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...of oppression. Subsequent critical discussion has done little to correct this, despite the crucial links between class and race made by Malcolm X shortly before his death. But the paths indicated by Malcolm are now being challengingly developed by one of the most exciting of this new generation of poets, the Afro-Puerto Rican writer Tony Medina. Combining a visceral political sensibility with a dynamic, improvisatory aesthetic, Medina's work speaks with urgency of the realities of life in the ghetto and the barrio and the need for radical, activist struggle.
Keywords: Baraka, Black Arts Movement, exteriorismo, hip-hop, people of colour, poetry, Walter Benjamin
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The tradition of the oppressed teaches us that the 'state of emergency' in which we live is not the exception but the rule. We must attain to a conception of history that is in keeping with this insight. Then we shall clearly realize that it is our task to bring about a real state of emergency.
--Walter Benjamin, Illuminations (1)
Eldridge Cleaver says ironically in Soul on Ice that no people have tried harder to be American than black people. (2) From David Walker and Sojourner Truth down to Malcolm X and Angela Davis, the principles of egalitarian democracy, the rights to free speech and free association and the right to education have been fought for and defended by African Americans with an intensity and steadfastness unmatched by their Euro-American counterparts. This is the story of two of the most important intellectual works of the twentieth century, C. L. R. James's The Black Jacobins and W. E. B. DuBois's Black Reconstruction, texts that take up the task of bringing about a real state of emergency in the struggle for freedom and that are grounded in and formative of the revolutionary tradition of the oppressed.
The debate on the meaning of Malcolm's legacy--dubbed 'the reemergence of Malcolm' by Joe Wood, who edited the best of the critical re-evaluations of Malcolm, Malcolm X." in our own image (3)--coincided with the Los Angeles uprising of spring 1992. Today, a return to this explosive conjuncture might appear an exercise in nostalgia, especially considering the stultifying reactionary climate in which we all live. Yet the intellectual energy that generated the Malcolm revival is still active, embodied in the writing of a new generation of black creative artists. In a moment, I want to turn to one writer in particular, Tony Medina, who was at the forefront of the Malcolm revival back in the early 1990s and who, today, has thirteen books to his name, a well-deserved reputation both nationally and internationally as an audience-scorching stand-up poet, a doctorate and a professorship of English at Howard University.
During the early stages of Malcolm's re-emergence, Amiri Baraka warned against the cultural nationalist tendency to 'racialise' Malcolm. Baraka had done this himself as a co-founder of the 1960s Black Arts Movement, a cultural upsurge that came in direct response to Malcolm's assassination in 1965. For instance, in his sharp critique of Spike Lee's provisional plan for the making of his Malcolm X film, Baraka argued that the failure of racial nationalism was its abstract concept of emancipation. (4) For Baraka, Lee's omission of Malcolm's break with racial nationalism in the last years of his life would simply repeat the same mistakes that Baraka himself had made as an artist in the 1960s. According to Baraka, among the pitfalls of the Black Arts Movement was an inadequate critique of 'race', which came at the expense of a class analysis of white racial oppression. (5)
The structure of Wood's anthology suggested that Baraka's position on Malcolm's contribution to the struggle for black equality--that it remains crucial because of the concrete organic interconnections that Malcolm made between class oppression and racial oppression--was a minority one. For the most part, the revival of critical interest in Malcolm and the analysis of black struggle in the 1990s remained within a set of specialised disciplines, with Cornel West in critical theory, Arnold Rampersad in black historiography, Angela Davis in black feminist studies, Robin Kelley in cultural studies and Greg Tate out of the new school of black postmodernism. Apart from Baraka's essay in Wood's volume, 'Malcolm as ideology', no critic has argued that Malcolm's importance lies in the historic attempt he made in the last years of his life to construct an ideological front that could involve intellectuals and cultural producers directly in revolutionary, anti-white supremacist, anti-capitalist activism. Baraka insisted that it was by breaking with black cultural nationalism--'blackness' as ideology--that Malcolm was able to redirect strategically the movement of black liberation struggle: 'It is like the paradox of "Blackness as an ideology"', wrote Baraka, 'in that it is the most superficial i.d. of the nation, classless and ultimately deceptive. Both Buthelezi and Mandela are "Black." Like Roy Innis and Malcolm X.' (6)
Baraka's criticisms of Lee are also significant in other ways. First, Baraka forced a recognition of the ongoing class struggle in the realm of black art and literature. Contrary to what many of the 'postcolonial', 'post-Marxist' and 'post-structuralist' schools are saying, class struggle in art and literature is far from diffuse or 'undecideable', to use a popular Foucauldianism: the US ruling-class apparatus of cultural production still shapes who says what, what they say and how they say it. Thus, Lee's ideological backwardness, Baraka argued, is a product of his class stance. And because Baraka is so often alone today as an African American artist and intellectual in his insistence on the need to build an ideological front that is founded on a class-struggle theory of race, gender and nation, black political art has, since the days of the Black Arts Movement, been diverted from the project of building a new American socialist popular culture.
Second, Baraka's analysis of Lee and the new African American intelligentsia raised the question of art and politics in relation to the situation of youth of colour in the US; after all, it was hip-hop culture that generated the popular appreciation of Malcolm's legacy necessary for the making of a blockbuster Hollywood film of Malcolm's life by an independent black filmmaker. The fact that no one bothered to ask Baraka to explain his specific reasons for opposing Lee's making of the film which would have included a discussion of the contradictory role of hip-hop in creating, on the one hand, the climate necessary for a serious engagement with Malcolm's political thought, and, on the other, the unguarded aesthetic means by which media conglomerates could mass-market his image back...
NOTE: All illustrations and photos
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