| Name: |
Imamu Amiri Baraka |
| Variant Name: |
|
| Birth Date: |
|
| Place of Birth: |
|
| Nationality: |
|
| Ethnicity: |
|
| Gender: |
|
| Occupations: |
|
Contemporary Afro-American literature, culture, and philosophy of the past two decades has been profoundly influenced by Amiri Baraka's social, political, and aesthetic principles. For those Americans who regard black arts as the aesthetic arm of the black revolutionary concept, no black writer has done more to articulate the relationship between art and politics. He succeeds W. E. B. DuBois and Richard Wright as one of the twentieth century's most prolific and persistent social and moral critics of black experience in America. "Black awareness" is evident throughout his published body of literary works. Elements of racial consciousness reflect not only social and psychological truths; but, metaphysically, they encompass the totality of racial reality in Western thought. Perhaps more than any other artist in American theater and letters he has persisted in discovering and revealing the truth of being black. Almost single-handedly during the late 1950s, guided by a strong concept of cultural nationalism, Baraka demonstrated to black people the potential power of theater and literature as ideological weapons, providing alternative solutions to the sociopolitical, economic, and historical suppression imposed by the dominant culture.
This is a free page. This page contains 151 words. This
biography contains 8,592 words (approx. 29 pages at 300
words per page).
Read the rest of this Biography with our Amiri Baraka Access Pass.
