Abstract
This essay articulates Amiri Baraka's relationship to humanist universalism through his work as a theatermaker, in particular through his play A Black Mass. Baraka's Black nationalist writings are infused with humanist assumptions despite the apparent contradiction between humanist universalism and nationalist separatism. The essay nominates as poietic the form of humanism that Baraka values, meaning that, for Baraka, humans imagine new worlds into existence from materials taken by the world as it is. This poietic humanism values contingency, invention, and impermanence and refuses essentialisms. The essay begins by drawing from Baraka's essays on theater the claim that the work, or action, of revolutionary art is to set into motion a doubling, to produce oppositions that remain unsettled. Next is an extended reading of Baraka's play A Black Mass, first staged in New Jersey in 1966, which he uses to settle philosophical scores with the Nation of Islam. Although the play borrows its plot from the Nation of Islam's myth of Yakub, which casts the white race as fundamentally monstrous, A Black Mass resists a vision of history as racial destiny. It does so, first, by staging the production of the human as a category of exclusion and so critiquing the process of racialization, and second, by rooting its tragic plot structure in a break between the expressive self and the poietic community. The essay's conclusion briefly contextualizes Baraka's poietic humanism within late 1960s debates among nationalist and Negritude thinkers, suggesting Frantz Fanon as an important influence and reasserting a dynamic approach to racial difference in Baraka's vision of Black art.
