Black sonic space and the stereophonic poetics of Amiri Baraka’s It’s Nation Time

Abstract

In the liner notes for Amiri Baraka’s 1972 album It’s Nation Time (Motown-Black Forum), Baraka asserts, ‘This recording is an institution.’ Recording on the heels of the 1970 Congress of African People, Baraka felt that the establishment of a pan-African nation was paramount, but where ought such a nation to be established? Could a recording be an institution? What does a nation sound like? The album, which received a limited release under Motown’s progressive Black Forum label, mixes poetry with free jazz, African drumming, and R&B–melding together the popular with avant-garde and traditional forms of black music. In doing so, It’s Nation Time attempts to re-inflect black life with a proud African ancestry and spirituality. In this article, I explore how Baraka uses the format of the stereo LP to push beyond the constrictions of place and history in order to produce a new, contingent black sonic space. The acoustic spaces Baraka inhabits are projective, hyperbolic, and imagined, and reflect a development in the studio stereo recording that took place around this time as engineers discovered that sonic spaces could not only be reproduced but manipulated and produced. As I show, It’s Nation Time strives toward a theory of sonic space that might redefine the parameters of a national space and create a new conception of blackness.