“My Soul is Moonburned”: Bob Kaufman, and The Abomunist Manifesto, or "Dada Prodigies of Black"


San Francisco legend Bob Kaufman was famous in the 1950s as the “black beat” poet and not coincidentally, also as “the most arrested man in San Francisco.” Born and raised in in New Orleans, one of the most culturally complex sites in the US, Kaufman bore a family name that was usually received as Jewish by his peers, and probably indicated Jewish ancestry—indeed, many early readings of his work account for it (often in very stereotyped ways) primarily as a “crossing” of African diasporic and Jewish culture. Meanwhile, Kaufman’s position as one of the very few black members of a literary counter-culture (Beat) which also exoticised and mystified African-American everyday life was fraught, and his work is a response to this as well as to the reactionary McCarthyite 50s. As critics such as Maria Damon have made clear, Kaufman negotiated the borders between “black” and “white” within Beat and related counter-cultures of San Francisco, as well as, on occasion, between gay and straight. Additionally, having been a Communist Party activist in the 1940s, Kaufman maintained an internationalist vision which set him apart from American exceptionalist formulations which also sometimes appear in Beat writing. This heightened sense of the USA’s borders, internal and external, make Kaufman’s writerly politics significantly different from other “beat” figures, as we shall see through an examination of his “Abomunist Manifesto,” which dialogues with the Dada manifestos of the historical avant-garde but foregrounds historical mechanics of racialisation in relation to the construction of “sense” and its negations. Kaufman’s postwar work collides “popular front” styles of socialist writing originating in the 30s with leftwing Dada of the teens and both “beat” and African-American modes of the 50s in a manner which is utterly unique, under appreciated, and entirely relevant to the predicaments of today, when the USA attempts to re-establish many of the borders whose collapse Kaufman’s work seemed to foretell.



Daniel Katz is Professor of English and Comparative Literary Studies at the University of Warwick. He is the author of Saying I No More: Subjectivity and Consciousness in the Prose of Samuel Beckett (Northwestern UP, 1999), American Modernism’s Expatriate Scene: The Labour of Translation (Edinburgh UP, 2007), and The Poetry of Jack Spicer (Edinburgh UP, 2013), and is also the Founding Editor of the book series Bloomsbury Studies in Critical Poetics. His critical work has appeared in MLQ, Modern Fiction Studies, Textual Practice, Journal of Modern Literature, Qui Parle, the TLS, and Raritan. He is currently editing and annotating Be Brave to Things: The Uncollected Poetry and Plays of Jack Spicer (forthcoming Wesleyan UP, 2021), and working on a new monograph for Oxford UP provisionally titled, The Big Lie of the Personal: Poetry, Politics and Death.

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