Poetry of the Civil Rights Movements in Australia and the United States, 1960s-1980s

Aboriginal poets Oodgeroo Noonuccal (formerly Kath Walker; 1920-1993) and Lionel Fogarty (1958-), and African American poets Amiri Baraka (formerly LeRoi Jones; 1934-2004), and Sonia Sanchez (1934-) were prominent in the struggles of their peoples during the civil rights movements of the 1960s and beyond. Fogarty and Sanchez are still politically engaged. Their poetries display common elements that enable a transcontinental comparative reading. This book scrutinizes the poetries of these poets to demonstrate their role in the struggle for civil and human rights of their peoples during this period. The book aims to show how these poets collaborated with other civil rights activists in voicing the demands of their peoples, and how they used their poetry to reflect the realities they experienced and to imagine new possibilities. This close, comparative analysis shows how these poets developed a distinctive rhetoric of resistance that drew on the ideas of Malcolm X, Frantz Fanon, and the language of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR). This book also highlights how, through poeticizing some of the milestone events in their histories, these poets revive their peoples’ own history. This qualitative study is grounded in a comparative analysis of content which examines how these writers demonstrate compositional and structural similarities and differences in their poetries, despite their responses to relatively distinct literary and political influences.

Ameer Chasib Furaih is an instructor at Baghdad University/ College of Education (Ibn Rushd) for Humanitarian Sciences