Like my first book, this volume has its origins in my dissertation. I had the great fortune to study political science at Yale University during the late 1970s and early 1980s. The political science department gave me the freedom to engage my humanist sensibilities, an act of intellectual toleration that went against the prevailing tendencies in the discipline. I want to thank my committee of Robert Lane, Juan Linz, and particularly David Apter, the chairman, for helping guide a confused graduate student through the bureaucracy of academia and doing so in a way that provided the space for me to follow my curiosity. In addition, I benefited from the intellectual generosity of Douglas Rae, James Scott, Stanley Greenberg, and the late Philip White.
While writing this work, I received encouragement and intellectual support from many friends and acquaintances, including associates from my Yale days: Horace Porter, Carla Carr, Frank Gonzales, Randall Kennedy, Adolph Reed, Eileen Hormel, Angelo Messore, Rabbi Arnold Wolfe, Marcus Bruce, Eugene Rivers, Henry Louis Gates, Norris Sakwe-Mante, Isabelle Gunning, Mary Davis, Deborah King, and the late Carl Price. I also benefited from my association with Kathy Rees, Larry Jackson, Helura Lyle, Tanya Green, Paul Kumar, Kris Graves, Eric Greene, Ethan Flad, Eve Goldberg, Fred Montas, Natalie Difloff, Joy Anderson, Nina Karnovsky, Steve Vacarro, Lisa Freeman, Alford Young, Carla O’Connor, Amy Randall, Beau Dunning, Josh Freely, “L.T.,” Maureen Kay, Tanya Jones, Denise Burgher, the Whitters family, and former Wesleyan colleagues: Robert O’Meally, Peter Marx, Georgie Leone, Barbara Craig, Steven Gregory, Michael Harris, Ollie Holmes, Clarence Walker, Marshall Hyatt, Nat and Erness Brody, Alex Dupuy, Richard Williams, Robert Wood, and Mary Ann Clawson. Lee Siegel’s unsolicited close reading of a very early version of this manuscript was a true gift. Dan Clawson and Gerald Gill have been two constant sources of encouragement and sanity. To Pop Kantor in Norfolk, I owe a special thanks for supplying me with good bourbon and good books. For almost three decades David Evans has helped me stay grounded. To Martin Kilson I owe a debt of immense gratitude for the time, energy, and spirit he has invested in me for a quarter century. Jackie Lindsay was there at the beginning. Melvin Fowler, E. J. Davis, and Melvin Maddox were inexhaustible suppliers of good conversation. Emma Ketteringham and Amy Randall remain foundational, though my behavior doesn’t show it. Ashley Hammarth, Erin Blakeley, Roberta Gold, Jill Kantor, Stephanie Mandell, and Sandy Sydlo persist as soulmates. Although I can do without Mandell’s terrible jokes, I do miss her. During the writing of this book, Lisa and Steve, Al and Carla, Kris and Fred and Joy have added new members to the American intellectual community. Congrats!
I want to thank supportive Trinity colleagues: Vijay Prashad, Raymond Baker, Joan Hendrick, Susan Pennybacker, Berel Lang, Steve Valocchi, Carol Clark, Renny Fulco, Laurie Waite, Noreen Channels, Hugh Ogden, Clinton Bailey, Dave Winer, Jack Chatfield, Stephanie Chambers, Peter Burns, Wally Swist, Maryam Elahi, Cheryl Greenberg, Ronald Spencer, Dianne Zannoni, and, gone but not forgotten, Lynn Tallit, Naomi Amos, Jeffrey Melnick, Van Gosse, Maurice Jackson, Jack Waggett, Hank Lewis, and Salim Washington. Different as “night and day,” Johnny Williams and Margo Perkins have added humor, vitality, and a healthy dose of skepticism to my life at Trinity. Judy Moran is the only known spirit-replenishing mathematician. Barbara Sicherman and Dina Anselmi have been two of Trinity’s gifts to my life. Dear and special friends, Barbara and Dina have tried to keep me whole through their humor, generosity, and critical introspection. Both have taught me a great deal about the expansiveness and intimacy of friendship. Whereas Barbara has a knack for expecting answers to endless questions about things of great and minor significance, Dina is the only person that I know who enjoys, more than I do, baiting people into arguments over minutia. Barb, I can’t remember! Dina, you win! With love, I celebrate the deviance of both women. Manijeh Zavareei, a kind, decent, and thoughtful colleague who died far too prematurely, will always be remembered for, among other things, trying to teach me how to write my name in Farsi.
My immediate and extended families have always supported my intellectual ambitions. I want to thank Maria and James Watts, my mother and father, for the love they have always given me. I also give them credit for my various neuroses. I have been blessed to have my brothers James and Robert; my sister Brenda, and my nephews Jim, Gregory, and Michael. I also want to thank my in-laws—Bil Wright, Jean Powell Watts, Beckett Logan, Robynne West, Richard Perkins, Karen Amore and Estelle Amore, my “main man” Kyle, and Ravae, my favorite and very special niece. My late Uncle James and Aunt Sally were always among my most avid supporters—as is my Aunt Julia. Paula West’s spiritedness will never be forgotten.
Cornel West, Werner Sollors, Traci C. West, Gerald Hudson, Michelle Wallace, Martin Luther Kilson, Farah Griffin, and James A. Miller have significantly informed my view of Baraka. Miller, a former Trinity College colleague, will probably reject most of the findings and arguments in this book. Because of that as well as his friendship with Baraka, I threatened to write here: “Jim Miller has been singularly responsible for shaping all the assessments contained within.” Jokes aside, I could not have written this book without the writings of Werner Sollors, Kim Benston, Henry Lacey, Houston Baker, William J. Harris, David Smith, Lloyd Brown, Harold Cruse, Theodore Hudson, and Komozi Woodard.
While this book is highly critical of Amiri Baraka, it should be clear that I think that his intellectual journey was one of the pathbreaking models for my generation. I thank him for giving us a corpus of works worthy of serious engagement. More important, I salute him for living a life full of risks and the resultant bruises, regrets, and bumps.
The staff at the Moorland-Spingarn Collection of Howard University deserve special thanks, particularly Joellen El-Bashir. Similar thanks go to the prints and photographs division of the Schomburg Library. I also am grateful to Eric Zinner and Despina Papazoglou Gimbel at New York University Press. Werner Sollors has once again shown phenomenal generosity toward me.
This book is dedicated to Traci Cassandra West, a true companion, advocate for justice, and partner in crimes of political opposition. Traci was present when this project began as a thesis prospectus. From its very inception she steadfastly insisted that I grapple with issues of feminism not only in my life but in my work. In sharing her life with me, she inspired and reinforced whatever ethical impulses I now have. Most important, she helped me recognize that the goal of writing is not to hit flies with sledgehammers. In helping me control my abundantly endowed demons, particularly crude ambition, an unbridled desire for acclaim, and a resilient will to compare myself with others, I have become far more capable of accepting the limits and unpredictability of life. No means exist to adequately convey my gratitude to her for steadfastly contesting my sense of life as a burden.