Amiri Baraka’s Signed Copy of "Reggae or Not!" First Independent Printing, on Revolution, Music, and Black Internationalism, 1981

Amiri Baraka

First Edition

Amiri Baraka’s signed Reggae or Not! from 1981, written during the poet’s Third World Marxist period and organized around reggae as a vehicle for examining cultural production, political commitment, and Black internationalism. Baraka had moved from Black cultural nationalism toward Marxism during the 1970s, retaining music as a central analytical and poetic language through which to address race, class, and revolutionary struggle. His signature across the title page distinguishes this first separate printing of a collection later incorporated into Transbluesency: The Selected Poems of Amiri Baraka/LeRoi Jones, where it appears within the principal chronology of his poetry.

Baraka, Amiri. Reggae or Not! New York: Contact II Publications, 1981. Signed by Amiri Baraka across the title page. First separate printing outside the magazine issue. 22 pages. The copyright notice states that the book “was originally published as a special supplement to Contact II, a bimonthly review of poetry, summer 1981.” Cover drawing by Teresa Berasi; typesetting furnished through Dan Cooper; printed in the United States by Bob Trapanese at Reliable Press in New York. The wrapper design places the title above a field of crosses bearing the repeated word “Submission,” connecting the collection’s musical subject to Baraka’s critique of cultural and political domination. Google Books records the Contact II edition as a 22 page illustrated chapbook issued in 1981.

The collection belongs to the period following Baraka’s public adoption of Marxism in the mid 1970s, when he redirected the cultural politics of the Black Arts Movement through class analysis and international anticolonial struggle. Reggae offered a form shaped by Jamaican working class experience, Rastafarian thought, African diasporic consciousness, and resistance to state and economic power, while also raising the question posed by Baraka’s title: whether the circulation of a revolutionary music necessarily carries revolutionary politics with it. The separate chapbook preserves the collection in its original independent publishing context, before its later republication within Baraka’s selected poems. Stapled illustrated wrappers measuring 8 x 6½ inches; staples intact; interior legible and free of markings or stains; signature clear. Overall very good condition. A signed first separate printing locating reggae within Baraka’s work on synthesizing Black music, Marxist analysis, and revolutionary poetic form.

Item #23652

Price: $350.00