Jazz Griots Music as History in the 1960s African American Poem

This study is about how four representative African American poets in the 1960s,Langston Hughes, Umbra's David Henderson, and the Black Arts Movement's SoniaSanchez, and Amiri Baraka engage, in the tradition of African griots, in poetic dialogueswith aesthetics, music, politics, and Black History, and in so doing narrate, using jazz asmeta-language, genealogies, etymologies, cultural legacies, and Black (hi)stories. Inintersecting and complementary ways, Hughes, Henderson, Sanchez, and Barakafashioned their griotism from theorizations of artistry as political engagement, and, inturn, formulated a Black aesthetic based on jazz performativity a series of jazz-infusediterations that form a complex pattern of literary, musical, historical, and politicalmoments in constant cross-fertilizing dialogues with one another. This form of poeticcall-and-response is essential for it allows the possibility of intergenerational dialoguesbetween poets and musicians as well as dialogical potential between song and politics,between Africa and Black America, within the poems. More importantly, these jazzdialogisms underline the construction of the Black Aesthetic as conceptualizedrespectively by the griotism of Hughes, of Henderson, and of Sanchez and Baraka.

Jean-Philippe Marcoux is professor of American literature at university Laval in Quebec, Canada.