"The Proprioceptive Probe": Amiri Baraka's New Ark in Tales and Tales of the Out and the Gone

Abstract:

Amiri Baraka reimagines his hometown, Newark, as a mythical New Ark in his fiction, Tales (1967) and the Tales of the Out and the Gone (2007), as a symbolic source wherefrom Black people reinvent themselves. At the basis of the poet’s spatial vision lies a culturally specific proprioceptive impulse, an attention to the real-time and site-specific innerworkings of the body. This essay analyzes the development of the sketchy characters and settings in the early stories into the New Ark’s “out and gone” in later stories within the framework of the proprioceptive loop that constantly internalizes and acts on the external.