Podcast appearances and mentions of Arnold Rampersad

In this episode I'm inviting you into this question with me: “Is It Burnout Or The Energetic Expense Of A Spiritual Breakthrough?” Now let's be clear, sometimes it really is burn-out. Sometimes, no…a lot of the times, capitalism, the patriarchal refusal to compensate care work and the lack of a state sanctioned social safety net can really bring us to our knees and leave us feeling burned out. I want to acknowledge that, but what I also want to be emphatically clear about acknowledging is sometimes it is spiritual severance, self-denial and self-negation that is at the core of our exhaustion. What creative invitations have you been resisting? Let's take a look at that and try to answer these questions together. Resources Register for 4-Part Winter Worldbuilding Workshop: https://www.seedaschool.com/program Download the Creative Offer Questionnaire to Oneself: https://www.seedaschool.com/questionnaire Subscribe to the Seeda School Substack: https://seedaschool.substack.com/ Follow Ayana on Instagram: ⁠@ayzaco⁠ Follow Seeda School on Instagram: ⁠@seedaschool Citations For the Worldbuilder's Episode 52 “Releasing the Burden of Being Complicit In Our Own Suffering” published July 4, 2024 Karen M. Rose “Happy 2025 + Capricorn New Moon” Guidance Alexis Pauline Gumbs “Live Q&A About Daily Practice” Mundane Miracles with Sonya Renee Taylor “Episode 6: Let Your Old Life Fall Away” *The Oxford Anthology of African-American Poetry* edited by Arnold Rampersad and Hilary Herbold “Poetry Is Not A Luxury” by Audre Lorde “Uses of the Erotic, The Erotic As Power” by Audre Lorde Cover Art: Mary L. Proctor's Freedom of Expression (1998) Materials: Costume jewelry, buttons, cowrie shells, paint, on wood door. Dimensions: 80 x 30.5 inches. Image Source

This week on The Learning Curve, co-hosts DFER’s Alisha Searcy and Mike Goldstein interview Stanford University Prof. Arnold Rampersad, author of Jackie Robinson: A Biography. He discusses the life and legacy of Robinson, the hall of fame baseball player and history-changing civil rights leader. Prof. Rampersad talks about Jackie Robinson’s journey from rural Georgia, his athletic triumphs at UCLA, and his struggles against poverty and racism. He continues by exploring […]

This week on The Learning Curve, co-hosts DFER's Alisha Searcy and Mike Goldstein interview Stanford University Prof. Arnold Rampersad, author of Jackie Robinson: A Biography. He discusses the life and legacy of Robinson, the hall of fame baseball player and history-changing civil rights leader. Prof. Rampersad talks about Jackie Robinson's journey from rural Georgia, his athletic triumphs at UCLA, and his struggles against poverty and racism. He continues by exploring Robinson's military service, his time in the Negro Leagues, and Branch Rickey's pivotal role in helping Jackie break Major League Baseball's color barrier. Prof. Rampersad highlights Robinson's historic MLB career, his profound impact on civil rights, and his enduring legacy.

To read Hayden's poem, click here (https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/46460/frederick-douglass). Thanks to W.W. Norton & Company for granting us permission to read this poem. Reginald Dwayne Betts's introduction to the Collected Poems of Robert Hayden (https://wwnorton.com/books/9780871406798/about-author) is very moving, as is the afterword by Arnold Rampersad. For a series of insightful observations about Hayden's sonnet, see Ross Gay, Aracelis Girmay, Aimee Nezhukumatathil, Patrick Rosal, and Ira Sadoff, "Poets Respond: A Discussion of "Frederick Douglass" by Robert Hayden." American Poetry Review, 38.3 (2009): 25-28. For a helpful close reading of the poem, see Fred M. Fetrow, "Robert Hayden's 'Frederick Douglass': Form and Meaning in a Modern Sonnet." CLA Journal 17.1 (September 1973): 78-84.

"In Robert Hayden's work the actualities of history and culture became the launching places for flights of imagination and intelligence. His voice characterized by musical diction and an exquisite feeling for the formality of pattern is a seminal one in American life and literature." — Arnold Rampersad

In Talking Culture's final full episode in season one, Alejandra, Meghan, and Daniel explore the work of Zora Neale Hurston. They discuss the boundaries she came up against in her pursuit of anthropology as well as the disciplinary boundaries between anthropology and folklore studies and where much of her work sits on the line of fiction and nonfiction. Throughout the episode the point to the debt anthropology owes to Hurston, and how her work paved the way for much of what anthropology strives to do today. Sources:Bascom, William R. 1953    Folklore and Anthropology. The Journal of American Folklore 66(262):283-290. https://www.jstor.org/stable/536722. Ben-Amos, Dan.1971    Toward a Definition of Folklore in Context. The Journal of American Folklore 84(331):3-15. https://www.jstor.org/stable/539729.Boyd, Valerie. 2003. Wrapped in rainbows: the life of Zora Neale Hurston. New York: Scribner.Darnell, Regna. 1973    American Anthropology and the Development of Folklore Scholarship: 1890-1920, Journal of the Folklore Institute 10(1/2):23-39. https://www.jstor.org/stable/3813878. Dorson, Richard M. 1963    Current Folklore Theories. Current Anthropology 4(1):93-112.  https://www.jstor.org/stable/2739820. Hemenway, Robert. 1976    Folklore Field Notes from Zora Neale Hurston. The Black Scholar 7(7):39-46. DOI: 10.1080/00064246.1976.11413814.Hurston, Zora Neale.  1939  Sound Recordings by Zora Neale Hurston. Library of Congress. Hurston, Zora Neale, Franz Boas, Arnold Rampersad, Henry Louis Gates, and Miguel Covarrubias. 2008. Mules and Men 1St Harper Perennial Modern Classics ed. Harper Perennial Modern Classics. New York: Harper Perennial.Britannica, T. Editors of Encyclopaedia. "Zora Neale Hurston." Encyclopedia Britannica, January 24, 2021. https://www.britannica.com/biography/Zora-Neale-Hurston.Pooley, William G. 2018    Native to the Past: History, Anthropology, and Folklore. Past and Present 239(1): e1–e15. https://doi.org/10.1093/pastj/gtv038.Russell, Mary Catherine. 2017    Zora Neale Hurston: Scientist, Folklorist, Storyteller. Pursuit - The Journal of Undergraduate Research at the University of Tennessee 8(1):124-138. http://trace.tennessee.edu/pursuit/vol8/iss1/13. 

This week on “The Learning Curve,” Gerard and Cara talk with Professor Arnold Rampersad, the Sara Hart Kimball Professor Emeritus in Humanities at Stanford University and recipient of the National Humanities Medal for his books including The Life of Langston Hughes and Ralph Ellison: A Biography. They discuss what teachers and students today should know about Langston Hughes's celebrated literary... Source

This week on “The Learning Curve,” Gerard and Cara talk with Professor Arnold Rampersad, the Sara Hart Kimball Professor Emeritus in Humanities at Stanford University and recipient of the National Humanities Medal for his books including The Life of Langston Hughes and Ralph Ellison: A Biography. They discuss what teachers and students today should know about Langston Hughes’s celebrated literary […]

Read more on Jackie Robinson from Arnold Rampersad - https://amzn.to/3e2BUATFollow Bob Kendrick on Twitter - https://twitter.com/nlbmprezVisit the Negro Leagues Baseball Museum in Kansas City - https://nlbm.com/

This interview accompanies the On Being episode “Maya Angelou, Elizabeth Alexander, and Arnold Rampersad — W.E.B. Du Bois & the American Soul.” Find more at onbeing.org.

A prolific writer on sociology, history, economics, and politics, W.E.B. Du Bois was one of the most extraordinary minds of American and global history. His life traced an incredible arc; he was born three years after the end of the Civil War and died on the eve of the March on Washington. In 1903, he penned the famous line that “the problem of the 20th century is the problem of the color line.” Du Bois was a formative voice for many of the people who gave us the Civil Rights Movement and for all of us navigating the still-unfolding, unfinished business of civil rights now. We bring his life and ideas into relief through three conversations with people who were inspired by him. Maya Angelou was a poet, educator, and activist. She was awarded the Presidential Medal of Arts in 2000 and the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2011. She is most well-known for her series of seven autobiographies, including “I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings.” Elizabeth Alexander is a chancellor of the Academy of American Poets and president of The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. Her books include “Crave Radiance” and her memoir, “The Light of the World.” Arnold Rampersad is emeritus professor of English at Stanford University and author of “The Art and Imagination of W.E.B. Du Bois.” He was awarded the National Humanities Medal in 2010. Find the transcript for this show at onbeing.org.

A prolific writer on sociology, history, economics, and politics, W.E.B. Du Bois was one of the most extraordinary minds of American and global history. His life traced an incredible arc; he was born three years after the end of the Civil War and died on the eve of the March on Washington. In 1903, he penned the famous line that “the problem of the 20th century is the problem of the color line.” Du Bois was a formative voice for many of the people who gave us the Civil Rights Movement and for all of us navigating the still-unfolding, unfinished business of civil rights now. We bring his life and ideas into relief through three conversations with people who were inspired by him. Elizabeth Alexander is a chancellor of the Academy of American Poets and president of The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. Her books include “Crave Radiance” and her memoir, “The Light of the World.” This interview is edited and produced with music and other features in the On Being episode “Maya Angelou, Elizabeth Alexander, and Arnold Rampersad — W.E.B. Du Bois and the American Soul.” Find more at onbeing.org.

A prolific writer on sociology, history, economics, and politics, W.E.B. Du Bois was one of the most extraordinary minds of American and global history. His life traced an incredible arc; he was born three years after the end of the Civil War and died on the eve of the March on Washington. In 1903, he penned the famous line that “the problem of the 20th century is the problem of the color line.” Du Bois was a formative voice for many of the people who gave us the Civil Rights Movement and for all of us navigating the still-unfolding, unfinished business of civil rights now. We bring his life and ideas into relief through three conversations with people who were inspired by him. Maya Angelou was a poet, educator, and activist. She was awarded the Presidential Medal of Arts in 2000 and the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2011. She is most well-known for her series of seven autobiographies, including “I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings.” This interview is edited and produced with music and other features in the On Being episode “Maya Angelou, Elizabeth Alexander, and Arnold Rampersad — W.E.B. Du Bois and the American Soul.” Find more at onbeing.org.

A prolific writer on sociology, history, economics, and politics, W.E.B. Du Bois was one of the most extraordinary minds of American and global history. His life traced an incredible arc; he was born three years after the end of the Civil War and died on the eve of the March on Washington. In 1903, he penned the famous line that “the problem of the 20th century is the problem of the color line.” Du Bois was a formative voice for many of the people who gave us the Civil Rights Movement and for all of us navigating the still-unfolding, unfinished business of civil rights now. We bring his life and ideas into relief through three conversations with people who were inspired by him. Arnold Rampersad is emeritus professor of English at Stanford University and author of “The Art and Imagination of W.E.B. Du Bois.” He was awarded the National Humanities Medal in 2010. This interview is edited and produced with music and other features in the On Being episode “Maya Angelou, Elizabeth Alexander, and Arnold Rampersad — W.E.B. Du Bois and the American Soul.” Find more at onbeing.org.

This week on StoryWeb: Langston Hughes’s book of poems Montage of a Dream Deferred. I play it cool And dig all jive That’s the reason I stay alive. My motto As I live and learn Is dig and be dug in return. So goes the poem “Motto” in Langston Hughes’s 1951 jazz collection, Montage of a Dream Deferred. The list of my favorite Langston Hughes poems would be long indeed, but no volume of his poetry makes my heart sing like Montage of a Dream Deferred. Not only does it include justly famous poems like “Harlem” and “Theme for English B” and lesser known poems like “Motto.” But it also – taken as a whole volume as Hughes intended – provides a marvelous portrait of the African American community in post-World War II Harlem. The story goes that Hughes wrote Montage of a Dream Deferred in a creative outburst in one week in September 1948. Hughes had just moved into his own home after being a renter his entire adult life. Writing to a friend, Hughes described Montage as “a full book-length poem in five sections,” “a precedent shattering opus—also could be known as a tour de force.” I completely concur with Hughes’s self-assessment: Montage of a Dream Deferred is very much a tour de force. In his early work, Hughes showed how the blues as a uniquely African American musical form shaped his poetry. Some time back, I explored his landmark 1925 poem “The Weary Blues” and the way it exemplified the blues influence on Hughes’s poetry. By the 1940s, however, jazz had more than come into its own, embodying the vast creativity and artistry of African Americans. Jazz is just right as a vehicle for Hughes’s poetry, for he can riff on a poetic theme much as a band member might riff on a musical motif set down by the leader. Jazz was, of course, a distinct creation of African American musicians. Though there were many white musicians who became interested in and mastered jazz and pushed it in new directions, jazz was largely an African American cultural phenomenon. No volume of Hughes’s poetry illustrates his “jazz in words” approach quite like Montage of a Dream Deferred. And here it’s especially be-bop and boogie woogie that shape the volume and provide its language and syncopated rhythms. In a prefatory note to the book, Hughes writes, [T]his poem on contemporary Harlem, like be-bop, is marked by conflicting changes, sudden nuances, sharp and impudent interjections, broken rhythms, and passages sometimes in the manner of the jam session, sometimes the popular song, punctuated by the riffs, runs, breaks, and disc-tortions of the music of a community in transition. Right from the volume’s first poem, “Dream Boogie,” we are immersed in the “cool” language of be-bop, and we encounter our first syncopated stanza of poetry. Hughes writes: Good morning, daddy! Ain’t you heard? The boogie-woogie rumble Of a dream deferred?   Listen to it closely: You’ll hear their feet Beating out and beating out a –   You think It’s a happy beat? Now that the motif has been established – the “dream deferred” – Hughes can riff on it throughout the volume, which he stressed was to be seen as one long poem rather than a collection of 87 individual short poems. He employs different voices, takes different vantage points, takes the same words and plays them back to us in a different way. Even a short and seemingly straightforward poem like “Harlem” (taught by many an American literature instructor and “sampled” by Lorraine Hansberry in the title of her pioneering play A Raisin in the Sun) can take on a deeper resonance when it’s set in the context of this jazz-in-words volume of poetry. Appearing about midway through the book, “Harlem” opens with one of the most well-known lines in American poetry: “What happens to a dream deferred?” That question is at the heart of this book of poems. What exactly is the “dream deferred” that gives title and theme to this volume of poetry? Hughes had always played with the theme of “the dream,” in particular the dream of political and social justice for African Americans. “But Hughes now faced the fact,” says The Oxford Index, “that the hopes that had drawn thousands of blacks to the northern cities had led many of them to disappointment, alienation, and bitterness. Some of these poems depict blacks still able to hope and dream, but the most powerful pieces raise the specter of poverty, violence, and death.” And finally what of the term “montage”? Usually used to name a cinematic technique, the word “montage” describes the quick cuts and splices between disparate but associated images. In this case, the montage is of Harlem just after World War II. Famous for its Renaissance in the 1920s, when African American migrants from the rural South poured into the Manhattan neighborhood and filled it with music, art, literature, rent parties, and life, Harlem by the late 1940s was in decline. The dream African Americans had sought in their own vibrant neighborhood was, indeed, drying up like a raisin in the sun. The montage Hughes gives us, says The Oxford Index, is one that pulls together “virtually every aspect of daily Harlem life, from the prosperous on Sugar Hill to the poorest folk living down below.” The book “touches on the lives of Harlem mothers, daughters, students, ministers, junkies, pimps, police, shop owners, homosexuals, landlords, and tenants; its aim is to render in verse a detailed portrait of the community, which Hughes knew extremely well.” In his 1940 autobiography, The Big Sea, Hughes said, “I tried to write poems like the songs they sang on Seventh Street. . . . Their songs—those of Seventh Street—had the pulse beat of the people who keep on going.” Eight years later when he wrote Montage of a Dream Deferred, he succeeded magnificently in capturing that pulse beat. To read Montage of a Dream Deferred, you’ll need to purchase The Collected Poems of Langston Hughes, edited by Arnold Rampersad. It is the only place the 1951 volume is available (and except for a few individual poems, you can’t read Montage of a Dream Deferred online). A great recording of many of Hughes’s poems, including several from Montage of a Dream Deferred, is an album by Ruby Dee and Ossie Davis. It’s available only on vinyl, but if you’ve got a turntable, you’re in for a treat. If you want to go deeper, consider taking the Langston Hughes walking tour the next time you are in Harlem. The Big Sea: An Autobiography will give you insights into Hughes’s life, as will Selected Letters of Langston Hughes. True aficionados will want to read Arnold Rampersad’s two-volume biography of Langston Hughes. Volume I of The Life of Langston Hughes is subtitled I, Too, Sing America and covers the years 1902-1941. Volume II is subtitled I Dream a World and covers the years 1941-1967 (the year of Hughes’s death). Visit thestoryweb.com/montage for links to all these resources. You can also listen to Langston Hughes read “Harlem,” arguably the most important poem to come out of Montage of a Dream Deferred. You can also watch actor Danny Glover recite the poem.

Listen to this special broadcast of the Pan-African Journal hosted by Abayomi Azikiwe, editor of the Pan-African News Wire. The program features our regular PANW reports on events in Charleston, South Carolina where the final funeral was held for the victims of the racist massacre at Mother Emanuel AME Church on June 17; the hidden character of the US economy as distorted by the jobless figures released every month; a settlement reached in the BP oil spill in 2010; and developments in Tunisa and Libya in light of the growing instability in the region. In the second hour we focus on two leading African American writers of the 20th century Langston Hughes and Ralph Ellision through the poetry of the former as well as a classic audio archive from the CBS Radio Workshop of 1948 and an interview with Arnold Rampersad, biographer of Ralph Ellision. Finally, in the third hour we listen to an audio documentary on the current state of South African literature some two decades after the overthrow of the apartheid system.

What happens when we put people on pedestals? And what happens when we take them off? Host Killeen Hanson interviews her father about his estranged father. Andrew Altschul exposes the ordinariness of rock-stars in an excerpt from his novel Lady Lazarus. Lee Konstantinou interviews Arnold Rampersad about his biography of Ralph Ellison; his question is not What kept Ellison from publishing anything after Invisible Man? but rather, How did this author climb onto that pedestal in the first place? Producers: Killeen Hanson, Noah Burbank, Lee Konstantinou Host: Killeen Hanson Featuring: Brent Hanson, Andrew Altschul, Arnold Rampersad Music: Noah Burbank More info at:http://web.stanford.edu/group/storytelling/cgi-bin/joomla/index.php/shows/season3/195-episode-305-off-the-pedestal.html

AMIRI BARAKACLICK HERE TO LISTEN TO SHOWPoet, writer, teacher, and political activist Amiri Baraka was born Everett LeRoi Jones in 1934 in Newark, New Jersey. He attended Rutgers University and Howard University, spent three years in the U.S. Air Force, and returned to New York City to attend Columbia University and the New School for Social Research. Baraka was well known for his strident social criticism, often writing in an incendiary style that made it difficult for some audiences and critics to respond with objectivity to his works. Throughout most of his career his method in poetry, drama, fiction, and essays was confrontational, calculated to shock and awaken audiences to the political concerns of black Americans. For decades, Baraka was one of the most prominent voices in the world of American literature.Baraka’s own political stance changed several times, thus dividing his oeuvre into periods: as a member of the avant-garde during the 1950s, Baraka—writing as Leroi Jones—was associated with Beat poets like Allen Ginsberg and Jack Kerouac; in the ‘60s, he moved to Harlem and became a Black Nationalist; in the ‘70s, he was involved in third-world liberation movements and identified as a Marxist. More recently, Baraka was accused of anti-Semitism for his poem “Somebody Blew up America,” written in response to the September 11 attacks.Baraka incited controversy throughout his career. He was praised for speaking out against oppression as well as accused of fostering hate. Critical opinion has been sharply divided between those who agree, with Dissent contributor Stanley Kaufman, that Baraka’s race and political moment have created his celebrity, and those who feel that Baraka stands among the most important writers of the twentieth century. In the American Book Review, Arnold Rampersad counted Baraka with Phyllis Wheatley, Frederick Douglass, Paul Laurence Dunbar, Langston Hughes, Zora Neale Hurston, Richard Wright, and Ralph Ellison “as one of the eight figures . . . who have significantly affected the course of African-American literary culture.”Baraka did not always identify with radical politics, nor did his writing always court controversy. During the 1950s Baraka lived in Greenwich Village, befriending Beat poets Allen Ginsberg, Frank O’Hara, and Gilbert Sorrentino. The white avant-garde—primarily Ginsberg, O’Hara, and leader of the Black Mountain poets Charles Olson—and Baraka believed in poetry as a process of discovery rather than an exercise in fulfilling traditional expectations. Baraka, like the projectivist poets, believed that a poem’s form should follow the shape determined by the poet’s own breath and intensity of feeling. In 1958 Baraka founded Yugen magazine and Totem Press, important forums for new verse. He was married to his co-editor, Hettie Cohen, from 1960 to 1965. His first play, A Good Girl Is Hard to Find, was produced at Sterington House in Montclair, New Jersey, that same year. Preface to a Twenty Volume Suicide Note, Baraka’s first published collection of poems appeared in 1961. M.L. Rosenthal wrote in The New Poets: American and British Poetry since World War II that these poems show Baraka’s “natural gift for quick, vivid imagery and spontaneous humor.” Rosenthal also praised the “sardonic or sensuous or slangily knowledgeable passages” that fill the early poems. While the cadence of blues and many allusions to black culture are found in the poems, the subject of blackness does not predominate. Throughout, rather, the poet shows his integrated, Bohemian social roots. The book’s last line is “You are / as any other sad man here / american.”With the rise of the civil rights movement Baraka’s works took on a more militant tone. His trip to Cuba in 1959 marked an important turning point in his life. His view of his role as a writer, the purpose of art, and the degree to which ethnic awareness deserved to be his subject changed dramatically. In Cuba he met writers and artists from third world countries whose political concerns included the fight against poverty, famine, and oppressive governments. In Home: Social Essays (1966), Baraka explains how he tried to defend himself against their accusations of self-indulgence, and was further challenged by Jaime Shelley, a Mexican poet, who said, “‘In that ugliness you live in, you want to cultivate your soul? Well, we’ve got millions of starving people to feed, and that moves me enough to make poems out of.’” Soon Baraka began to identify with third world writers and to write poems and plays with strong political messages.Dutchman, a play of entrapment in which a white woman and a middle-class black man both express their murderous hatred on a subway, was first performed Off-Broadway in 1964. While other dramatists of the time were wedded to naturalism, Baraka used symbolism and other experimental techniques to enhance the play’s emotional impact. The play established Baraka’s reputation as a playwright and has been often anthologized and performed. It won the Village Voice Obie Award in 1964 and was later made into a film. The plays and poems following Dutchman expressed Baraka’s increasing disappointment with white America and his growing need to separate from it. Critics observed that as Baraka’s poems became more politically intense, they left behind some of the flawless technique of the earlier poems. Richard Howard wrote of The Dead Lecturer (1964) in the Nation: “These are the agonized poems of a man writing to save his skin, or at least to settle in it, and so urgent is their purpose that not one of them can trouble to be perfect.”To make a clean break with the Beat influence, Baraka turned to writing fiction in the mid-1960s, penning The System of Dante’s Hell (1965), a novel, and Tales (1967), a collection of short stories. The stories are “‘fugitive narratives’ that describe the harried flight of an intensely self-conscious Afro-American artist/intellectual from neo-slavery of blinding, neutralizing whiteness, where the area of struggle is basically within the mind,” Robert Elliot Fox wrote in Conscientious Sorcerers: The Black Postmodernist Fiction of LeRoi Jones/Baraka, Ishmael Reed, and Samuel R. Delany.The role of violent action in achieving political change is more prominent in these stories, as is the role of music in black life.In addition to his poems, novels and politically-charged essays, Baraka is a noted writer of music criticism. His classic history Blues People: Negro Music in White America (1963) traces black music from slavery to contemporary jazz. Finding indigenous black art forms was important to Baraka in the ‘60s, as he was searching for a more authentic voice for his own poetry. Baraka became known as an articulate jazz critic and a perceptive observer of social change. As Clyde Taylor stated in Amiri Baraka: The Kaleidoscopic Torch, “The connection he nailed down between the many faces of black music, the sociological sets that nurtured them, and their symbolic evolutions through socio-economic changes, in Blues People, is his most durable conception, as well as probably the one most indispensable thing said about black music.” Baraka also published the important studies Black Music (1968) and The Music: Reflections on Jazz and Blues (1987). Lloyd W. Brown commented in Amiri Baraka that Baraka’s essays on music are flawless: “As historian, musicological analyst, or as a journalist covering a particular performance Baraka always commands attention because of his obvious knowledge of the subject and because of a style that is engaging and persuasive even when the sentiments are questionable and controversial.”After Black Muslim leader Malcolm X was killed in 1965, Baraka moved to Harlem and founded the Black Arts Repertory Theatre/School. The Black Arts Movement helped develop a new aesthetic for black art and Baraka was its primary theorist. Black American artists should follow “black,” not “white” standards of beauty and value, he maintained, and should stop looking to white culture for validation. The black artist’s role, he wrote in Home: Social Essays (1966), is to “aid in the destruction of America as he knows it.” Foremost in this endeavor was the imperative to portray society and its ills faithfully so that the portrayal would move people to take necessary corrective action. He married his second wife, Amina, in 1967. In that same year, Baraka published the poetry collection Black Magic,which chronicles his separation from white culture and values while displaying his mastery of poetic technique. There was no doubt that Baraka’s political concerns superseded his just claims to literary excellence, and critics struggled to respond to the political content of the works. Some felt the best art must be apolitical and dismissed Baraka’s newer work as “a loss to literature.” Kenneth Rexroth wrote inWith Eye and Ear that Baraka “has succumbed to the temptation to become a professional Race Man of the most irresponsible sort. . . . His loss to literature is more serious than any literary casualty of the Second War.” In 1966 Bakara moved back to Newark, New Jersey, and a year later changed his name to the Bantuized Muslim appellation Imamu (“spiritual leader,” later dropped) Ameer (later Amiri, “prince”) Baraka (“blessing”).By the early 1970s Baraka was recognized as an influential African-American writer. Randall noted in Black World that younger black poets Nikki Giovanni and Don L. Lee (later Haki R. Madhubuti) were “learning from LeRoi Jones, a man versed in German philosophy, conscious of literary tradition . . . who uses the structure of Dante’s Divine Comedy in his System of Dante’s Hell and the punctuation, spelling and line divisions of sophisticated contemporary poets.” More importantly, Arnold Rampersad wrote in the American Book Review, “More than any other black poet . . . he taught younger black poets of the generation past how to respond poetically to their lived experience, rather than to depend as artists on embalmed reputations and outmoded rhetorical strategies derived from a culture often substantially different from their own.”After coming to see Black Nationalism as a destructive form of racism, Baraka denounced it in 1974 and became a third world socialist. He produced a number of Marxist poetry collections and plays in the 1970s that reflected his newly adopted political goals. Critics contended that works like the essays collected in Daggers and Javelins (1984) lack the emotional power of the works from his Black Nationalist period. However, Joe Weixlmann, in Amiri Baraka: The Kaleidoscopic Torch, argued against the tendency to categorize the radical Baraka instead of analyze him: “At the very least, dismissing someone with a label does not make for very satisfactory scholarship. Initially, Baraka’s reputation as a writer and thinker derived from a recognition of the talents with which he is so obviously endowed. The subsequent assaults on that reputation have, too frequently, derived from concerns which should be extrinsic to informed criticism.”In more recent years, recognition of Baraka’s impact on late 20th century American culture has resulted in the publication of several anthologies of his literary oeuvre.The LeRoi Jones/Amiri Baraka Reader (1999) presents a thorough overview of the writer’s development, covering the period from 1957 to 1983. The volume presents Baraka’s work from four different periods and emphasizes lesser-known works rather than the author’s most famous writings. Transbluency: The Selected Poems of Amiri Baraka/LeRoi Jones (1961-1995), published in 1995, was hailed by Daniel L. Guillory in Library Journal as “critically important.” And Donna Seaman, writing inBooklist, commended the “lyric boldness of this passionate collection.” Kamau Brathwaite described Baraka’s 2004 collection, Somebody Blew up America & Other Poems, as “one more mark in modern Black radical and revolutionary cultural reconstruction.” The book contains Baraka’s controversial poem of the same name, which he wrote as New Jersey’s poet laureate. After the poem’s publication, public outcry became so great that the governor of New Jersey took action to abolish the position. Baraka sued, though the United States Court of Appeals eventually ruled that state officials were immune from such charges.Baraka’s legacy as a major poet of the second half of the 20th century remains matched by his importance as a cultural and political leader. His influence on younger writers has been significant and widespread, and as a leader of the Black Arts movement of the 1960s Baraka did much to define and support black literature’s mission into the next century. His experimental fiction of the 1960s is considered some of the most significant African-American fiction since that of Jean Toomer. Writers from other ethnic groups have credited Baraka with opening “tightly guarded doors” in the white publishing establishment, noted Maurice Kenney in Amiri Baraka: The Kaleidoscopic Torch, who added: “We’d all still be waiting the invitation from the New Yorker without him. He taught us how to claim it and take it.”Baraka was recognized for his work through a PEN/Faulkner Award, a Rockefeller Foundation Award for Drama, and the Langston Hughes Award from City College of New York. He was awarded fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts. Amiri Baraka crossed over on January 9,  2014To visit Amiri Baraka's website CLICK HERE

Ralph Ellison never produced another novel in his lifetime after his magnum opus "Invisible Man," which won the National Book Award in 1953. Did success ruin him? This is one theme in the new biography of Ellison by Arnold Rampersad, the first scholar given complete access to Ellison's papers at the Library of Congress. Rampersad discussed and signed his book, "Ralph Ellison: A Biography," as part of the Books & Beyond author series organized by the Center for the Book in the Library of Congress. The event was co-sponsored by the Library's Manuscript Division. Ellison's story of an unnamed black man in 1940s New York City who struggles to find his identity and place in society won him the National Book Award for fiction and catapulted him to national prominence. Ellison went on to earn many other honors, including two presidential medals and election to the American Academy of Arts and Letters. Yet, his failure to publish a second novel, despite years of striving, haunted him for the rest of his life. Speaker Biography: Arnold Rampersad is Sara Hart Kimball Professional in the Humanities and a member of the Department of English at Stanford University. His books include biographies of Langston Hughes and Jackie Robinson, and he collaborated with Arthur Ashe on his memoir, "Days of Grace." He has written for The New York Times Book Review, The New Republic and The Washington Post and is an elected member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the American Philosophical Society.

As part of our American Perspectives season, distinguished literary scholar and Stanford professor Arnold Rampersad explores the relation ship between jazz and the work of Langston Hughes and Ralph Ellison. His acclaimed study Ralph Ellison: A Biography has been recently published. This podcast is brought to you by the Ancient Art Podcast. Explore more at ancientartpodcast.org.

Arnold Rampersad is the Sara Hart Kimball Professor in the Humanities in Stanford's Department of English. In 1991 he was awarded a John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation fellowship. (May 21, 2007)