideously red/
with the blood of their/ ci-vi-li-zation

Black Art and Black Aesthetics: Poesis as Politics
Points

Black Art

1)

Does this poem
conform to
formal norms?
Which ones?

2)

Where do you
turn when you
can’t get out of
the Bubble?

Larry Neal Defines the B.A.M. Project
1)

2)

To align the projects of
the black artist and
political activist
To fashion a collective
goal: the destruction of
double consciousness

Amiri Baraka (1934- )
born Leroi Jones
Bohemian, Black Power Advocate, Communist
Preface to a Twenty Volume Suicide Note, poems, 1961
Blues People: Black People in White America, 1963
Dutchman and the Slavedrama, 1964
The system of Dante’s hell, novel, 1965
Home: Social Essays, 1965
A Black Mass (1966
Tales, 1967
Black Magic, poems, 1969
Four Black Revolutionary Plays, 1969
Slave Ship, 1970
It's Nation Time, poems, 1970
Raise Race Rays Raize: Essays Since 1965, 1971
Hard Facts, poems, 1975
The Motion of History and Other Plays, 1978
Poetry for the Advanced, 1979
reggae or not!, 1981
Daggers and Javelins: Essays 1974-1979, 1984
The Autobiography of LeRoi Jones/Amiri Baraka, 1984
The Music: Reflections on Jazz and Blues, 1987
Transbluesency: The Selected Poems of Amiri Baraka/LeRoi Jones, 1995
Wise, Why’s Y’s, essays, 1995
Funk Lore: New Poems, 1996.
Somebody Blew Up America, 2001
The Book of Monk, 2005
Tales of the Out & the Gone, 2006
Billy Harper: Blueprints of Jazz, Volume 2, Audio CD, 2008
Ancient Music

Dutchman
A Modern Myth of Black Assimilation

QuickTime™ and a
xvid decompressor
are needed to see this picture.

Major Themes
Race and Racism: Assimilation, Self-hatred
Violence and Cruelty: The violence of white oppression
that murders blacks in a literal and figurative sense.
Passivity: A by-product of assimilation that, for Baraka,
makes a community stagnant, incapable of
producing leaders or innovators. And yet, it is a
passivity whose transgression results in selfdestruction (perhaps of a positive variety, but more
than likely not)
Sexism: Emasculation, The Siren/Fury archetypal
devouring female
Allegory
a subway “heaped in modern myth”
Symbolic Associations and Locales
The Story of Adam and Eve, The Flying Dutchman,
Dutch Slave Ships, the subway or “flying underbelly
of the city”

Tainted Forms of Expression
CLAY Are you angry about anything? Did I say something wrong?
LULA Everything you say is wrong. [Mock smile] That's what makes you so
attractive. Ha. In that funnybook jacket with all the buttons. [More animate,
taking hold of his jacket] What've you got that jacket and tie on in all this heat
for? And why're you wearing a jacket and tie like that? Did your people ever
burn witches or start revolutions over the price of tea? Boy, those narrowshoulder clothes come from a tradition you ought to feel oppressed by. A
three-button suit. What right do you have to be wearing a three-button suit
and striped tie? Your grandfather was a slave, he didn't go to Harvard.
CLAY My grandfather was a night watchman.
LULA And you went to a colored college where everybody thought they
were Averell Harriman.
CLAY All except me.
LULA And who did you think you were? Who do you think you are now?
CLAY [Laughs as if to make light of the whole trend of the conversation]
Well, in college I thought I was Baudelaire. But I've slowed down since.
LULA I bet you never once thought you were a black nigger. [Mock serious,
then she howls with laughter. CLAY is stunned but after initial reaction, he
quickly tries to appreciate the humor. LULA almost shrieks] A black
Baudelaire.

Talking Points:
1)Costume Prescribed
modes of revolt.
2)Black Baudelaire:
The Relationship
Between the Black
Artists of the 60s and
Extant Poetic Forms
3)Symbolism: Black
Baudelaires and Black
Niggers
4)“I bet you never
once thought you
were a black nigger”.

“Cultural Strangulation”
by
Addison Gayle

Cultural Strangulation
“There is no White aesthetic”

The Agenda:
To Defend the Positing of a Black Aesthetic

Let us proposes Greece as the logical starting point, bearing in mind
Will Durrant’s observation that “all of Western Civilization is but a
footnote to Plato,” and take Plato as the first writer to attempt a
systematic aesthetic [….] However, Plato defines beauty in ambiguous
terms leaving the problem of more secular, circumscribred, secular
definition to philosophers, poets, and critics […] these aestheticians
have been white, there, it is not surprising that, symbolically and
literally, the have defined beauty in terms of whiteness,

The Argument:
1)The failure to recognize a separate black
aesthetic is not only out of step with current
leftist moves forward in the field of race
relations, but is also the outgrowth of a
failure to come to terms with what might
constitute a White Aesthetic.
2)This White Aesthetic is as older than the
“race problem,” but its privileging of light
over dark was mapped onto race relations.
3)Given the legacy of racism in America and
that Occidental aesthetic are tainted by
racism, the black aesthetic must be defined
oppositionally. This opposition can be
embodied in the phrase “Black is Beautiful”
a slogan during the Black Power Movement.

The Ironic and Oppositional Position of Black Aesthetics

3) Hence, in the American realm,
the entire realm of aesthetics is
poisoned by a racism that comes
to the fore every time it
evaluates an object of Black Art.
4) And, the Black artist is forced into
a corner. To answer to the
demands of traditional aesthetics
is to allow white critics to dictate
the expression of Black
experience (which can result in a
re-instantiation of racism)
5) Hence, the only option other
than assimilation, calls for an
iconoclastic set of principles
embodied in the phrase “Black is
Beautiful”

Exploding the Raisin
A Cry for What Kind of Revolt-The Shuffle
LULA [Her voice takes on a different, more businesslike quality] I've heard enough.
CLAY [Reaching for his books] I bet you have. I guess I better collect my stuff and get off this train. Looks like we
won't be acting out that little pageant you outlined before.
LULA No. We won't. You're right about that, at least.
[She turns to look quickly around the rest of the car] All right!
[The others respond]
CLAY [Bending across the girl to retrieve his belongings] Sorry, baby, I don't think we could make it.
[As he is bending over her, the girl brings up a small knife and plunges it into CLAY's chest. Twice. He slumps across
her knees, his mouth working stupidly]
LULA Sorry is right.
[Turning to the others in the car who have already gotten up from their seats] Sorry is the rightest thing you've said.
Get this man off me! Hurry, now!
[ The others come and drag CLAY's body down the aisle] Open the door and throw his body out. They throw him off]
And all of you get off at the next stop. LULA busies herself straightening her things. Getting everything in order. She
takes out a notebook and makes a quick scribbling note. Drops it in her bag. The train apparently stops and all the
others get off, leaving her alone in the coach.
Very soon a young Negro of about twenty comes into the coach, with a couple of books under his arm. He sits a few
seats in back of LULA. When he is seated she turns and gives him a long slow look. He looks up from his book and
drops the book on his lap. Then an old Negro conductor comes into the car, doing a sort of restrained soft shoe, and
half mumbling the words of some song. He looks at the young man, briefly, with a quick greeting]
CONDUCTOR Hey, brother!
YOUNG NEGRO Hey
[The conductor continues down the aisle with his little dance and the mumbled song. LULA turns to stare at him and
follows his movements down the aisle. The conductor tips his hat when he reaches her seat, and continues out the
car]
Curtain

Theoretical Approaches to
Black Drama
The History of Black Drama The
consists of innovative
(infinite?) deformative
(nation based discursive
strategies of masking and
sounding) discursive
strategies that are always
mixtures of the mastery of
form and the deformation
of mastery

the mastery of form

deformation of
mastery

Houston Bakeresque
QuickTime™ and a
xvid decompressor
are needed to see this picture.

Acting Black and Double Consciousness
You don’t know anything except what’s
there for you to see.

QuickTime™ and a
xvid decompressor
are needed to see this picture.

CLAY [Pushing her against the seat] I'm not telling you again, Tallulah Bankhead! Luxury. In your face and your fingers. You telling me what I ought to do.
[Sudden scream frightening the whole coach] Well, don't! Don't you tell me anything! If I'm a middle-class fake white man . . . let me be. And let me be in the way
I want.
[Through his teeth] I'll rip your lousy breasts off! Let me be who I feel like being. Uncle Tom. Thomas. Whoever. It's none of your business. You don't know
anything except what's there for you to see. An act. Lies. Device. Not the pure heart, the pumping black heart. You don't ever know that. And I sit here, in
this buttoned-up suit, to keep myself from cutting all your throats. I mean wantonly. You great liberated whore! You fuck some black man, and right away
you're an expert on black people. What a lotta shit that is. The only thing you know is that you come if he bangs you hard enough. And that's all. The belly
rub? You wanted to do the belly rub? Shit, you don't even know how. You don't know how. That ol' dipty-dip shit you do, rolling your ass like an elephant.
That's not my kind of belly rub. Belly rub is not Queens. Belly rub is dark places, with big hats and overcoats held up with one arm. Belly rub hates you.
Old bald-headed four-eyed ofays popping their fingers . . . and don't know yet what they're doing. They say, "I love Bessie Smith." And don't even
understand that Bessie Smith is saying, "Kiss my ass, kiss my black unruly ass." Before love, suffering, desire, anything you can explain, she's saying,
and very plainly, "Kiss my black ass." And if you don't know that, it's you that's doing the kissing. Charlie Parker? Charlie Parker. All the hip white boys
scream for Bird. And Bird saying, "Up your ass, feebleminded ofay! Up your ass." And they sit there talking about the tortured genius of Charlie Parker.
Bird would've played not a note of music if he just walked up to East Sixty-seventh Street and killed the first ten white people he saw. Not a note! And I'm
the great would-be poet. Yes. That's right! Poet. Some kind of bastard literature . . . all it needs is a simple knife thrust. Just let me bleed you, you loud
whore, and one poem vanished. A whole people of neurotics, struggling to keep from being sane. And the only thing that would cure the neurosis would be
your murder. Simple as that. I mean if I murdered you, then other white people would begin to understand me. You understand? No. I guess not. If Bessie
Smith had killed some white people she wouldn't have needed that music. She could have talked very straight and plain about the world. No metaphors.
No grunts. No wiggles in the dark of her soul. Just straight two and two are four. Money. Power. Luxury. Like that. All of them. Crazy niggers turning their
backs on sanity. When all it needs is that simple act. Murder. Just murder! Would make us all sane.
[Suddenly weary] Ahhh. Shit. But who needs it? I'd rather be a fool. Insane. Safe with my words, and no deaths, and clean, hard thoughts, urging me to new
conquests. My people's madness. Hah! That's a laugh. My people. They don't need me to claim them. They got legs and arms of their own. Personal
insanities. Mirrors. They don't need all those words. They don't need any defense. But listen, though, one more thing. And you tell this to your father, who's
probably the kind of man who needs to know at once. So he can plan ahead. Tell him not to preach so much rationalism and cold logic to these niggers.
Let them alone. Let them sing curses at you in code and see your filth as simple lack of style. Don't make the mistake, through some irresponsible surge
of Christian charity, of talking too much about the advantages of Western rationalism, or the great intellectual legacy of the white man, or maybe they'll
begin to listen. And then, maybe one day, you'll find they actually do understand exactly what you are talking about, all these fantasy people. All these
blues people. And on that day, as sure as shit, when you really believe you can "accept" them into your fold, as half-white trusties late of the subject
peoples. With no more blues, except the very old ones, and not a watermelon in sight, the great missionary heart will have triumphed, and all of those excoons will be stand-up Western men, with eyes for clean hard useful lives, sober, pious and sane, and they'll murder you. They'll murder you, and have
very rational explanations. Very much like your own. They'll cut your throats, and drag you out to the edge of your cities so the flesh can fall away from
your bones, in sanitary isolation.

Talking Points:
1)Intra-Group Knowledge in Cultural Production: Doubly Conscious Performing
2)Acting vs. Being Black and the Problem of Performing for Two Audiences
3)Artistic and Rational Revolution
4)History of Struggle and the History of Black Cultural Production

Toasting
Black Internationalism, Nationalism, Folklore, and the
Signifying Monkey
Way down in the jungle deep,
The bad ass lion stepped on the signifyin monkey's feet.
The monkey said, "Muthafucka, can't you see?
Why, you standin on my goddamn feet!"
The lion said, "I ain't heard a word you said."
Said, "If you say three more I'll be steppin on yo muthafuckin head!"
Now, the monkey lived in the jungle in an old oak tree.
Bullshittin the lion everyday of the week.
Why, everyday before the sun go down,
The lion would kick his all through the jungle town.
But the monkey got wise and started usin his wit.
Said, "I'm gon' put a stop to this ole ass kickin shit!"
So he ran up on the lion the very next day.
Said, "Oh Mr. lion, there's a big, bad muthafucka comin your way.
And when you meet, it's gonna be a goddamn sin,
And wherever you meet some ass is bound to bend."
Said, "he's somebody that you don't know,
He just broke a-loose from the Ringlin Brother's show."
Said, "Baby, he talked about your people in a helluva way!
He talked about your people till my hair turned gray!
He said your daddy's a freak and your momma's a whore.
Said he spotted you running through the jungle sellin asshole from door to door!
Said your sister did the damndest trick.
She got down so low and sucked a earthworm's dick.
Said he spotted yo niece behind the tree,
Screwin a muthafuckin flea!
He said he saw yo aunt sittin on the fence
Givin a goddamn zebra a french.
Then he talked about yo mammy and yo sister Lou,
Then he start talkin about how good yo grandmaw screw.

QuickTime™ and a
xvid decompressor
are needed to see this picture.


Slide 10

Negritude and the Black
Arts Movement

QuickTime™ and a
xvid decompressor
are needed to see this picture.

“Sellout” by LG Damas
I feel ridiculous/ in their shoes/ their
dinner jackets/ their starched
shirts/ and detachable collars/
their monocles and/ their bowler
hats
……………….
QuickTime™ and a
xvid decompressor
are needed to see this picture.

I feel ridiculous/ among them/ like an
accomplice/ among them/ like a
pimp/ like a murderer among
them/ my hands hideously red/
with the blood of their/ ci-vi-li-zation

Black Art and Black Aesthetics: Poesis as Politics
Points

Black Art

1)

Does this poem
conform to
formal norms?
Which ones?

2)

Where do you
turn when you
can’t get out of
the Bubble?

Larry Neal Defines the B.A.M. Project
1)

2)

To align the projects of
the black artist and
political activist
To fashion a collective
goal: the destruction of
double consciousness

Amiri Baraka (1934- )
born Leroi Jones
Bohemian, Black Power Advocate, Communist
Preface to a Twenty Volume Suicide Note, poems, 1961
Blues People: Black People in White America, 1963
Dutchman and the Slavedrama, 1964
The system of Dante’s hell, novel, 1965
Home: Social Essays, 1965
A Black Mass (1966
Tales, 1967
Black Magic, poems, 1969
Four Black Revolutionary Plays, 1969
Slave Ship, 1970
It's Nation Time, poems, 1970
Raise Race Rays Raize: Essays Since 1965, 1971
Hard Facts, poems, 1975
The Motion of History and Other Plays, 1978
Poetry for the Advanced, 1979
reggae or not!, 1981
Daggers and Javelins: Essays 1974-1979, 1984
The Autobiography of LeRoi Jones/Amiri Baraka, 1984
The Music: Reflections on Jazz and Blues, 1987
Transbluesency: The Selected Poems of Amiri Baraka/LeRoi Jones, 1995
Wise, Why’s Y’s, essays, 1995
Funk Lore: New Poems, 1996.
Somebody Blew Up America, 2001
The Book of Monk, 2005
Tales of the Out & the Gone, 2006
Billy Harper: Blueprints of Jazz, Volume 2, Audio CD, 2008
Ancient Music

Dutchman
A Modern Myth of Black Assimilation

QuickTime™ and a
xvid decompressor
are needed to see this picture.

Major Themes
Race and Racism: Assimilation, Self-hatred
Violence and Cruelty: The violence of white oppression
that murders blacks in a literal and figurative sense.
Passivity: A by-product of assimilation that, for Baraka,
makes a community stagnant, incapable of
producing leaders or innovators. And yet, it is a
passivity whose transgression results in selfdestruction (perhaps of a positive variety, but more
than likely not)
Sexism: Emasculation, The Siren/Fury archetypal
devouring female
Allegory
a subway “heaped in modern myth”
Symbolic Associations and Locales
The Story of Adam and Eve, The Flying Dutchman,
Dutch Slave Ships, the subway or “flying underbelly
of the city”

Tainted Forms of Expression
CLAY Are you angry about anything? Did I say something wrong?
LULA Everything you say is wrong. [Mock smile] That's what makes you so
attractive. Ha. In that funnybook jacket with all the buttons. [More animate,
taking hold of his jacket] What've you got that jacket and tie on in all this heat
for? And why're you wearing a jacket and tie like that? Did your people ever
burn witches or start revolutions over the price of tea? Boy, those narrowshoulder clothes come from a tradition you ought to feel oppressed by. A
three-button suit. What right do you have to be wearing a three-button suit
and striped tie? Your grandfather was a slave, he didn't go to Harvard.
CLAY My grandfather was a night watchman.
LULA And you went to a colored college where everybody thought they
were Averell Harriman.
CLAY All except me.
LULA And who did you think you were? Who do you think you are now?
CLAY [Laughs as if to make light of the whole trend of the conversation]
Well, in college I thought I was Baudelaire. But I've slowed down since.
LULA I bet you never once thought you were a black nigger. [Mock serious,
then she howls with laughter. CLAY is stunned but after initial reaction, he
quickly tries to appreciate the humor. LULA almost shrieks] A black
Baudelaire.

Talking Points:
1)Costume Prescribed
modes of revolt.
2)Black Baudelaire:
The Relationship
Between the Black
Artists of the 60s and
Extant Poetic Forms
3)Symbolism: Black
Baudelaires and Black
Niggers
4)“I bet you never
once thought you
were a black nigger”.

“Cultural Strangulation”
by
Addison Gayle

Cultural Strangulation
“There is no White aesthetic”

The Agenda:
To Defend the Positing of a Black Aesthetic

Let us proposes Greece as the logical starting point, bearing in mind
Will Durrant’s observation that “all of Western Civilization is but a
footnote to Plato,” and take Plato as the first writer to attempt a
systematic aesthetic [….] However, Plato defines beauty in ambiguous
terms leaving the problem of more secular, circumscribred, secular
definition to philosophers, poets, and critics […] these aestheticians
have been white, there, it is not surprising that, symbolically and
literally, the have defined beauty in terms of whiteness,

The Argument:
1)The failure to recognize a separate black
aesthetic is not only out of step with current
leftist moves forward in the field of race
relations, but is also the outgrowth of a
failure to come to terms with what might
constitute a White Aesthetic.
2)This White Aesthetic is as older than the
“race problem,” but its privileging of light
over dark was mapped onto race relations.
3)Given the legacy of racism in America and
that Occidental aesthetic are tainted by
racism, the black aesthetic must be defined
oppositionally. This opposition can be
embodied in the phrase “Black is Beautiful”
a slogan during the Black Power Movement.

The Ironic and Oppositional Position of Black Aesthetics

3) Hence, in the American realm,
the entire realm of aesthetics is
poisoned by a racism that comes
to the fore every time it
evaluates an object of Black Art.
4) And, the Black artist is forced into
a corner. To answer to the
demands of traditional aesthetics
is to allow white critics to dictate
the expression of Black
experience (which can result in a
re-instantiation of racism)
5) Hence, the only option other
than assimilation, calls for an
iconoclastic set of principles
embodied in the phrase “Black is
Beautiful”

Exploding the Raisin
A Cry for What Kind of Revolt-The Shuffle
LULA [Her voice takes on a different, more businesslike quality] I've heard enough.
CLAY [Reaching for his books] I bet you have. I guess I better collect my stuff and get off this train. Looks like we
won't be acting out that little pageant you outlined before.
LULA No. We won't. You're right about that, at least.
[She turns to look quickly around the rest of the car] All right!
[The others respond]
CLAY [Bending across the girl to retrieve his belongings] Sorry, baby, I don't think we could make it.
[As he is bending over her, the girl brings up a small knife and plunges it into CLAY's chest. Twice. He slumps across
her knees, his mouth working stupidly]
LULA Sorry is right.
[Turning to the others in the car who have already gotten up from their seats] Sorry is the rightest thing you've said.
Get this man off me! Hurry, now!
[ The others come and drag CLAY's body down the aisle] Open the door and throw his body out. They throw him off]
And all of you get off at the next stop. LULA busies herself straightening her things. Getting everything in order. She
takes out a notebook and makes a quick scribbling note. Drops it in her bag. The train apparently stops and all the
others get off, leaving her alone in the coach.
Very soon a young Negro of about twenty comes into the coach, with a couple of books under his arm. He sits a few
seats in back of LULA. When he is seated she turns and gives him a long slow look. He looks up from his book and
drops the book on his lap. Then an old Negro conductor comes into the car, doing a sort of restrained soft shoe, and
half mumbling the words of some song. He looks at the young man, briefly, with a quick greeting]
CONDUCTOR Hey, brother!
YOUNG NEGRO Hey
[The conductor continues down the aisle with his little dance and the mumbled song. LULA turns to stare at him and
follows his movements down the aisle. The conductor tips his hat when he reaches her seat, and continues out the
car]
Curtain

Theoretical Approaches to
Black Drama
The History of Black Drama The
consists of innovative
(infinite?) deformative
(nation based discursive
strategies of masking and
sounding) discursive
strategies that are always
mixtures of the mastery of
form and the deformation
of mastery

the mastery of form

deformation of
mastery

Houston Bakeresque
QuickTime™ and a
xvid decompressor
are needed to see this picture.

Acting Black and Double Consciousness
You don’t know anything except what’s
there for you to see.

QuickTime™ and a
xvid decompressor
are needed to see this picture.

CLAY [Pushing her against the seat] I'm not telling you again, Tallulah Bankhead! Luxury. In your face and your fingers. You telling me what I ought to do.
[Sudden scream frightening the whole coach] Well, don't! Don't you tell me anything! If I'm a middle-class fake white man . . . let me be. And let me be in the way
I want.
[Through his teeth] I'll rip your lousy breasts off! Let me be who I feel like being. Uncle Tom. Thomas. Whoever. It's none of your business. You don't know
anything except what's there for you to see. An act. Lies. Device. Not the pure heart, the pumping black heart. You don't ever know that. And I sit here, in
this buttoned-up suit, to keep myself from cutting all your throats. I mean wantonly. You great liberated whore! You fuck some black man, and right away
you're an expert on black people. What a lotta shit that is. The only thing you know is that you come if he bangs you hard enough. And that's all. The belly
rub? You wanted to do the belly rub? Shit, you don't even know how. You don't know how. That ol' dipty-dip shit you do, rolling your ass like an elephant.
That's not my kind of belly rub. Belly rub is not Queens. Belly rub is dark places, with big hats and overcoats held up with one arm. Belly rub hates you.
Old bald-headed four-eyed ofays popping their fingers . . . and don't know yet what they're doing. They say, "I love Bessie Smith." And don't even
understand that Bessie Smith is saying, "Kiss my ass, kiss my black unruly ass." Before love, suffering, desire, anything you can explain, she's saying,
and very plainly, "Kiss my black ass." And if you don't know that, it's you that's doing the kissing. Charlie Parker? Charlie Parker. All the hip white boys
scream for Bird. And Bird saying, "Up your ass, feebleminded ofay! Up your ass." And they sit there talking about the tortured genius of Charlie Parker.
Bird would've played not a note of music if he just walked up to East Sixty-seventh Street and killed the first ten white people he saw. Not a note! And I'm
the great would-be poet. Yes. That's right! Poet. Some kind of bastard literature . . . all it needs is a simple knife thrust. Just let me bleed you, you loud
whore, and one poem vanished. A whole people of neurotics, struggling to keep from being sane. And the only thing that would cure the neurosis would be
your murder. Simple as that. I mean if I murdered you, then other white people would begin to understand me. You understand? No. I guess not. If Bessie
Smith had killed some white people she wouldn't have needed that music. She could have talked very straight and plain about the world. No metaphors.
No grunts. No wiggles in the dark of her soul. Just straight two and two are four. Money. Power. Luxury. Like that. All of them. Crazy niggers turning their
backs on sanity. When all it needs is that simple act. Murder. Just murder! Would make us all sane.
[Suddenly weary] Ahhh. Shit. But who needs it? I'd rather be a fool. Insane. Safe with my words, and no deaths, and clean, hard thoughts, urging me to new
conquests. My people's madness. Hah! That's a laugh. My people. They don't need me to claim them. They got legs and arms of their own. Personal
insanities. Mirrors. They don't need all those words. They don't need any defense. But listen, though, one more thing. And you tell this to your father, who's
probably the kind of man who needs to know at once. So he can plan ahead. Tell him not to preach so much rationalism and cold logic to these niggers.
Let them alone. Let them sing curses at you in code and see your filth as simple lack of style. Don't make the mistake, through some irresponsible surge
of Christian charity, of talking too much about the advantages of Western rationalism, or the great intellectual legacy of the white man, or maybe they'll
begin to listen. And then, maybe one day, you'll find they actually do understand exactly what you are talking about, all these fantasy people. All these
blues people. And on that day, as sure as shit, when you really believe you can "accept" them into your fold, as half-white trusties late of the subject
peoples. With no more blues, except the very old ones, and not a watermelon in sight, the great missionary heart will have triumphed, and all of those excoons will be stand-up Western men, with eyes for clean hard useful lives, sober, pious and sane, and they'll murder you. They'll murder you, and have
very rational explanations. Very much like your own. They'll cut your throats, and drag you out to the edge of your cities so the flesh can fall away from
your bones, in sanitary isolation.

Talking Points:
1)Intra-Group Knowledge in Cultural Production: Doubly Conscious Performing
2)Acting vs. Being Black and the Problem of Performing for Two Audiences
3)Artistic and Rational Revolution
4)History of Struggle and the History of Black Cultural Production

Toasting
Black Internationalism, Nationalism, Folklore, and the
Signifying Monkey
Way down in the jungle deep,
The bad ass lion stepped on the signifyin monkey's feet.
The monkey said, "Muthafucka, can't you see?
Why, you standin on my goddamn feet!"
The lion said, "I ain't heard a word you said."
Said, "If you say three more I'll be steppin on yo muthafuckin head!"
Now, the monkey lived in the jungle in an old oak tree.
Bullshittin the lion everyday of the week.
Why, everyday before the sun go down,
The lion would kick his all through the jungle town.
But the monkey got wise and started usin his wit.
Said, "I'm gon' put a stop to this ole ass kickin shit!"
So he ran up on the lion the very next day.
Said, "Oh Mr. lion, there's a big, bad muthafucka comin your way.
And when you meet, it's gonna be a goddamn sin,
And wherever you meet some ass is bound to bend."
Said, "he's somebody that you don't know,
He just broke a-loose from the Ringlin Brother's show."
Said, "Baby, he talked about your people in a helluva way!
He talked about your people till my hair turned gray!
He said your daddy's a freak and your momma's a whore.
Said he spotted you running through the jungle sellin asshole from door to door!
Said your sister did the damndest trick.
She got down so low and sucked a earthworm's dick.
Said he spotted yo niece behind the tree,
Screwin a muthafuckin flea!
He said he saw yo aunt sittin on the fence
Givin a goddamn zebra a french.
Then he talked about yo mammy and yo sister Lou,
Then he start talkin about how good yo grandmaw screw.

QuickTime™ and a
xvid decompressor
are needed to see this picture.


Slide 11

Negritude and the Black
Arts Movement

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are needed to see this picture.

“Sellout” by LG Damas
I feel ridiculous/ in their shoes/ their
dinner jackets/ their starched
shirts/ and detachable collars/
their monocles and/ their bowler
hats
……………….
QuickTime™ and a
xvid decompressor
are needed to see this picture.

I feel ridiculous/ among them/ like an
accomplice/ among them/ like a
pimp/ like a murderer among
them/ my hands hideously red/
with the blood of their/ ci-vi-li-zation

Black Art and Black Aesthetics: Poesis as Politics
Points

Black Art

1)

Does this poem
conform to
formal norms?
Which ones?

2)

Where do you
turn when you
can’t get out of
the Bubble?

Larry Neal Defines the B.A.M. Project
1)

2)

To align the projects of
the black artist and
political activist
To fashion a collective
goal: the destruction of
double consciousness

Amiri Baraka (1934- )
born Leroi Jones
Bohemian, Black Power Advocate, Communist
Preface to a Twenty Volume Suicide Note, poems, 1961
Blues People: Black People in White America, 1963
Dutchman and the Slavedrama, 1964
The system of Dante’s hell, novel, 1965
Home: Social Essays, 1965
A Black Mass (1966
Tales, 1967
Black Magic, poems, 1969
Four Black Revolutionary Plays, 1969
Slave Ship, 1970
It's Nation Time, poems, 1970
Raise Race Rays Raize: Essays Since 1965, 1971
Hard Facts, poems, 1975
The Motion of History and Other Plays, 1978
Poetry for the Advanced, 1979
reggae or not!, 1981
Daggers and Javelins: Essays 1974-1979, 1984
The Autobiography of LeRoi Jones/Amiri Baraka, 1984
The Music: Reflections on Jazz and Blues, 1987
Transbluesency: The Selected Poems of Amiri Baraka/LeRoi Jones, 1995
Wise, Why’s Y’s, essays, 1995
Funk Lore: New Poems, 1996.
Somebody Blew Up America, 2001
The Book of Monk, 2005
Tales of the Out & the Gone, 2006
Billy Harper: Blueprints of Jazz, Volume 2, Audio CD, 2008
Ancient Music

Dutchman
A Modern Myth of Black Assimilation

QuickTime™ and a
xvid decompressor
are needed to see this picture.

Major Themes
Race and Racism: Assimilation, Self-hatred
Violence and Cruelty: The violence of white oppression
that murders blacks in a literal and figurative sense.
Passivity: A by-product of assimilation that, for Baraka,
makes a community stagnant, incapable of
producing leaders or innovators. And yet, it is a
passivity whose transgression results in selfdestruction (perhaps of a positive variety, but more
than likely not)
Sexism: Emasculation, The Siren/Fury archetypal
devouring female
Allegory
a subway “heaped in modern myth”
Symbolic Associations and Locales
The Story of Adam and Eve, The Flying Dutchman,
Dutch Slave Ships, the subway or “flying underbelly
of the city”

Tainted Forms of Expression
CLAY Are you angry about anything? Did I say something wrong?
LULA Everything you say is wrong. [Mock smile] That's what makes you so
attractive. Ha. In that funnybook jacket with all the buttons. [More animate,
taking hold of his jacket] What've you got that jacket and tie on in all this heat
for? And why're you wearing a jacket and tie like that? Did your people ever
burn witches or start revolutions over the price of tea? Boy, those narrowshoulder clothes come from a tradition you ought to feel oppressed by. A
three-button suit. What right do you have to be wearing a three-button suit
and striped tie? Your grandfather was a slave, he didn't go to Harvard.
CLAY My grandfather was a night watchman.
LULA And you went to a colored college where everybody thought they
were Averell Harriman.
CLAY All except me.
LULA And who did you think you were? Who do you think you are now?
CLAY [Laughs as if to make light of the whole trend of the conversation]
Well, in college I thought I was Baudelaire. But I've slowed down since.
LULA I bet you never once thought you were a black nigger. [Mock serious,
then she howls with laughter. CLAY is stunned but after initial reaction, he
quickly tries to appreciate the humor. LULA almost shrieks] A black
Baudelaire.

Talking Points:
1)Costume Prescribed
modes of revolt.
2)Black Baudelaire:
The Relationship
Between the Black
Artists of the 60s and
Extant Poetic Forms
3)Symbolism: Black
Baudelaires and Black
Niggers
4)“I bet you never
once thought you
were a black nigger”.

“Cultural Strangulation”
by
Addison Gayle

Cultural Strangulation
“There is no White aesthetic”

The Agenda:
To Defend the Positing of a Black Aesthetic

Let us proposes Greece as the logical starting point, bearing in mind
Will Durrant’s observation that “all of Western Civilization is but a
footnote to Plato,” and take Plato as the first writer to attempt a
systematic aesthetic [….] However, Plato defines beauty in ambiguous
terms leaving the problem of more secular, circumscribred, secular
definition to philosophers, poets, and critics […] these aestheticians
have been white, there, it is not surprising that, symbolically and
literally, the have defined beauty in terms of whiteness,

The Argument:
1)The failure to recognize a separate black
aesthetic is not only out of step with current
leftist moves forward in the field of race
relations, but is also the outgrowth of a
failure to come to terms with what might
constitute a White Aesthetic.
2)This White Aesthetic is as older than the
“race problem,” but its privileging of light
over dark was mapped onto race relations.
3)Given the legacy of racism in America and
that Occidental aesthetic are tainted by
racism, the black aesthetic must be defined
oppositionally. This opposition can be
embodied in the phrase “Black is Beautiful”
a slogan during the Black Power Movement.

The Ironic and Oppositional Position of Black Aesthetics

3) Hence, in the American realm,
the entire realm of aesthetics is
poisoned by a racism that comes
to the fore every time it
evaluates an object of Black Art.
4) And, the Black artist is forced into
a corner. To answer to the
demands of traditional aesthetics
is to allow white critics to dictate
the expression of Black
experience (which can result in a
re-instantiation of racism)
5) Hence, the only option other
than assimilation, calls for an
iconoclastic set of principles
embodied in the phrase “Black is
Beautiful”

Exploding the Raisin
A Cry for What Kind of Revolt-The Shuffle
LULA [Her voice takes on a different, more businesslike quality] I've heard enough.
CLAY [Reaching for his books] I bet you have. I guess I better collect my stuff and get off this train. Looks like we
won't be acting out that little pageant you outlined before.
LULA No. We won't. You're right about that, at least.
[She turns to look quickly around the rest of the car] All right!
[The others respond]
CLAY [Bending across the girl to retrieve his belongings] Sorry, baby, I don't think we could make it.
[As he is bending over her, the girl brings up a small knife and plunges it into CLAY's chest. Twice. He slumps across
her knees, his mouth working stupidly]
LULA Sorry is right.
[Turning to the others in the car who have already gotten up from their seats] Sorry is the rightest thing you've said.
Get this man off me! Hurry, now!
[ The others come and drag CLAY's body down the aisle] Open the door and throw his body out. They throw him off]
And all of you get off at the next stop. LULA busies herself straightening her things. Getting everything in order. She
takes out a notebook and makes a quick scribbling note. Drops it in her bag. The train apparently stops and all the
others get off, leaving her alone in the coach.
Very soon a young Negro of about twenty comes into the coach, with a couple of books under his arm. He sits a few
seats in back of LULA. When he is seated she turns and gives him a long slow look. He looks up from his book and
drops the book on his lap. Then an old Negro conductor comes into the car, doing a sort of restrained soft shoe, and
half mumbling the words of some song. He looks at the young man, briefly, with a quick greeting]
CONDUCTOR Hey, brother!
YOUNG NEGRO Hey
[The conductor continues down the aisle with his little dance and the mumbled song. LULA turns to stare at him and
follows his movements down the aisle. The conductor tips his hat when he reaches her seat, and continues out the
car]
Curtain

Theoretical Approaches to
Black Drama
The History of Black Drama The
consists of innovative
(infinite?) deformative
(nation based discursive
strategies of masking and
sounding) discursive
strategies that are always
mixtures of the mastery of
form and the deformation
of mastery

the mastery of form

deformation of
mastery

Houston Bakeresque
QuickTime™ and a
xvid decompressor
are needed to see this picture.

Acting Black and Double Consciousness
You don’t know anything except what’s
there for you to see.

QuickTime™ and a
xvid decompressor
are needed to see this picture.

CLAY [Pushing her against the seat] I'm not telling you again, Tallulah Bankhead! Luxury. In your face and your fingers. You telling me what I ought to do.
[Sudden scream frightening the whole coach] Well, don't! Don't you tell me anything! If I'm a middle-class fake white man . . . let me be. And let me be in the way
I want.
[Through his teeth] I'll rip your lousy breasts off! Let me be who I feel like being. Uncle Tom. Thomas. Whoever. It's none of your business. You don't know
anything except what's there for you to see. An act. Lies. Device. Not the pure heart, the pumping black heart. You don't ever know that. And I sit here, in
this buttoned-up suit, to keep myself from cutting all your throats. I mean wantonly. You great liberated whore! You fuck some black man, and right away
you're an expert on black people. What a lotta shit that is. The only thing you know is that you come if he bangs you hard enough. And that's all. The belly
rub? You wanted to do the belly rub? Shit, you don't even know how. You don't know how. That ol' dipty-dip shit you do, rolling your ass like an elephant.
That's not my kind of belly rub. Belly rub is not Queens. Belly rub is dark places, with big hats and overcoats held up with one arm. Belly rub hates you.
Old bald-headed four-eyed ofays popping their fingers . . . and don't know yet what they're doing. They say, "I love Bessie Smith." And don't even
understand that Bessie Smith is saying, "Kiss my ass, kiss my black unruly ass." Before love, suffering, desire, anything you can explain, she's saying,
and very plainly, "Kiss my black ass." And if you don't know that, it's you that's doing the kissing. Charlie Parker? Charlie Parker. All the hip white boys
scream for Bird. And Bird saying, "Up your ass, feebleminded ofay! Up your ass." And they sit there talking about the tortured genius of Charlie Parker.
Bird would've played not a note of music if he just walked up to East Sixty-seventh Street and killed the first ten white people he saw. Not a note! And I'm
the great would-be poet. Yes. That's right! Poet. Some kind of bastard literature . . . all it needs is a simple knife thrust. Just let me bleed you, you loud
whore, and one poem vanished. A whole people of neurotics, struggling to keep from being sane. And the only thing that would cure the neurosis would be
your murder. Simple as that. I mean if I murdered you, then other white people would begin to understand me. You understand? No. I guess not. If Bessie
Smith had killed some white people she wouldn't have needed that music. She could have talked very straight and plain about the world. No metaphors.
No grunts. No wiggles in the dark of her soul. Just straight two and two are four. Money. Power. Luxury. Like that. All of them. Crazy niggers turning their
backs on sanity. When all it needs is that simple act. Murder. Just murder! Would make us all sane.
[Suddenly weary] Ahhh. Shit. But who needs it? I'd rather be a fool. Insane. Safe with my words, and no deaths, and clean, hard thoughts, urging me to new
conquests. My people's madness. Hah! That's a laugh. My people. They don't need me to claim them. They got legs and arms of their own. Personal
insanities. Mirrors. They don't need all those words. They don't need any defense. But listen, though, one more thing. And you tell this to your father, who's
probably the kind of man who needs to know at once. So he can plan ahead. Tell him not to preach so much rationalism and cold logic to these niggers.
Let them alone. Let them sing curses at you in code and see your filth as simple lack of style. Don't make the mistake, through some irresponsible surge
of Christian charity, of talking too much about the advantages of Western rationalism, or the great intellectual legacy of the white man, or maybe they'll
begin to listen. And then, maybe one day, you'll find they actually do understand exactly what you are talking about, all these fantasy people. All these
blues people. And on that day, as sure as shit, when you really believe you can "accept" them into your fold, as half-white trusties late of the subject
peoples. With no more blues, except the very old ones, and not a watermelon in sight, the great missionary heart will have triumphed, and all of those excoons will be stand-up Western men, with eyes for clean hard useful lives, sober, pious and sane, and they'll murder you. They'll murder you, and have
very rational explanations. Very much like your own. They'll cut your throats, and drag you out to the edge of your cities so the flesh can fall away from
your bones, in sanitary isolation.

Talking Points:
1)Intra-Group Knowledge in Cultural Production: Doubly Conscious Performing
2)Acting vs. Being Black and the Problem of Performing for Two Audiences
3)Artistic and Rational Revolution
4)History of Struggle and the History of Black Cultural Production

Toasting
Black Internationalism, Nationalism, Folklore, and the
Signifying Monkey
Way down in the jungle deep,
The bad ass lion stepped on the signifyin monkey's feet.
The monkey said, "Muthafucka, can't you see?
Why, you standin on my goddamn feet!"
The lion said, "I ain't heard a word you said."
Said, "If you say three more I'll be steppin on yo muthafuckin head!"
Now, the monkey lived in the jungle in an old oak tree.
Bullshittin the lion everyday of the week.
Why, everyday before the sun go down,
The lion would kick his all through the jungle town.
But the monkey got wise and started usin his wit.
Said, "I'm gon' put a stop to this ole ass kickin shit!"
So he ran up on the lion the very next day.
Said, "Oh Mr. lion, there's a big, bad muthafucka comin your way.
And when you meet, it's gonna be a goddamn sin,
And wherever you meet some ass is bound to bend."
Said, "he's somebody that you don't know,
He just broke a-loose from the Ringlin Brother's show."
Said, "Baby, he talked about your people in a helluva way!
He talked about your people till my hair turned gray!
He said your daddy's a freak and your momma's a whore.
Said he spotted you running through the jungle sellin asshole from door to door!
Said your sister did the damndest trick.
She got down so low and sucked a earthworm's dick.
Said he spotted yo niece behind the tree,
Screwin a muthafuckin flea!
He said he saw yo aunt sittin on the fence
Givin a goddamn zebra a french.
Then he talked about yo mammy and yo sister Lou,
Then he start talkin about how good yo grandmaw screw.

QuickTime™ and a
xvid decompressor
are needed to see this picture.


Slide 12

Negritude and the Black
Arts Movement

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xvid decompressor
are needed to see this picture.

“Sellout” by LG Damas
I feel ridiculous/ in their shoes/ their
dinner jackets/ their starched
shirts/ and detachable collars/
their monocles and/ their bowler
hats
……………….
QuickTime™ and a
xvid decompressor
are needed to see this picture.

I feel ridiculous/ among them/ like an
accomplice/ among them/ like a
pimp/ like a murderer among
them/ my hands hideously red/
with the blood of their/ ci-vi-li-zation

Black Art and Black Aesthetics: Poesis as Politics
Points

Black Art

1)

Does this poem
conform to
formal norms?
Which ones?

2)

Where do you
turn when you
can’t get out of
the Bubble?

Larry Neal Defines the B.A.M. Project
1)

2)

To align the projects of
the black artist and
political activist
To fashion a collective
goal: the destruction of
double consciousness

Amiri Baraka (1934- )
born Leroi Jones
Bohemian, Black Power Advocate, Communist
Preface to a Twenty Volume Suicide Note, poems, 1961
Blues People: Black People in White America, 1963
Dutchman and the Slavedrama, 1964
The system of Dante’s hell, novel, 1965
Home: Social Essays, 1965
A Black Mass (1966
Tales, 1967
Black Magic, poems, 1969
Four Black Revolutionary Plays, 1969
Slave Ship, 1970
It's Nation Time, poems, 1970
Raise Race Rays Raize: Essays Since 1965, 1971
Hard Facts, poems, 1975
The Motion of History and Other Plays, 1978
Poetry for the Advanced, 1979
reggae or not!, 1981
Daggers and Javelins: Essays 1974-1979, 1984
The Autobiography of LeRoi Jones/Amiri Baraka, 1984
The Music: Reflections on Jazz and Blues, 1987
Transbluesency: The Selected Poems of Amiri Baraka/LeRoi Jones, 1995
Wise, Why’s Y’s, essays, 1995
Funk Lore: New Poems, 1996.
Somebody Blew Up America, 2001
The Book of Monk, 2005
Tales of the Out & the Gone, 2006
Billy Harper: Blueprints of Jazz, Volume 2, Audio CD, 2008
Ancient Music

Dutchman
A Modern Myth of Black Assimilation

QuickTime™ and a
xvid decompressor
are needed to see this picture.

Major Themes
Race and Racism: Assimilation, Self-hatred
Violence and Cruelty: The violence of white oppression
that murders blacks in a literal and figurative sense.
Passivity: A by-product of assimilation that, for Baraka,
makes a community stagnant, incapable of
producing leaders or innovators. And yet, it is a
passivity whose transgression results in selfdestruction (perhaps of a positive variety, but more
than likely not)
Sexism: Emasculation, The Siren/Fury archetypal
devouring female
Allegory
a subway “heaped in modern myth”
Symbolic Associations and Locales
The Story of Adam and Eve, The Flying Dutchman,
Dutch Slave Ships, the subway or “flying underbelly
of the city”

Tainted Forms of Expression
CLAY Are you angry about anything? Did I say something wrong?
LULA Everything you say is wrong. [Mock smile] That's what makes you so
attractive. Ha. In that funnybook jacket with all the buttons. [More animate,
taking hold of his jacket] What've you got that jacket and tie on in all this heat
for? And why're you wearing a jacket and tie like that? Did your people ever
burn witches or start revolutions over the price of tea? Boy, those narrowshoulder clothes come from a tradition you ought to feel oppressed by. A
three-button suit. What right do you have to be wearing a three-button suit
and striped tie? Your grandfather was a slave, he didn't go to Harvard.
CLAY My grandfather was a night watchman.
LULA And you went to a colored college where everybody thought they
were Averell Harriman.
CLAY All except me.
LULA And who did you think you were? Who do you think you are now?
CLAY [Laughs as if to make light of the whole trend of the conversation]
Well, in college I thought I was Baudelaire. But I've slowed down since.
LULA I bet you never once thought you were a black nigger. [Mock serious,
then she howls with laughter. CLAY is stunned but after initial reaction, he
quickly tries to appreciate the humor. LULA almost shrieks] A black
Baudelaire.

Talking Points:
1)Costume Prescribed
modes of revolt.
2)Black Baudelaire:
The Relationship
Between the Black
Artists of the 60s and
Extant Poetic Forms
3)Symbolism: Black
Baudelaires and Black
Niggers
4)“I bet you never
once thought you
were a black nigger”.

“Cultural Strangulation”
by
Addison Gayle

Cultural Strangulation
“There is no White aesthetic”

The Agenda:
To Defend the Positing of a Black Aesthetic

Let us proposes Greece as the logical starting point, bearing in mind
Will Durrant’s observation that “all of Western Civilization is but a
footnote to Plato,” and take Plato as the first writer to attempt a
systematic aesthetic [….] However, Plato defines beauty in ambiguous
terms leaving the problem of more secular, circumscribred, secular
definition to philosophers, poets, and critics […] these aestheticians
have been white, there, it is not surprising that, symbolically and
literally, the have defined beauty in terms of whiteness,

The Argument:
1)The failure to recognize a separate black
aesthetic is not only out of step with current
leftist moves forward in the field of race
relations, but is also the outgrowth of a
failure to come to terms with what might
constitute a White Aesthetic.
2)This White Aesthetic is as older than the
“race problem,” but its privileging of light
over dark was mapped onto race relations.
3)Given the legacy of racism in America and
that Occidental aesthetic are tainted by
racism, the black aesthetic must be defined
oppositionally. This opposition can be
embodied in the phrase “Black is Beautiful”
a slogan during the Black Power Movement.

The Ironic and Oppositional Position of Black Aesthetics

3) Hence, in the American realm,
the entire realm of aesthetics is
poisoned by a racism that comes
to the fore every time it
evaluates an object of Black Art.
4) And, the Black artist is forced into
a corner. To answer to the
demands of traditional aesthetics
is to allow white critics to dictate
the expression of Black
experience (which can result in a
re-instantiation of racism)
5) Hence, the only option other
than assimilation, calls for an
iconoclastic set of principles
embodied in the phrase “Black is
Beautiful”

Exploding the Raisin
A Cry for What Kind of Revolt-The Shuffle
LULA [Her voice takes on a different, more businesslike quality] I've heard enough.
CLAY [Reaching for his books] I bet you have. I guess I better collect my stuff and get off this train. Looks like we
won't be acting out that little pageant you outlined before.
LULA No. We won't. You're right about that, at least.
[She turns to look quickly around the rest of the car] All right!
[The others respond]
CLAY [Bending across the girl to retrieve his belongings] Sorry, baby, I don't think we could make it.
[As he is bending over her, the girl brings up a small knife and plunges it into CLAY's chest. Twice. He slumps across
her knees, his mouth working stupidly]
LULA Sorry is right.
[Turning to the others in the car who have already gotten up from their seats] Sorry is the rightest thing you've said.
Get this man off me! Hurry, now!
[ The others come and drag CLAY's body down the aisle] Open the door and throw his body out. They throw him off]
And all of you get off at the next stop. LULA busies herself straightening her things. Getting everything in order. She
takes out a notebook and makes a quick scribbling note. Drops it in her bag. The train apparently stops and all the
others get off, leaving her alone in the coach.
Very soon a young Negro of about twenty comes into the coach, with a couple of books under his arm. He sits a few
seats in back of LULA. When he is seated she turns and gives him a long slow look. He looks up from his book and
drops the book on his lap. Then an old Negro conductor comes into the car, doing a sort of restrained soft shoe, and
half mumbling the words of some song. He looks at the young man, briefly, with a quick greeting]
CONDUCTOR Hey, brother!
YOUNG NEGRO Hey
[The conductor continues down the aisle with his little dance and the mumbled song. LULA turns to stare at him and
follows his movements down the aisle. The conductor tips his hat when he reaches her seat, and continues out the
car]
Curtain

Theoretical Approaches to
Black Drama
The History of Black Drama The
consists of innovative
(infinite?) deformative
(nation based discursive
strategies of masking and
sounding) discursive
strategies that are always
mixtures of the mastery of
form and the deformation
of mastery

the mastery of form

deformation of
mastery

Houston Bakeresque
QuickTime™ and a
xvid decompressor
are needed to see this picture.

Acting Black and Double Consciousness
You don’t know anything except what’s
there for you to see.

QuickTime™ and a
xvid decompressor
are needed to see this picture.

CLAY [Pushing her against the seat] I'm not telling you again, Tallulah Bankhead! Luxury. In your face and your fingers. You telling me what I ought to do.
[Sudden scream frightening the whole coach] Well, don't! Don't you tell me anything! If I'm a middle-class fake white man . . . let me be. And let me be in the way
I want.
[Through his teeth] I'll rip your lousy breasts off! Let me be who I feel like being. Uncle Tom. Thomas. Whoever. It's none of your business. You don't know
anything except what's there for you to see. An act. Lies. Device. Not the pure heart, the pumping black heart. You don't ever know that. And I sit here, in
this buttoned-up suit, to keep myself from cutting all your throats. I mean wantonly. You great liberated whore! You fuck some black man, and right away
you're an expert on black people. What a lotta shit that is. The only thing you know is that you come if he bangs you hard enough. And that's all. The belly
rub? You wanted to do the belly rub? Shit, you don't even know how. You don't know how. That ol' dipty-dip shit you do, rolling your ass like an elephant.
That's not my kind of belly rub. Belly rub is not Queens. Belly rub is dark places, with big hats and overcoats held up with one arm. Belly rub hates you.
Old bald-headed four-eyed ofays popping their fingers . . . and don't know yet what they're doing. They say, "I love Bessie Smith." And don't even
understand that Bessie Smith is saying, "Kiss my ass, kiss my black unruly ass." Before love, suffering, desire, anything you can explain, she's saying,
and very plainly, "Kiss my black ass." And if you don't know that, it's you that's doing the kissing. Charlie Parker? Charlie Parker. All the hip white boys
scream for Bird. And Bird saying, "Up your ass, feebleminded ofay! Up your ass." And they sit there talking about the tortured genius of Charlie Parker.
Bird would've played not a note of music if he just walked up to East Sixty-seventh Street and killed the first ten white people he saw. Not a note! And I'm
the great would-be poet. Yes. That's right! Poet. Some kind of bastard literature . . . all it needs is a simple knife thrust. Just let me bleed you, you loud
whore, and one poem vanished. A whole people of neurotics, struggling to keep from being sane. And the only thing that would cure the neurosis would be
your murder. Simple as that. I mean if I murdered you, then other white people would begin to understand me. You understand? No. I guess not. If Bessie
Smith had killed some white people she wouldn't have needed that music. She could have talked very straight and plain about the world. No metaphors.
No grunts. No wiggles in the dark of her soul. Just straight two and two are four. Money. Power. Luxury. Like that. All of them. Crazy niggers turning their
backs on sanity. When all it needs is that simple act. Murder. Just murder! Would make us all sane.
[Suddenly weary] Ahhh. Shit. But who needs it? I'd rather be a fool. Insane. Safe with my words, and no deaths, and clean, hard thoughts, urging me to new
conquests. My people's madness. Hah! That's a laugh. My people. They don't need me to claim them. They got legs and arms of their own. Personal
insanities. Mirrors. They don't need all those words. They don't need any defense. But listen, though, one more thing. And you tell this to your father, who's
probably the kind of man who needs to know at once. So he can plan ahead. Tell him not to preach so much rationalism and cold logic to these niggers.
Let them alone. Let them sing curses at you in code and see your filth as simple lack of style. Don't make the mistake, through some irresponsible surge
of Christian charity, of talking too much about the advantages of Western rationalism, or the great intellectual legacy of the white man, or maybe they'll
begin to listen. And then, maybe one day, you'll find they actually do understand exactly what you are talking about, all these fantasy people. All these
blues people. And on that day, as sure as shit, when you really believe you can "accept" them into your fold, as half-white trusties late of the subject
peoples. With no more blues, except the very old ones, and not a watermelon in sight, the great missionary heart will have triumphed, and all of those excoons will be stand-up Western men, with eyes for clean hard useful lives, sober, pious and sane, and they'll murder you. They'll murder you, and have
very rational explanations. Very much like your own. They'll cut your throats, and drag you out to the edge of your cities so the flesh can fall away from
your bones, in sanitary isolation.

Talking Points:
1)Intra-Group Knowledge in Cultural Production: Doubly Conscious Performing
2)Acting vs. Being Black and the Problem of Performing for Two Audiences
3)Artistic and Rational Revolution
4)History of Struggle and the History of Black Cultural Production

Toasting
Black Internationalism, Nationalism, Folklore, and the
Signifying Monkey
Way down in the jungle deep,
The bad ass lion stepped on the signifyin monkey's feet.
The monkey said, "Muthafucka, can't you see?
Why, you standin on my goddamn feet!"
The lion said, "I ain't heard a word you said."
Said, "If you say three more I'll be steppin on yo muthafuckin head!"
Now, the monkey lived in the jungle in an old oak tree.
Bullshittin the lion everyday of the week.
Why, everyday before the sun go down,
The lion would kick his all through the jungle town.
But the monkey got wise and started usin his wit.
Said, "I'm gon' put a stop to this ole ass kickin shit!"
So he ran up on the lion the very next day.
Said, "Oh Mr. lion, there's a big, bad muthafucka comin your way.
And when you meet, it's gonna be a goddamn sin,
And wherever you meet some ass is bound to bend."
Said, "he's somebody that you don't know,
He just broke a-loose from the Ringlin Brother's show."
Said, "Baby, he talked about your people in a helluva way!
He talked about your people till my hair turned gray!
He said your daddy's a freak and your momma's a whore.
Said he spotted you running through the jungle sellin asshole from door to door!
Said your sister did the damndest trick.
She got down so low and sucked a earthworm's dick.
Said he spotted yo niece behind the tree,
Screwin a muthafuckin flea!
He said he saw yo aunt sittin on the fence
Givin a goddamn zebra a french.
Then he talked about yo mammy and yo sister Lou,
Then he start talkin about how good yo grandmaw screw.

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xvid decompressor
are needed to see this picture.


Slide 13

Negritude and the Black
Arts Movement

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are needed to see this picture.

“Sellout” by LG Damas
I feel ridiculous/ in their shoes/ their
dinner jackets/ their starched
shirts/ and detachable collars/
their monocles and/ their bowler
hats
……………….
QuickTime™ and a
xvid decompressor
are needed to see this picture.

I feel ridiculous/ among them/ like an
accomplice/ among them/ like a
pimp/ like a murderer among
them/ my hands hideously red/
with the blood of their/ ci-vi-li-zation

Black Art and Black Aesthetics: Poesis as Politics
Points

Black Art

1)

Does this poem
conform to
formal norms?
Which ones?

2)

Where do you
turn when you
can’t get out of
the Bubble?

Larry Neal Defines the B.A.M. Project
1)

2)

To align the projects of
the black artist and
political activist
To fashion a collective
goal: the destruction of
double consciousness

Amiri Baraka (1934- )
born Leroi Jones
Bohemian, Black Power Advocate, Communist
Preface to a Twenty Volume Suicide Note, poems, 1961
Blues People: Black People in White America, 1963
Dutchman and the Slavedrama, 1964
The system of Dante’s hell, novel, 1965
Home: Social Essays, 1965
A Black Mass (1966
Tales, 1967
Black Magic, poems, 1969
Four Black Revolutionary Plays, 1969
Slave Ship, 1970
It's Nation Time, poems, 1970
Raise Race Rays Raize: Essays Since 1965, 1971
Hard Facts, poems, 1975
The Motion of History and Other Plays, 1978
Poetry for the Advanced, 1979
reggae or not!, 1981
Daggers and Javelins: Essays 1974-1979, 1984
The Autobiography of LeRoi Jones/Amiri Baraka, 1984
The Music: Reflections on Jazz and Blues, 1987
Transbluesency: The Selected Poems of Amiri Baraka/LeRoi Jones, 1995
Wise, Why’s Y’s, essays, 1995
Funk Lore: New Poems, 1996.
Somebody Blew Up America, 2001
The Book of Monk, 2005
Tales of the Out & the Gone, 2006
Billy Harper: Blueprints of Jazz, Volume 2, Audio CD, 2008
Ancient Music

Dutchman
A Modern Myth of Black Assimilation

QuickTime™ and a
xvid decompressor
are needed to see this picture.

Major Themes
Race and Racism: Assimilation, Self-hatred
Violence and Cruelty: The violence of white oppression
that murders blacks in a literal and figurative sense.
Passivity: A by-product of assimilation that, for Baraka,
makes a community stagnant, incapable of
producing leaders or innovators. And yet, it is a
passivity whose transgression results in selfdestruction (perhaps of a positive variety, but more
than likely not)
Sexism: Emasculation, The Siren/Fury archetypal
devouring female
Allegory
a subway “heaped in modern myth”
Symbolic Associations and Locales
The Story of Adam and Eve, The Flying Dutchman,
Dutch Slave Ships, the subway or “flying underbelly
of the city”

Tainted Forms of Expression
CLAY Are you angry about anything? Did I say something wrong?
LULA Everything you say is wrong. [Mock smile] That's what makes you so
attractive. Ha. In that funnybook jacket with all the buttons. [More animate,
taking hold of his jacket] What've you got that jacket and tie on in all this heat
for? And why're you wearing a jacket and tie like that? Did your people ever
burn witches or start revolutions over the price of tea? Boy, those narrowshoulder clothes come from a tradition you ought to feel oppressed by. A
three-button suit. What right do you have to be wearing a three-button suit
and striped tie? Your grandfather was a slave, he didn't go to Harvard.
CLAY My grandfather was a night watchman.
LULA And you went to a colored college where everybody thought they
were Averell Harriman.
CLAY All except me.
LULA And who did you think you were? Who do you think you are now?
CLAY [Laughs as if to make light of the whole trend of the conversation]
Well, in college I thought I was Baudelaire. But I've slowed down since.
LULA I bet you never once thought you were a black nigger. [Mock serious,
then she howls with laughter. CLAY is stunned but after initial reaction, he
quickly tries to appreciate the humor. LULA almost shrieks] A black
Baudelaire.

Talking Points:
1)Costume Prescribed
modes of revolt.
2)Black Baudelaire:
The Relationship
Between the Black
Artists of the 60s and
Extant Poetic Forms
3)Symbolism: Black
Baudelaires and Black
Niggers
4)“I bet you never
once thought you
were a black nigger”.

“Cultural Strangulation”
by
Addison Gayle

Cultural Strangulation
“There is no White aesthetic”

The Agenda:
To Defend the Positing of a Black Aesthetic

Let us proposes Greece as the logical starting point, bearing in mind
Will Durrant’s observation that “all of Western Civilization is but a
footnote to Plato,” and take Plato as the first writer to attempt a
systematic aesthetic [….] However, Plato defines beauty in ambiguous
terms leaving the problem of more secular, circumscribred, secular
definition to philosophers, poets, and critics […] these aestheticians
have been white, there, it is not surprising that, symbolically and
literally, the have defined beauty in terms of whiteness,

The Argument:
1)The failure to recognize a separate black
aesthetic is not only out of step with current
leftist moves forward in the field of race
relations, but is also the outgrowth of a
failure to come to terms with what might
constitute a White Aesthetic.
2)This White Aesthetic is as older than the
“race problem,” but its privileging of light
over dark was mapped onto race relations.
3)Given the legacy of racism in America and
that Occidental aesthetic are tainted by
racism, the black aesthetic must be defined
oppositionally. This opposition can be
embodied in the phrase “Black is Beautiful”
a slogan during the Black Power Movement.

The Ironic and Oppositional Position of Black Aesthetics

3) Hence, in the American realm,
the entire realm of aesthetics is
poisoned by a racism that comes
to the fore every time it
evaluates an object of Black Art.
4) And, the Black artist is forced into
a corner. To answer to the
demands of traditional aesthetics
is to allow white critics to dictate
the expression of Black
experience (which can result in a
re-instantiation of racism)
5) Hence, the only option other
than assimilation, calls for an
iconoclastic set of principles
embodied in the phrase “Black is
Beautiful”

Exploding the Raisin
A Cry for What Kind of Revolt-The Shuffle
LULA [Her voice takes on a different, more businesslike quality] I've heard enough.
CLAY [Reaching for his books] I bet you have. I guess I better collect my stuff and get off this train. Looks like we
won't be acting out that little pageant you outlined before.
LULA No. We won't. You're right about that, at least.
[She turns to look quickly around the rest of the car] All right!
[The others respond]
CLAY [Bending across the girl to retrieve his belongings] Sorry, baby, I don't think we could make it.
[As he is bending over her, the girl brings up a small knife and plunges it into CLAY's chest. Twice. He slumps across
her knees, his mouth working stupidly]
LULA Sorry is right.
[Turning to the others in the car who have already gotten up from their seats] Sorry is the rightest thing you've said.
Get this man off me! Hurry, now!
[ The others come and drag CLAY's body down the aisle] Open the door and throw his body out. They throw him off]
And all of you get off at the next stop. LULA busies herself straightening her things. Getting everything in order. She
takes out a notebook and makes a quick scribbling note. Drops it in her bag. The train apparently stops and all the
others get off, leaving her alone in the coach.
Very soon a young Negro of about twenty comes into the coach, with a couple of books under his arm. He sits a few
seats in back of LULA. When he is seated she turns and gives him a long slow look. He looks up from his book and
drops the book on his lap. Then an old Negro conductor comes into the car, doing a sort of restrained soft shoe, and
half mumbling the words of some song. He looks at the young man, briefly, with a quick greeting]
CONDUCTOR Hey, brother!
YOUNG NEGRO Hey
[The conductor continues down the aisle with his little dance and the mumbled song. LULA turns to stare at him and
follows his movements down the aisle. The conductor tips his hat when he reaches her seat, and continues out the
car]
Curtain

Theoretical Approaches to
Black Drama
The History of Black Drama The
consists of innovative
(infinite?) deformative
(nation based discursive
strategies of masking and
sounding) discursive
strategies that are always
mixtures of the mastery of
form and the deformation
of mastery

the mastery of form

deformation of
mastery

Houston Bakeresque
QuickTime™ and a
xvid decompressor
are needed to see this picture.

Acting Black and Double Consciousness
You don’t know anything except what’s
there for you to see.

QuickTime™ and a
xvid decompressor
are needed to see this picture.

CLAY [Pushing her against the seat] I'm not telling you again, Tallulah Bankhead! Luxury. In your face and your fingers. You telling me what I ought to do.
[Sudden scream frightening the whole coach] Well, don't! Don't you tell me anything! If I'm a middle-class fake white man . . . let me be. And let me be in the way
I want.
[Through his teeth] I'll rip your lousy breasts off! Let me be who I feel like being. Uncle Tom. Thomas. Whoever. It's none of your business. You don't know
anything except what's there for you to see. An act. Lies. Device. Not the pure heart, the pumping black heart. You don't ever know that. And I sit here, in
this buttoned-up suit, to keep myself from cutting all your throats. I mean wantonly. You great liberated whore! You fuck some black man, and right away
you're an expert on black people. What a lotta shit that is. The only thing you know is that you come if he bangs you hard enough. And that's all. The belly
rub? You wanted to do the belly rub? Shit, you don't even know how. You don't know how. That ol' dipty-dip shit you do, rolling your ass like an elephant.
That's not my kind of belly rub. Belly rub is not Queens. Belly rub is dark places, with big hats and overcoats held up with one arm. Belly rub hates you.
Old bald-headed four-eyed ofays popping their fingers . . . and don't know yet what they're doing. They say, "I love Bessie Smith." And don't even
understand that Bessie Smith is saying, "Kiss my ass, kiss my black unruly ass." Before love, suffering, desire, anything you can explain, she's saying,
and very plainly, "Kiss my black ass." And if you don't know that, it's you that's doing the kissing. Charlie Parker? Charlie Parker. All the hip white boys
scream for Bird. And Bird saying, "Up your ass, feebleminded ofay! Up your ass." And they sit there talking about the tortured genius of Charlie Parker.
Bird would've played not a note of music if he just walked up to East Sixty-seventh Street and killed the first ten white people he saw. Not a note! And I'm
the great would-be poet. Yes. That's right! Poet. Some kind of bastard literature . . . all it needs is a simple knife thrust. Just let me bleed you, you loud
whore, and one poem vanished. A whole people of neurotics, struggling to keep from being sane. And the only thing that would cure the neurosis would be
your murder. Simple as that. I mean if I murdered you, then other white people would begin to understand me. You understand? No. I guess not. If Bessie
Smith had killed some white people she wouldn't have needed that music. She could have talked very straight and plain about the world. No metaphors.
No grunts. No wiggles in the dark of her soul. Just straight two and two are four. Money. Power. Luxury. Like that. All of them. Crazy niggers turning their
backs on sanity. When all it needs is that simple act. Murder. Just murder! Would make us all sane.
[Suddenly weary] Ahhh. Shit. But who needs it? I'd rather be a fool. Insane. Safe with my words, and no deaths, and clean, hard thoughts, urging me to new
conquests. My people's madness. Hah! That's a laugh. My people. They don't need me to claim them. They got legs and arms of their own. Personal
insanities. Mirrors. They don't need all those words. They don't need any defense. But listen, though, one more thing. And you tell this to your father, who's
probably the kind of man who needs to know at once. So he can plan ahead. Tell him not to preach so much rationalism and cold logic to these niggers.
Let them alone. Let them sing curses at you in code and see your filth as simple lack of style. Don't make the mistake, through some irresponsible surge
of Christian charity, of talking too much about the advantages of Western rationalism, or the great intellectual legacy of the white man, or maybe they'll
begin to listen. And then, maybe one day, you'll find they actually do understand exactly what you are talking about, all these fantasy people. All these
blues people. And on that day, as sure as shit, when you really believe you can "accept" them into your fold, as half-white trusties late of the subject
peoples. With no more blues, except the very old ones, and not a watermelon in sight, the great missionary heart will have triumphed, and all of those excoons will be stand-up Western men, with eyes for clean hard useful lives, sober, pious and sane, and they'll murder you. They'll murder you, and have
very rational explanations. Very much like your own. They'll cut your throats, and drag you out to the edge of your cities so the flesh can fall away from
your bones, in sanitary isolation.

Talking Points:
1)Intra-Group Knowledge in Cultural Production: Doubly Conscious Performing
2)Acting vs. Being Black and the Problem of Performing for Two Audiences
3)Artistic and Rational Revolution
4)History of Struggle and the History of Black Cultural Production

Toasting
Black Internationalism, Nationalism, Folklore, and the
Signifying Monkey
Way down in the jungle deep,
The bad ass lion stepped on the signifyin monkey's feet.
The monkey said, "Muthafucka, can't you see?
Why, you standin on my goddamn feet!"
The lion said, "I ain't heard a word you said."
Said, "If you say three more I'll be steppin on yo muthafuckin head!"
Now, the monkey lived in the jungle in an old oak tree.
Bullshittin the lion everyday of the week.
Why, everyday before the sun go down,
The lion would kick his all through the jungle town.
But the monkey got wise and started usin his wit.
Said, "I'm gon' put a stop to this ole ass kickin shit!"
So he ran up on the lion the very next day.
Said, "Oh Mr. lion, there's a big, bad muthafucka comin your way.
And when you meet, it's gonna be a goddamn sin,
And wherever you meet some ass is bound to bend."
Said, "he's somebody that you don't know,
He just broke a-loose from the Ringlin Brother's show."
Said, "Baby, he talked about your people in a helluva way!
He talked about your people till my hair turned gray!
He said your daddy's a freak and your momma's a whore.
Said he spotted you running through the jungle sellin asshole from door to door!
Said your sister did the damndest trick.
She got down so low and sucked a earthworm's dick.
Said he spotted yo niece behind the tree,
Screwin a muthafuckin flea!
He said he saw yo aunt sittin on the fence
Givin a goddamn zebra a french.
Then he talked about yo mammy and yo sister Lou,
Then he start talkin about how good yo grandmaw screw.

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