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...