About Japan Black Studies Association since 1954

The Project on the History of Black Writing is pleased to welcome our colleagues from the Japanese Black Studies Association, one of the oldest professional organizations in the field.

[By Tsunehiko Kato]


Japan Black Studies Association was founded in 1954, the year of the Supreme Court decision in America. But it was not the founders’ intention to be timely. Rather, the establishment had its own root in Japanese context. Objectively speaking, the Association was part of newly liberated larger social and academic movements in Japan for enhancement of democracy, peace and human rights in the post-war and the emergent cold-war period. Although people were very poor, this period had liberating effects upon Japanese intellectuals after the long winter of militarism and oppression of speech. The encounter with American democracy and culture was the important part of the liberating effects. But some intellectuals were aware that even in democratic America, there were people who had been excluded from it. It seems to be not an accident that JBSA started from Kobe where there were two kinds of U.S. military bases, that is, one for white soldiers and another for black soldiers. Those people who created JBSA were also aware that a post-colonial world was emerging in Africa as well as in Asia and Latin America. They were keen on learning from their history and experience. So JBSA had from the start an interdisciplinary approach as well as post-colonial concerns. 

Tribute to Amiri Baraka

[By Gregg Murray]

I was assigned William J. Harris’s very well-organized The Leroi Jones/Amiri Baraka Reader for Maria Damon’s African-American Poetries class, and until that point his names meant nothing to me. Now, this is in some ways an indictment of my undergraduate coursework in English. But I was an undergrad after all, dogearing my way through the classics, the ‘important’ literature, literature with a seal of approval, the canons of centuries past, and stacking up what I thought I was supposed to read to be educated in this field. But please do not think I exaggerate when I say this: there is no poet more important than Amiri Baraka. It is counterproductive to create hierarchies of greatness, to claim one writer or thinker or visionary is better than another. So, I hope you’ll forgive my indulgence at this emotional time. Amiri Baraka is not only important; he is the very best we had.

GOODNIGHT, SWEET PRINCE AND FLIGHTS OF ANGELS SING THEE TO THY REST: A FEW NOTES ON AMIRI BARAKA

[By William J. Harris]


"If my letter re your poem sounded crusader and contentious I’m sorry. But I have gone deep, and gotten caught with images of the world, that exists, or that will be here after we go. I have not the exquisite objectivity of circumstance. The calm precise mind of Luxury. . . . I can’t sleep. And I do not believe in all this relative shit. There is a right and a wrong. A good and a bad. And it’s up to me, you, all of the so called minds, to find out. It is only knowledge of things that will bring this ‘moral earnestness’.”

--Amiri Baraka to Edward Dorn, 1961

THE WESTERN PHILOSPHER

He shits

And doesn’t

Even notice

It

He has

His mind

On the stars

Warning

Don’t

Let him

Sit

On your head

--William J. Harris

It is hard to believe but the great poet, Amiri Baraka’s funeral will be on this Saturday, January 18 in Newark. It is hard to believe he has left us so soon. Each time I saw him he was so alive and vital, especially in performance. He was a fighter and an artist to the end.

Remembering Alvin Aubert and Amiri Baraka

[By Jerry W. Ward, Jr.]

My introduction to Leroi Jones was reading “The End of Man is His Beauty” and “A Poem for Democrats” in 1963 in Rosey E. Pool’s anthology Beyond the Blues (Hand and Flower Press 1962). In the head note, Jones asserted that writing “beautiful poems full of mystical sociology and abstract politics” was among his ambitions. Five years later at Fort Knox, I read the anthology Black Fire, a confirmation that focused anger has purpose. When I began teaching at Tougaloo College in the fall of 1970, Home: Social Essays by LeRoi Jones was one of the textbooks in my freshman composition course. My students had to debate why Negro literature was a myth and what black writing should be. Reading Jones before and after he became Amiri Baraka and using the terrible beauty of his mind as a touchstone for engaged cultural work was simply normal for me. Keeping up with his prodigious output was mission impossible; deciding how to deal with his ideological shifts and transformations of identity was hard work. But he was teaching me constantly that nothing worth having in our tradition of perpetual struggle comes easily, I can’t mark the year in the 1980s when I finally met Baraka, but I was relieved to discover this intellectual giant was not a man to be feared but a man with whom I could have civil discourses, with whom I could laugh and joke, with whom I could celebrate the complexities of being human. It sufficed that he would lend me his ear as I struggled with the immense range of his creativity. He was the master craftsman and teacher who taught me invaluable lessons about tradition and commitment. Baraka far exceeded his early ambitions and gave America a matchless body of engaged writing.