Amiri Baraka is important for many reasons, but one stands out: he was an anti-fascist artist. In the 1960s, when, lest we forget, the realities of Jim Crow had not gone away; in the ’70s and the ’80s, when the KKK resurged under Reagan; and in the years of Bush I and Bush II, he frequently drew parallels with Weimar and the rise of German fascism. Looking to examples of the past with an eye to the present, he was in search of a committed art that thought about form and that used form for a purpose. With Theodore Harris’s work, Baraka found an equally committed, explicitly politicized take on the world.

Harris began as a wall writer in West Philly with the tag “KNIFE” before joining the city’s mural arts programme and then turning to collage. In 1996, he met Baraka through Philadelphia poet Lamont B. Steptoe, his illustrations appearing in Baraka’s long-running newsletter Unity and Struggle. A few years later, Harris suggested to Baraka that they collaborate. The resulting book of Harris’s collages and Baraka’s texts, Our Flesh of Flames, appeared in 2008. In 2024 it was reissued by Willow Books in an expanded third printing with a new poem-preface from Fred Moten, additional texts and collages by Harris, and a transcription of Baraka’s 2008 reading of the work at Haverford College, alongside the original introduction by M.K. Asante, Jr. and afterword by Gene Ray.

In an introductory note penned in 1998, Baraka mentions John Heartfield and Romare Bearden as precedents for Harris’s work. Like Bearden, Harris draws on Black life for his source material. His images, however, are starker. They are made up of fewer components, and tend to retain entire figures from their original sources, rather than constructing them out of separate parts. “For Harris,” writes M.K. Asante in his introduction, “each page is a wall.” For a page to be a wall implies a wall’s solidity, but also its open nature as a place of contested public meaning. Walls are public spaces that over time become layered, whether with paint, posters, or bullet holes. Their surface is ever-changing, palimpsestic, a space in which different histories are sometimes covered over, sometimes simultaneously visible.

Walls appear literally in Harris’s collage The Long Dream, After Richard Wright. Several layers of exposed brickwork that look either to have been weathered away over time or blasted away by weaponry open onto a collaged window of a Black teenager behind a chain-link fence. (Harris explains that the sources are a photograph of a wall damaged by Israeli rocket fire and an image from the 1994 film Fresh.) One thinks, too, of the 2008 crash, of foreclosed houses, abandoned buildings, the subprime crisis, of Langston Hughes’s dream deferred: “or does it explode?”

Harris’s collages tend to draw on recurring images, placed in new configurations: dollar bills, national monuments, flags, jail cells, cops. Asante calls these “alphabets,” a visual grammar that, like Baraka’s texts, is based on détourning existing grammars of power through puns and doublings. These alphabets can have a mordant humor: an image of an envelope calling on Secretary of State Colin Powell for reparations on slavery is addressed “to the Secretary of the Lower Intestine,” riffing on Baraka’s nickname for him, “Colon Powell.”

But there is resistance, too. “Our Prize Fighter Paul Robeson” is memorably depicted in front of the Capitol with a double fist, standing up to the forces of State power; Mohammad Ali punches at a U.S. flag and a military rifle; there are homages to “Poets of Resistance Sonia Sanchez and Lamont B. Steptoe,” who had read at the mass events protesting the Iraq War. Harris knows that while the image of resistance will always be co-opted, demonized, and fetishized, it is also a spark for action. In contrast, Harris focuses less on particular figures of evil than on symbols and institutions: the Capitol Building, the Lincoln Memorial, Mount Rushmore, the dollar bill.

Harris’s institutional symbols metonymically stand in for the promises they fail to fulfil. His use of metonymy forces attention to the ways that meaning is created and weaponized. The images literally turn things upside down: the Capitol Building, which, in its inverted form, reminded Baraka of a bomb, Mount Rushmore or the Pentagon as a “wounded guillotine.” Think of Marx standing Hegel’s dialectic back on its feet. Continuing the metaphor of the head, Baraka calls his contributions to the project “captions” rather than poems—or, in reference to the vodoun trickster loa Elegba, descendant of the Yoruba god of law, justice and speech, “electric hats that Elegba used to wear on his knot.” Dense with punning reference to Harris’s collages, the texts are in the caustically epigrammatic mode of the latter-day “low coups” which appear in Baraka’s self-illustrated pamphlet Un Poco Low Coups from 2014.

Such work takes the form of the quick, aphoristic quip, honed via Lu Xun’s “daggers and javelins,” Brecht, Hughes’s Ask Your Mama or Semple stories, and, perhaps above all, the Dozens. The turning point of the quip is the pun: a revelation of the connection between one thing and another which sheds new light on the social systems that produce the language in which those things are connected, and the injustices the puns point towards. Though avowedly anti-metaphysical, Baraka loves to play on the signifying systems of religion, as Sun Ra and the Nation of Islam had signified on Christianity. Cops are, invariably, devils: the deictic word “this,” as pronounced in some Black American accents, reveals our present to be the Danteian “dis,” “THE CAPITAL of HELL.” One of the most cutting and painful of Baraka’s puns is that which links the Swahili word for the holocaust of the African slave trade, “maafa” and “motherfucker.”

These puns are not so much jokes as points of entry, at the dialectical crossroads of meaning where Elegba dwells. Baraka coined the term “association complexes” for his experimental early novel The System of Dante’s Hell (as he explained it to Kalamu ya Salaam: “I’m going to write a story in which I do not write the story, but write the story that the story makes me think of.”) Here, slippages of sonic connection turn into improvisational moments of historical revelation, H. Box Brown to H. Rap Brown. To Remember Eric Smith, Harris’s image of the upside-down Capitol Building emerging from a burned dollar bill and a rally against police brutality, Baraka writes:

Poetry is, as Baraka famously put it, “musicked speech,” but it is seen speech too. Here, the sonic slippage of puns is enhanced by the experimental visuals of the mise-en-page: unclosed quotation marks, a trope going back to the days of Olson and projective verse, where voices open onto other voices without being closed, a three step line via William Carlos Williams or Mayakovsky, the line space that drops “down,” and then the insertion of the slogan “FREE MUMIA,” taken from Harris’s image. The closing slogan functions as a kind of collaged object itself, which the poem moves visually down towards: the movement from analysis to action, a concrete demand.

Later in the book, Harris puts together a kind of suite of images featuring the U.S. flag, which Baraka’s caption calls “a flag / of death,” hiding a “dungeon of devils.” The flag is shown apparently eaten by a jail cell inmate in Led Away to Decay, stretched out and torn in a “Collaged Eulogy” for James Byrd, Jr., draped over protruding weapons in another eulogy for Amadou Diallo. In the last of these images, Strange Justice, while a crowd of Black schoolchildren wave the flag to the image’s right, a crowd of white supremacist wave Confederate flags to the left. Over the two is collaged the entrance to a school.

In drawing together but separating the two crowds, Harris alludes to the days of segregation—“separate but equal”—and the traumatic integration of schools, while drawing a parallel with the continuing underdevelopment of a Black proletariat (the Black half of the school is overshadowed by an excavator ready to swing) and the two sides of the increasing pageantry of flag-waving, crescendoing during the war on terror (and now the age of MAGA).

In the comments from Haverford College, Baraka writes:

The Confederate flag is not merely a symbol, but a weapon in itself, and, as a weapon, it must be a target. The Harris-Baraka collage and caption can’t be reduced to a simple demand—take down a flag—but it can’t be separate from it. Baraka famously wrote about “magic words” in the late ’60s, and as Harris puts it, “art is our magic weapon”—in quite material terms.

***

Viewed from the lens of 2025, these images, the earliest of which date back 30 years, take on a prophetic quality. The masked youth of the opening collage, Vetoed Dreams, looking sideways-on at the viewer is in fact taken from an image of the Rwandan genocide, the mask worn to cover the stench of corpses. Today, however, it evokes Covid-era masking-up, as well as the masking-up of protestors which preceded and replaced it. Most notable, however, is the recurrent image of the upside-down Capitol Building, which first appears in this image.

In his autobiography The Big Sea, Langston Hughes gives a vivid portrait of the “ordinary Negroes” on Seventh Street who “looked at the dome of the Capitol and laughed out loud”: the Capitol an object of scorn, cut down to size. In 1982, the cover art to Bad Brains’ debut album by Donna Lee Parsons depicted the Capitol being struck by a bolt of lightning. Today, however, the assault on the Capitol comes from a different source. As is well-known, in January 2021, a crowd stormed the building, enraged at what they saw as Donald Trump’s illegitimate defeat in the U.S. Presidential elections. In January 2025, elected to a second term, Trump pardoned 1,500 participants who had been charged for the insurrection.

Reflecting this iconographic shift, the new edition of Our Flesh of Flame opens with an updated version of the collage. In the new version, entitled The Capitol Vetoed, Harris superimposes a third image: a still of a flying saucer attacking the building, this time the right-way up, from the McCarthy-era B-movie Earth vs the Flying Saucers. The fear of alien invasion standing for communists, “outside agitators,” and immigrants is here revealed as a projection of the very systems thought to be in need of defending. Harris’s outrage at the 2021 takeover of the Capitol Building, which Baraka did not live to see, lies in his recognition of what that occupation represented. It was, he comments, “like a bouncy house at a white supremacist block party.” Those who stormed the Capitol were white supremacist insurrectionists, waving Confederate flags, displaying Nazi symbols. Some of them were cops. The police remain devils.

In these collages, the Capitol is not so much something to be defended in itself, as something oppressive. The Capitol functions as much as a symbol of injustice, of the failed promise of law, as something to be defended. It is a weapon against Black people. Lawlessness is a property the law-making and law-preserving violence of the state ascribes to those it terrorizes and those that resist that terror. But lawlessness is also the true quality of those who flout, bend, and break the laws they themselves make.

As Ray notes, the red background to Vetoed Dreams suggests both “the material devastation inflicted by a system and its violence” and “the burning down and razing of intolerable social structures. Red: the traditional color of solidarity, of a common struggle against capitalist power. In its clarity, the sharp line dividing the red field from the Capitol dome enters the boy’s head like the flash of insight, the empowerment of politicized consciousness.” This flash of consciousness, like the lightning bolt in the Bad Brains cover and the lightning bolts that appear in Harris’s collages, is sudden, sharp, swift: a dialectical cut. For Harris, the work of the collagist is to juxtapose “past and current images” to show “how much the past is in the present,” the collagist “a surgeon who helps put the past and present back together again.” Right now, in an age informed by a perhaps unprecedented surge of historical misinformation and amnesia, that suggests emergency surgery. Our Flesh of Flames comes from the era of Bush I, Bush II, the War in Iraq, Amadou Diallo, the Second Intifada. Today it’s Trump I, Trump II, the genocide in Gaza, George Floyd, ICE, and who knows what’s to come. For artists stunned as to how to react to all of these things—and facing a new McCarthyism—work like that of Baraka and Harris suggests the importance of an ongoing, critical iconographic engagement.

“The American Word / For Nazi,” writes Baraka, “Is American!” One may or may not agree with Baraka’s implied argument that the US was already fascist. And a sense of the movement from Bush-era Republicanism to the current Trumpian variety reveals historical shifts rather than a single, unbroken lineage. Fascism itself is not a single, unchanging entity, and the movement towards the current conjuncture was not inevitable. But there is value in paying attention, for example, to the documented historical overlaps between American and Nazi race laws in the 1930s, or the experience of racialized policing as a kind of limited fascism, explored in Alberto Toscano’s recent writing on Angela Davis’s and George Jackson’s analyses in the 1970s. Our Flesh of Flames is not a theoretical or historical text like those of Toscano, Davis, or Jackson. Complex tactical debates on the need to defend liberal protections even on the part of those of us critical of liberalism, of the questions of alliances, of strategy, of the simultaneous critique and defense of different aspects of the law, are perhaps beyond the scope of a single work of art. Yet, in their critical attention to competing, contradictory systems of meaning, Baraka’s and Harris’s work provides us with a dialectical lens we might direct towards our present.