Still a Revolutionary …

Abstract

The conversation below is a follow-up to Christopher Bigsby's interview with Amiri Baraka, published in Theatre Quarterly three decades ago, in 1978. It was recorded in the artist's backstage room in Katowice, Poland, immediately after a moving performance of the Amiri Baraka Speech Quartet in the Hipnoza Jazz Club in Katowice, during the ‘Ars Cameralis Silesiae Superioris’ Festival in 2009. The interlocutors were accompanied by a leading jazz pianist, Dave Burrell, and an excellent double bass player, William Parker. The interview, originally carried out for the Er(r)go: Journal of Theory, Culture and Literary Studies, was possible thanks to the help and encouragement of one of the most inspiring Polish contemporary poets, Bartek Majzel, an unswerving propagator of culture in Silesia and throughout Poland. Paweł Jędrzejko is an Assistant Professor at the University of Silesia in Katowice. He is the author of Liquidity and Existence: the Experience of the Land and the Sea in Herman Melville's Thought (Sosnowiec-Katowice-Zabrze: BananaArt.Pl/ExMachina/MStudio, 2008). He is also a co-founder and co-editor of the Review of International American Studies and regularly works with Er(r)go Quarterly.