Liner notes evolved during the twentieth century as a new genre of music writing, one that served as both a compliment and a complement to the pioneering jazz recordings it set out to describe. Prior to the purchase of a jazz album, liner notes gave consumers a preview of the sounds they would soon hear (and the messages they might receive). As decades passed, some liner notes became as memorable as the albums they graced. When writers as diverse as Ira Gitler, Amiri Baraka, and Stanley Crouch emerged as tastemakers in jazz circles, it was not only for their music criticism, but also for the liner notes they placed on albums by John Coltrane, Billie Holiday, and Wynton Marsalis. This essay considers a host of writers who made liner notes a key factor within jazz culture, and within American discourse more generally.

Aimee Zygmonski provides a close reading of Amiri Baraka’s play Dutchman followed by a study of the creation of his Black Arts Repertory Theatre to provide an insider perspective into the development of the Black Arts Movement. Her study of Baraka’s racial and political awakening as represented in the increasing self-awareness of his character Clay allows her to identify emergent themes that would eventually inform “the Movement.” Although the Black Arts Movement did not last long, Zygmonski asserts that the awakened consciousness that resulted from this flurry of activity “reverberate[s]” in the works of more contemporary and present-day artists.

Sandra L. Richards shares a hemispheric approach to understanding African American theatre. Centering the writings of Canadian, US, and Caribbean playwrights, she moves not only across the Americas but also the twentieth century. Richards identifies the similar concerns of geographically and temporally separated playwrights as markers of African Diaspora drama. Among the salient features of this category, which includes dramatic works by Amiri Baraka, Djanet Sears, August Wilson, and Aimé Césaire, among others, are plays that retain African cultural elements, depict resistance to colonial governing, and circulate a common or shared understanding of the operations of Blackness within a particular political moment.

This chapter addresses the flowering of African American poetry that occurs from 1945 to 1970 against the backdrop of the Civil Rights Movement and in the context of a period of tumultuous change in the history of race relations in America. The chapter discusses how poets such as Robert Hayden, Gwendolyn Brooks, and Amiri Baraka grapple in various ways with fraught questions about aesthetics, race, identity, and politics. The chapter examines the emergence of the influential and controversial movement known as the Black Arts Movement (led by poets including Baraka, Sonia Sanchez, and Nikki Giovanni) in the context of the turbulent racial violence and social justice movements of the 1960s.

This chapter examines Langston Hughes’s long-neglected service as a literary ambassador. Focusing on Hughes’s 1965 trip to France and his 1966 visit to Senegal, the chapter demonstrates that the eminent poet used Cold War cultural diplomacy to promote Black internationalist connection and, more surprisingly, to express his political and aesthetic disagreements with an incipient Black Arts Movement.

In Chapter 4, I consider how poets reconfigured the long-play stereo album and challenged the spatial limits of the printed book. In particular, I turn to Langston Hughes’s LP book Ask Your Mama: 12 Moods for Jazz (1961) and Amiri Baraka’s poetry album It’s Nation Time (1972), recorded for Motown’s Black Forum label, in order to discuss how the stereo LP opened new black sonic spaces at a contentious moment in history. While many poets made recordings during the 1960s, what distinguishes these works is their ongoing dialogue with the specificities of stereo sound, the LP, and sound in its spatial dimensions. Part of what is radical about a stereophonic poetic is the way that it opens a space within a space -- one that sits neither inside nor outside history.

An argument about the interpretation of black atlantic music is used here to articulate a joyful and shamelessly sentimental response to the dry defaults of ‘afropessimist’ thinking. An extended discussion of the relationship between music and freedom provides a means to explore the possibility of a dissident politics of culture articulated in terms derived from the vexed history of organised musical sound.