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The Black Arts Movement of the 1960s has been criticized for substituting a neo-African essentialism for what was identified as Western essentialism. Henry Louis Gates, Jr., is among those who have critiqued the Black Arts Movement for promoting a "poetics rooted in a social realism, indeed, in a sort of mimeticism," in which the "relation between black art and black life was a direct one" (102). In place of the sociopolitical and empirical binarism of black and white, Gates advocates understanding "race" in the postmodernist terms of a "trope" in which the categories of black and white are not preconstituted. Amiri Baraka's work has been seen, from this postmodernist position, as advocating an essentialist and unproblematic conception of black identity.
This essay attempts to rethink the question of Baraka's binarism. The argument is that, while Baraka's retributive logic is focused on the need for assertion of ethnic and racial identity, his work also reveals complex negotiations with such binary categories as black/white and art/activism. In his essays and theoretical pronouncements Baraka sets up a fixed, non-dialectic opposition between black and white, and the categories have the double load of racial and metaphysical meaning. The white Western usage of black as a signifier of evil, death, and darkness is directly reversed, and white is made to carry the suggestions of sickness, death, and absence. When we analyze blackness in Baraka, we realize that it is both the goal to be passionately struggled for, and the innate being of the African American. The impassioned rhetoric that is built up in Baraka's essays around the terms black and white often projects the two worlds as mutually and self-evidently exclusive. Below the level of passionate rhetoric, however, the categories remain tenuously defined and shifting. Quite often the terms beg the question. "The Black Man must aspire to Blackness," says Baraka in "The Legacy of Malcolm X" (Home 248). If blackness is both the natural and the ideal state, then the term black evidently is not definitive, and needs to be defined. The charge of Baraka's propounding "black essentialism" also needs further examination, since the polarization of white and black in his work may be more apparent and strategic than real.
Rejection of the White World
What was the significance...