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A Black Mass
''A Black Mass'' is a play written by Amiri Baraka and performed at Proctor's Theatre in Newark, New Jersey in 1966. Baraka also recorded a version of the play with Sun Ra's Myth-Science Orchestra in 1968. The play is based on the religious doctrine of Yakub as taught by the Nation of Islam, and it describes the origin of white people according to this doctrine. ''A Black Mass'', written at the beginning of Baraka's involvement in black nationalism and the Black Arts Movement, was a turning point in the artist's career. Conceived as a form of "action literature", the play aimed to raise the political consciousness of Black Americans. Baraka had learned of the Yakub myth from Malcolm X, whose assassination in 1965 likely provided further inspiration for the work. This play is a visceral experience through the use of music and lighting, beginning in a "Jet blackness" accompanied with the "Music of eternal concentration and wisdom" composed by Sun Ra Le Sony'r Ra (born Herman ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Amiri Baraka
Amiri Baraka (born Everett Leroy Jones; October 7, 1934 – January 9, 2014), previously known as LeRoi Jones and Imamu Amear Baraka, was an American writer of poetry, drama, fiction, essays, and music criticism. He was the author of numerous books of poetry and taught at several universities, including the University at Buffalo and Stony Brook University. He received the PEN/Beyond Margins Award in 2008 for ''Tales of the Out and the Gone''. Baraka's plays, poetry, and essays have been described by scholars as constituting defining texts for African-American culture. Baraka's career spanned nearly 52 years, and his themes range from Black liberation to White racism. His notable poems include "The Music: Reflection on Jazz and Blues", "The Book of Monk", and "New Music, New Poetry", works that draw on topics from the worlds of society, music, and literature. Baraka's poetry and writing have attracted both high praise and condemnation. In the African-American community, some ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Play (theatre)
A play is a form of drama that primarily consists of dialogue between Character (arts), characters and is intended for theatre, theatrical performance rather than mere Reading (process), reading. The creator of a play is known as a playwright. Plays are staged at various levels, ranging from London's West End theatre, West End and New York City's Broadway theatre, Broadway – the highest echelons of commercial theatre in the English-speaking world – to Regional theater in the United States, regional theatre, community theatre, and academic productions at universities and schools. A stage play is specifically crafted for performance on stage, distinct from works meant for broadcast or cinematic adaptation. They are presented on a stage before a live audience. Some dramatists, notably George Bernard Shaw, have shown little preference for whether their plays are performed or read. The term "play" encompasses the written texts of playwrights and their complete theatrical renditio ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Newark, New Jersey
Newark ( , ) is the List of municipalities in New Jersey, most populous City (New Jersey), city in the U.S. state of New Jersey, the county seat of Essex County, New Jersey, Essex County, and a principal city of the New York metropolitan area.Table1. New Jersey Counties and Most Populous Cities and Townships: 2020 and 2010 Censuses , New Jersey Department of Labor and Workforce Development. Accessed December 1, 2022.New Jersey County Map , New Jersey Department of State. Accessed December 27, 2022. As of the 2020 U ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Sun Ra
Le Sony'r Ra (born Herman Poole Blount, May 22, 1914 – May 30, 1993), better known as Sun Ra, was an American jazz composer, bandleader, piano and synthesizer player, and poet known for his experimental music, "cosmic" philosophy, prolific output, and theatrical performances. For much of his career, Ra led The Arkestra, an ensemble with an ever-changing name and flexible line-up. Born and raised in Alabama, Blount became involved in the Music of Chicago, Chicago jazz scene during the late 1940s. He soon abandoned his birth name, taking the name Le Sony'r Ra, shortened to Sun Ra (after Ra, the Egyptian god of the Sun). Claiming to be an alien from Saturn on a mission to preach peace, he developed a mythical persona and an idiosyncratic credo that made him a pioneer of Afrofuturism. Throughout his life he denied ties to his prior identity saying, "Any name that I use other than Ra is a pseudonym." His widely eclectic and avant-garde music echoed the entire history of jazz, from ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Yakub (Nation Of Islam)
Yakub (also spelled Yacub or Yaqub) is a figure in the mythology of the Nation of Islam (NOI) and its offshoots. According to the NOI's doctrine, Yakub was a black Meccan scientist who lived 6,600 years ago and created the white race. According to the story, following his discovery of the law of attraction and repulsion, he gathered followers and began the creation of the white race through a form of selective breeding referred to as "grafting" on the island of Patmos; Yakub died at the age of 150, but his followers continued the process after his death. According to the NOI, the white race was created with an evil nature, and were destined to rule over black people for a period of 6,000 years through the practice of "tricknology", which ended in 1914. The story and idea of Yakub originated in the writings of the NOI's founder Wallace Fard Muhammad. Scholars have variously traced its origins in Fard's thought to the idea of the Yakubites propounded by the Moorish Science Te ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Nation Of Islam
The Nation of Islam (NOI) is a religious organization founded in the United States by Wallace Fard Muhammad in 1930. A centralized and hierarchical organization, the NOI is committed to black nationalism and focuses its attention on the African diaspora, especially on African Americans. While describing itself as Islamic and using Islamic terminology, its religious tenets differ substantially from orthodox Islamic schools and branches#African-American movements, Islamic traditions. Religious studies, Scholars of religion characterize it as a new religious movement. The Nation teaches that there has been a succession of mortal gods, each a black man named Allah, of whom Fard Muhammad is the most recent. It claims that the first Allah created the earliest humans, the Arabic-speaking, dark-skinned Tribe of Shabazz, whose members possessed inner divinity and from whom all Person of color, people of color descend. It maintains that a scientist named Yakub (Nation of Islam), Yakub ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
White People
White is a Race (human categorization), racial classification of people generally used for those of predominantly Ethnic groups in Europe, European ancestry. It is also a Human skin color, skin color specifier, although the definition can vary depending on context, nationality, ethnicity and point of view. Description of populations as "White" in reference to their skin color is occasionally found in Greco-Roman ethnography and other ancient or medieval sources, but these societies did not have any notion of a White race or pan-European identity. The term "White race" or "White people", defined by their light skin among other physical characteristics, entered the major European languages in the later seventeenth century, when the concept of a "unified White" achieved greater acceptance in Europe, in the context of racialization, racialized slavery and social status in the European colonies. Scholarship on Race (human categorization), race distinguishes the modern concept from ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Black Nationalism
Black nationalism is a nationalist movement which seeks representation for Black people as a distinct national identity, especially in racialized, colonial and postcolonial societies. Its earliest proponents saw it as a way to advocate for democratic representation in culturally plural societies or to establish self-governing independent nation-states for Black people. Modern Black nationalism often aims for the social, political, and economic empowerment of Black communities within white majority societies, either as an alternative to assimilation or as a way to ensure greater representation and equality within predominantly Eurocentric cultures. As an ideology, Black nationalism encompasses a diverse range of beliefs which have variously included forms of economic, political and cultural nationalism, or pan-nationalism. It often overlaps with, but is distinguished from, similar concepts and movements such as Pan-Africanism, Ethiopianism, the back-to-Africa move ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Black Arts Movement
The Black Arts Movement (BAM) was an African Americans, African-American-led art movement that was active during the 1960s and 1970s. Through activism and art, BAM created new cultural institutions and conveyed a message of black pride. The movement expanded from the accomplishments of artists of the Harlem Renaissance. Famously referred to by Larry Neal as the "aesthetic and spiritual sister of Black Power", BAM applied these same political ideas to Visual arts, art and literature. and artists found new inspiration in their African heritage as a way to present the African-American culture, black experience in America. Artists such as Aaron Douglas (artist), Aaron Douglas, Hale Woodruff, and Meta Vaux Warrick Fuller pioneered the movement with a distinctly modernist aesthetic. This style influenced the proliferation of African American art during the twentieth century. The poet and playwright Amiri Baraka is widely recognized as the founder of BAM. In 1965, he established the ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Political Consciousness
Following the work of Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Karl Marx outlined the workings of a political consciousness. The politics of consciousness Consciousness typically refers to the idea of a being who is self-aware. It is a distinction often reserved for human beings. This remains the original and most common usage of the term. For Marx, consciousness describes a person's political sense of self. That is, consciousness describes a person's awareness of politics. For Marx, an authentic consciousness was linked to understanding one's true position in History. While Hegel placed God behind the workings of consciousness in people, Marx saw the political economy as the engine of mind. In the 20th century, many social movements and intellectuals have developed this use of consciousness. False consciousness In Marx's view, consciousness was always political, for it was always the outcome of politic-economic circumstances. What one thinks of life, power, and self, for Marx, is ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
African Americans
African Americans, also known as Black Americans and formerly also called Afro-Americans, are an American racial and ethnic group that consists of Americans who have total or partial ancestry from any of the Black racial groups of Africa. African Americans constitute the second largest ethno-racial group in the U.S. after White Americans. The term "African American" generally denotes descendants of Africans enslaved in the United States. In 2023, an estimated 48.3 million people self-identified as Black, making up 14.4% of the country’s population. This marks a 33% increase since 2000, when there were 36.2 million Black people living in the U.S. African-American history began in the 16th century, with Africans being sold to European slave traders and transported across the Atlantic to the Western Hemisphere. They were sold as slaves to European colonists and put to work on plantations, particularly in the southern colonies. A few were able to achieve freedom th ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Malcolm X
Malcolm X (born Malcolm Little, later el-Hajj Malik el-Shabazz; May 19, 1925 – February 21, 1965) was an African American revolutionary, Islam in the United States, Muslim minister and human rights activist who was a prominent figure during the civil rights movement until Assassination of Malcolm X, his assassination in 1965. A spokesman for the Nation of Islam (NOI) until 1964, after which he left the movement, he was a vocal advocate for Black empowerment and the promotion of Islam within the African American community. He is also a celebrated figure within African American and Muslim communities for his pursuit of racial justice. Malcolm spent his adolescence living in a series of foster homes and with various relatives, after his father's death and his mother's hospitalization. He committed various crimes, being sentenced to eight to ten years in prison in 1946 for larceny and burglary. In prison, he joined the Nation of Islam, adopting the name Malcolm X to ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
