Bob Kaufman, el jazz y la diáspora: un latido silencioso entre tambores

Abstract

In the late 1950s, Bob Kaufman, an African-American poet and member of the beatniks in San Francisco, began to use bebop/jazz as the basis of his new poetry. 
Among his various influences, Kaufman himself recognizes the importance of authors such as Nicolás Guillén, Langston Hughes and Federico García Lorca, and not only in his poetics, but in his revolutionary political ethos, thus inscribing his spoken and surrealist jazz in the wake of radical struggles of interwars. One of the most outstanding features of Kaufman’s poetry, and of his own biography, was the intentional use of silence (also characteristic of Lorca, Hughes and Guillén), and which will be addressed in this essay in its double dimension: On the one hand , as a subversive gesture in the midst of “spectacularized” noise, as Debord theorized. On the other hand, and following F. Jameson, as the “political unconscious” of a literature that responds to the vital, material and symbolic plunder of triangular trade (between Africa, America and Europe), and that is at the origins of a model of capitalist accumulation that entered into crisis in the 1930s and 1960s.