“A Culture of Violence and Foodsmells”: Amiri Baraka’s The System of Dante’s Hell and the War on Poverty

One of the most unlikely institutions to benefit from President Johnson’s War on Poverty was the Black Arts Repertory Theatre and School (BARTS) in Harlem, founded by Amiri Baraka (LeRoi Jones), Larry Neal, and others. Its immediate patron was Harlem Youth Opportunities Unlimited, a community action project established under the Kennedy administration to deal with the problems of inner city youth. In the summer of 1965, the Johnson administration channeled over two million dollars into the program, hoping to cool down tempers after the riots of 1964 (Krosney 83). Due to the bureaucratic chaos created by the need to spend so much money in a short period of time, it was relatively easy for Baraka and his compatriots to acquire funding for their venture; in his autobiography, Baraka estimates that “we must have got away with a couple hundred grand and even more in services when it was all over” (307). Throughout the summer, BARTS staged black nationalist street dramas that ritualistically enacted the deaths of liberal whites and integrationist blacks, accompanied by avant-garde jazz by Sun Ra, Albert Ayler, and Archie Shepp. It was not what the architects of the War on Poverty had in mind, and Sargent Shriver eventually terminated the theatre’s funding, denouncing its plays as “scurrilous” and “obscene” (Levine 55). The incident, which drew national attention and helped undermine congressional support for the War on Poverty, dramatized some of the profound differences separating liberal reformers and militant black nationalists in the mid-1960s. Drawing upon cold war social science, community action programs like Harlem Youth Opportunities Unlimited attempted to instill middle-class attitudes in black inner city youth, so as to prepare them for the integrated workforce supposedly opened up by the 1964 Civil Rights Act.¹ For Baraka, in contrast, this attempt to integrate lower-class youth into middle-class society was typical of white liberal and black bourgeois efforts to perpetuate double consciousness amongst impoverished urban blacks. His Black Arts theaters in Harlem and Newark instead encouraged black youth to preserve their cultural differences from the white middle class.

However, Baraka’s literary work from the early-to-mid-1960s also registers some of the affinities between his thinking about black poverty and that of the liberal intellectuals who helped plan out the War on Poverty. These intellectuals were engaged in a shared project—that of rethinking poverty as an identity category, as a distinct culture at odds with the attitudes and values of the rationalistic middle class. This shared project became a common motif in the literature and social science of the 1950s and culminated in 1960s debates about the Great Society. It gave rise to a peculiar kind of welfare politics—one whereby confronting poverty entailed either affirming or rejecting the culture of the poor. In the essay that follows, I will focus on Baraka’s The System of Dante’s Hell, an experimental novel written in the early 1960s and published in 1965. Baraka wrote this novel while he was still a Beat poet living in Greenwich Village, associated with white, avant-garde artists such as Allen Ginsberg, Charles Olson, and Frank O’Hara. However, it is a transitional text, one that moves toward the cultural nationalism that dominated Baraka’s writings from the mid-1960s to the mid-1970s, when he became a third world Marxist. Baraka began work on the novel at about the same time that the idea of a distinct “culture of poverty” began to permeate public discourse in the United States, thanks largely to Michael Harrington’s The Other America (1962), which publicized the existence of widespread poverty to an American middle-class audience. The System of Dante’s Hell exemplifies the similarities between this poverty discourse and the idealization of poor Americans and especially poor African Americans that pervaded the Beat literature of the 1950s and that persisted into Baraka’s cultural nationalism. It also exemplifies the ways in which cultural affirmation of the poor, especially when allied with an avant-garde aesthetic...