Contested Lineages: Fred Moten, Terrance Hayes, and the Legacy of Amiri Baraka

This essay argues that Amiri Baraka is a crucial touchstone by which poets Fred Moten and Terrance Hayes convey their distinct aesthetic and sociopolitical commitments. Illuminating Moten’s and Hayes’s engagements with Baraka—particularly the inextricable relationship he maps between black music, poetry, and sociopolitical change—the essay complicates the literary genealogy recently advanced by Charles Rowell in Angles of Ascent: A Norton Anthology of Contemporary African American Poetry (2013), which elides Baraka’s influence. Instead, I emphasize Baraka’s lasting significance for Moten, Hayes, and by extension, a broad spectrum of twenty-first-century African American writers.