The Specter of Marxism: The Marxian Influence on Amiri Baraka\u27s Black Nationalist Poetry

Abstract Campbell, Emahunn Raheem Ali. MA. The University of Memphis. August 2010. “The Specter of Marxism: The Marxian Influence on Amiri Baraka’s Black Nationalist Poetry.” Kathy Lou Schultz. Baraka’s move from cultural nationalism to Marxism came through an understanding “that it was the [capitalism] that oppressed [Blacks] and that it could not only utilize whites, who seem to be in control of it, but that it could also utilize Blacks.” His reasoning is not solely based on one’s relation to the means of production; it is also based on what he was observing in his native city of Newark, New Jersey during the late 1960s and early 1970s, particularly as it related to the political and social ascendency of the Black petit bourgeoisie. It is my argument that these Marxian antecedents manifest themselves in his cultural nationalist poetry. Furthermore, these ideological influences and aesthetic manifestations, which have internal and external contradictions, function dialectically in a way that anticipates his shift from cultural nationalism to Marxism