Black Arts and the Great Society

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Stephen Schryer
Keyword(s):  
Lower Class ◽  
Community Action ◽  
War On Poverty ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Poetic Form ◽  
Gwendolyn Brooks ◽  
Amiri Baraka ◽  
Participatory Art ◽  
Class Culture ◽  
Black Arts

This chapter discusses two Black Arts writers who benefited from War on Poverty patronage: Amiri Baraka (LeRoi Jones) and Gwendolyn Brooks. In The System of Dante’s Hell and In the Mecca, the two writers developed distinct versions of participatory art. Like much of Baraka’s Beat-period work, The System of Dante’s Hell thematizes his dissatisfaction with the white counterculture and desire to create art that could connect him with black urban audiences. However, the novel draws on the counterculture’s essentialist conception of lower-class culture in ways that would continue to shape Baraka’s cultural nationalist output of the late 1960s. In contrast, Brooks’s In the Mecca rejects the immersive drama that defines Baraka’s Black Arts. Inspired by her Community Action Program–sponsored work with Chicago’s Blackstone Rangers, the collection insists that minority poets use the resources of poetic form to achieve a calibrated distance from their lower-class subjects.

Introduction

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Stephen Schryer
Keyword(s):  
World War Ii ◽  
Community Action ◽  
War On Poverty ◽  
Action Program ◽  
Amiri Baraka ◽  
Process Art ◽  
Class Culture ◽  
Black Arts ◽  
The Poor ◽  
Community Action Program

Focusing on the African American poet and playwright Amiri Baraka (LeRoi Jones), the Introduction explores links between 1950s and 1960s process literature and the Community Action Program. Baraka’s Black Arts Repertory Theatre and School (BARTS) was funded through the War on Poverty, and his version of process art fulfilled the participatory requirements of the Community Action Program. Both Baraka and many welfare activists allied with the Community Action Program also drew on a binary conception of class culture popularized by the post–World War II counterculture and liberal social science. This binary conception produced two figures that alternately incited and frustrated literary and social work efforts to bridge the gap between the middle class and the poor: the juvenile delinquent and the welfare mother.

Maximum Feasible Participation

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Stephen Schryer
Keyword(s):  
World War Ii ◽  
Cultural Difference ◽  
Lower Class ◽  
Community Action ◽  
Literary Form ◽  
War On Poverty ◽  
Joyce Carol Oates ◽  
Amiri Baraka ◽  
Process Art ◽  
Binary Model

Ranging from the 1950s to the present, Maximum Feasible Participation traces the literary legacy of the War on Poverty. After World War II, countercultural and minority writers developed an antiformalist art that privileged process over product, rejecting literary conventions that separated authors from their audiences. This aesthetic was part of a broader trend toward participatory professionalism: an emerging model of expert work that challenged boundaries between professionals and clients. During the War on Poverty, the Johnson administration promoted this model through the Community Action Program, which encouraged “maximum feasible participation” by lower-class clients. Not coincidentally, many writers, especially cultural nationalists like Amiri Baraka (LeRoi Jones), established institutions that were funded by this program. Participatory professionalism, however, hinged on a concept of poverty that was the paradigm’s undoing. Postwar social scientists developed a binary model of class, which insisted that the poor inhabit a culture of poverty at odds with middle-class norms. This theory resonated with process artists’ depictions of poverty as an alternative, present-oriented worldview that disrupted traditional literary conventions. This notion of cultural difference at once enabled and frustrated process art, and it lent itself to political programs aimed at dismantling the welfare state. With in-depth readings of Jack Kerouac, Amiri Baraka, Gwendolyn Brooks, Oscar Zeta Acosta, Joyce Carol Oates, Tom Wolfe, Alice Walker, Toni Cade Bambara, Philip Roth, and Carolyn Chute, Maximum Feasible Participation shows how mid-twentieth-century welfare politics transformed American writers’ understanding of audience and literary form.

Conclusion

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Stephen Schryer
Keyword(s):  
Working Class ◽  
Cultural Difference ◽  
Expert Knowledge ◽  
Lower Class ◽  
Community Action ◽  
War On Poverty ◽  
Reading Practices ◽  
Class Culture ◽  
Alternative Culture ◽  
Community Action Program

The Conclusion sums up ongoing anxieties about lower-class cultural difference in the wake of Donald Trump’s electoral victory, exploring the notion that the rural white working class inhabits an alternative culture hostile toward expert knowledge. The Conclusion develops this notion through a reading of Carolyn Chute’s The School on Heart’s Content Road and Treat Us like Dogs and We Will Become Wolves. In these fictions, Chute imagines an educational co-op that creates working-class experts, bypassing the division between professionals and lower-class clients that marked the Community Action Program. Chute embodies this notion of working-class expertise in the novels’ form; she presents them as alternative histories, accessible to nonexpert reading practices. However, the novels replicate the War on Poverty–era notion of class culture, which cannot be eradicated without exterminating the tribal consciousness of working-class Maine.

The Aesthetics of Anticipation

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Margo Natalie Crawford
Keyword(s):  
21St Century ◽  
Harlem Renaissance ◽  
Langston Hughes ◽  
Black Arts Movement ◽  
Jean Toomer ◽  
Gwendolyn Brooks ◽  
Amiri Baraka ◽  
Black Arts ◽  
Black Aesthetics

The first chapter argues that black aesthetics pivot on the spirit of anticipation. The first section of this chapter focuses on the 1920 and 30s Harlem Renaissance anticipation of the Black Arts Movement. Crawford then shows how the Black Arts Movement anticipates the post-black maneuvers of the 21st century. This chapter examines literature written by Langston Hughes, Jean Toomer, Claudia Rankine, Amiri Baraka, Gwendolyn Brooks, and others.

The Black Arts Movement

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Crystal Gorham Doss
Keyword(s):  
African American ◽  
Social Engagement ◽  
Black Arts Movement ◽  
Gwendolyn Brooks ◽  
Amiri Baraka ◽  
Black Experience ◽  
Black Arts ◽  
Vernacular English ◽  
Political Activist ◽  
Minority Writers

The Black Arts movement (BAM) spanned the period from the mid-1960s to the mid-1970s and is considered an artistic extension of the Black Power movement. BAM writers aimed to produce explicitly political art and saw the artist as a political activist. Though it began in New York, the BAM was a national movement. It was also an intellectual and academic movement that changed how African American literature was valued and studied. BAM writers focused on telling the stories of the past, recovering the work of formerly unknown artists, and exploring the diversity of the contemporary Black experience. BAM artists frequently used African American Vernacular English. The BAM included authors of drama, poetry and prose. Key figures in this movement included Amiri Baraka (1934–2014), Sonia Sanchez (1934–), Nikki Giovanni (1943–), Maya Angelou (1928–2014), Gwendolyn Brooks (1917–2000) and Larry Neal (1937–1981). The BAM is unique among modernist artistic movements because of its political and social engagement. It influenced writers like Toni Morrison (1931–) and Alice Walker (1944–), and it inspired minority writers from other historically oppressed groups.

A “DARLING OF THE MOB”: THE ANTIDISCIPLINARITY OF THE JACK SHEPPARD TEXTS

2013 ◽  
Vol 41 (3) ◽  
pp. 435-461
Author(s):  
Elizabeth Stearns
Keyword(s):  
Middle Class ◽  
Moral Panic ◽  
Lower Class ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Class Culture ◽  
Historical Romance ◽  
Theatrical Performances ◽  
Wide Dissemination

The story of Jack Sheppard, a jailbreaker hanged for theft in 1724, inspired William Harrison Ainsworth in 1839 to write a historical romance chronicling and fictionalizing Sheppard's exploits. Though first published in a middle-class magazine, Ainsworth's serialization of Sheppard's career in Jack Sheppard: A Romance (1839–1840) subsequently caused a sensation among lower-class audiences for whom the novel was not originally intended. The wide dissemination of Sheppard's story among the lower classes in ballads, songs, cheap plagiarisms, and theatrical performances created a moral panic for contemporary middle-class critics who were concerned with the implications of such material in lower-class culture. Thus, despite the novel's initial reception in the middle-class press as another pleasant and harmless romance, it soon became reviled as a source of inspiration for would-be Jack Sheppards everywhere.

Literary Experimentation in Rowland Hill's Village Dialogues: Transcending "Critical Attitudes" in the Face of Societal Ruination

2011 ◽  
Vol 66 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-36
Author(s):  
Adrian J. Wallbank
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Middle Class ◽  
French Revolution ◽  
British Society ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Concerted Effort ◽  
Early Nineteenth Century ◽  
Class Culture ◽  
The Face ◽  
Literary Techniques

Adrian J. Wallbank, "Literary Experimentation in Rowland Hill's Village Dialogues: Transcending 'Critical Attitudes' in the Face of Societal Ruination" (pp. 1–36) In the aftermath of the French "Revolution Controversy," middle-class evangelical writers made a concerted effort to rehabilitate the moral fabric of British society. Hannah More's Cheap Repository Tracts (1795–98) are recognized as pivotal within this program, but in this essay I question whether they were really as influential as has been supposed. I argue that autobiographical evidence from the period demonstrates an increasing skepticism toward overt didacticism, and that despite their significant and undeniable penetration within working-class culture, the Cheap Repository Tracts, if not all "received ideologies," were increasingly being rejected by their readers. This essay examines the important contribution that Rowland Hill's Village Dialogues (1801) made to this arena. Hill, like many of his contemporaries, felt that British society was facing ruination, but he also recognized that overt moralizing and didacticism was no longer palatable or effective. I argue that Hill thus experimented with an array of literary techniques—many of which closely intersect with developments occurring within the novel and sometimes appear to contradict or undermine the avowed seriousness of evangelicalism—that not only attempt to circumvent what Jonathan Rose has described as the "critical attitudes" of early-nineteenth-century readers, but also effectively map the "transitional" nature of the shifting literary and social terrains of the period. In so doing, Hill contributed signally to the evolution of the dialogue form (which is often synonymous with mentoring and didacticism), since his use of conversational mimesis and satire predated the colloquialism of John Wilson's Noctes Ambrosianae (1822–35) and Walter Savage Landor's Imaginary Conversations (1824–29).

scholarly journals STATE OF EXCEPTION THROUGH RASISME IN GO SET A WATCHMAN IN AGAMBEN’S POLITICAL PHILOSOPHY

2021 ◽  
Vol 20 (2) ◽  
pp. 123-134
Author(s):  
Damay Rahmawati ◽  
Ramadhani Ardianto Karsa Sunaryono ◽  
Mira Utami
Keyword(s):  
Political Philosophy ◽  
Racial Discrimination ◽  
Black People ◽  
Lower Class ◽  
State Of Exception ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Citizenship Rights ◽  
American Society ◽  
The Impact ◽  
Harper Lee

This study aims to see racism in the novel Go Set a Watchman by Harper Lee as state of exception; a political philosophy of Agamben. Agamben's idea of ​​state of exception is used in this study as the theoretical framework. This research specifically reveals how racism becomes part of state of exception in American society around 1960s when the novel was written. The analysis focuses on issues of racism in American society as depicted in the novel. The issue of racism is taken with the aim of analyzing state of exception in USA, in dealing with racial discrimination. After analyzing the issues of racism and state of exception in the novel, this study reveals that racism in American society is politically structured. The finding of this study is the discrimination experienced by lower class citizens who are dominated by black people, as the impact of state of exception which affects their citizenship rights.

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