Jazz griots

Description:

"Jazz Griots studies how four representative African American poets of the 1960s, Langston Hughes, Umbra's David Henderson, and the Black Arts Movement's Sonia Sanchez and Amiri Baraka engage, in the tradition of griots, in poetic dialogues with aesthetics, music, politics, and black history. In so doing they narrate--using jazz as meta-language--genealogies, etymologies, cultural legacies, and black (hi)stories. In intersecting and complementary ways, Hughes, Henderson, Sanchez, and Baraka fashioned their griotism from theorizations of artistry as political engagement, and in turn formulated a black aesthetic based on jazz performativity: on a series of jazz-infused iterations that form a complex pattern of literary, musical, historical, and political moments in constant cross-fertilizing dialogues. This form of poetic call-and-response becomes a definitional literary template for these poets, as it allows both the possibility of intergenerational dialogues between poets and musicians and dialogic potential between song and politics, between Africa and Black America, between vernacular continuums"--Page 4 of cover.

subjects: African American authors,  Rhythm,  Jazz in literature,  Intellectual life,  History and criticism,  English language,  American poetry,  Griots,  African Americans,  American poetry, african american authors, history and criticism,  African americans, intellectual life,  English language, rhythm

Times: 20th century