"[A] generous and generative work that positions Baraka as a listener and singer/vocalizer as well as a reader and writer. Smethurst invites us to think about Baraka's intellectual production with and about music as a sustained engagement with Marxist thought . Brick City Vanguard gestures toward exciting articulations of Black studies and cultural studies."-- American Literary History " Brick City Vanguard equips readers to take seriously, at long last, the entire career of a major writer-activist, one whose abiding concerns remain before us today."-- African American Review "Through a critical reassessment of the way Amiri Baraka came to understand and perform Black art while reecting the diversity of its social and political thought, Smethurst offers a novel approach to reinterpreting Baraka's cultural legacy."-- Journal of African American History "An illuminating work about a central figure in the Black Arts Movement."-- CHOICE "Once again, with Brick City Vanguard , James Smethurst proves that he is one of the leading scholars of the Black Arts Movement, of New Left literary studies, and of one of its emblematic writers, Amiri Baraka."-- Jean-Philippe Marcoux , cofounder of the Amiri Baraka Society and author of Jazz Griots: Music as History in the 1960s African American Poem "James Smethurst has read everything on Baraka and produced an original and important book.

Brick City Vanguard is a major contribution to the field."-- William J. Harris , author of The Poetry and Poetics of Amiri Baraka: The Jazz Aesthetic.