This book represents a new perspective to the study of Amiri Baraka's black nationalist literary works of the 1960s. It emphasizes the centrality of the East with reference to the Middle East and ancient Africa to Baraka's black nationalist politics, activities and beliefs. Baraka always connected the liberation of black Americans to the East. His awareness of the East, the book shows, arose from the necessity to de-historicize the current black American history, a history of enslavement, suffering and acculturation. Baraka always advocated the need for black Americans to create an...