Blackface and the Black Arts Movement

2013 ◽  
Vol 57 (2) ◽  
pp. 143-162 ◽  
Author(s):  
Mike Sell
Keyword(s):  
African Americans ◽  
Black Arts Movement ◽  
Black Arts ◽  
The 1960S ◽  
Blackface Performance

The 1960s witnessed among African Americans a wholesale rejection of white power, including the repertoire and iconography of blackface performance. And yet, surprisingly, one finds among some of the most revolutionary Afrocentric artists, critics, and activists of the time a complex, nuanced, even contradictory attitude towards “blacking up.”

Poetics of the Enclave

2018 ◽  
pp. 91-108
Author(s):  
Timo Müller
Keyword(s):  
Black Arts Movement ◽  
Black Aesthetic ◽  
Black Arts ◽  
Recent Scholarship ◽  
Margaret Walker ◽  
1960S And 1970S ◽  
June Jordan ◽  
White Form ◽  
The 1960S

This chapter examines the previously neglected role of the sonnet in the Black Arts movement of the 1960s and 1970s. Leading theorists of the movement denounced the sonnet as a paradigmatic “white” form that constrained black self-expression and had to be excluded from the black nation. The demand for an oral, authentic, collective poetry led poets to dismantle the traditional sonnet structure and adapt the form to cultural nationalist demands. The chapter reviews the role of traditional poetic forms in the black aesthetic and discusses strategies of camouflaging or demarcating the sonnet in the work of June Jordan, Joe Mitchell, Conrad Kent Rivers, Quincy Troupe, and Margaret Walker. These strategies confirm the view in recent scholarship that the Black Arts movement exerted both a confining and a creative influence on poets of the time.

Building the Black Arts Movement

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jonathan Fenderson
Keyword(s):  
Critical Role ◽  
Culture Wars ◽  
Black Arts Movement ◽  
Institution Building ◽  
Black Arts ◽  
Editorial Work ◽  
History Of ◽  
The 1960S ◽  
Creative Artists

This book is the first to document and analyze Hoyt Fuller’s profound influence on the Black Arts movement. Using historical snapshots of Fuller’s life and activism as a means to rethink the period, Building the Black Arts Movement provides a fresh take on the general trajectory of African American literary (and cultural) studies as the field developed over the course of two explosive decades in the mid-twentieth century. The book argues that the Black Arts movement can be understood as a pivotal and volatile moment in the long history of America’s culture wars. Moreover, by shifting our focus from creative artists and repositioning Fuller at the center of the movement--as one of its most underappreciated architects--the book grants new insights into the critical role of editorial work, the international dimensions of the movement, the complexities of sexuality, and the challenges of Black institution building during the 1960s and ’70s.

The Blues Revival and the Black Arts Movement

2020 ◽  
pp. 197-226
Author(s):  
Adam Gussow
Keyword(s):  
Cultural Revolution ◽  
Black Arts Movement ◽  
The Political ◽  
Cultural Inheritance ◽  
Black Arts ◽  
Beloved Community ◽  
Black Revolution ◽  
Blues Music ◽  
The 1960S ◽  
Larry Neal

This chapter, which originally appeared in somewhat different form in New Thoughts on the Black Arts Movement (2006), places that Black literary and cultural revolution in dialogue with another cultural earthquake of the 1960s, the emergence of a mass white audience for blues music. For some Black Arts writers and thinkers like Ron Karenga, Sonia Sanchez, and Haki Madhubuti (Don L. Lee), the blues savored of black southern abjection and were, in Karenga’s dismissive judgment, “invalid,” an outmoded form without the political utility urgently needed in a time of Black revolution. Yet for many others, led by Larry Neal, the blues were a cherished ancestral rootsock and inalienably Black cultural inheritance—“the essential vector of the Afro-American sensibility and identity.” Even as the blues were being debated within the Black intelligentsia, a white blues revolution was transpiring, one in which white fans imagined themselves forming a beloved community with aged Black blues players who had been brought back into national circulation at festivals and college gigs, and in which white blues artists like Paul Butterfield and Janis Joplin, enjoying mass popularity, drew the fierce condemnation of Black Arts writers Ron Welburn and Stephen E. Henderson.

The Challenge of the Changing Same: The Jazz Avant-Garde of the 1960s, the Black Aesthetic and the Black Arts Movement

2005 ◽  
Vol 1 (2) ◽  
Author(s):  
Jason Robinson
Keyword(s):  
The United States ◽  
Black Arts Movement ◽  
Black Music ◽  
Artistic Identity ◽  
Black Aesthetic ◽  
Black Literature ◽  
Black Artists ◽  
Avant Garde ◽  
Black Arts ◽  
The 1960S

This essay focuses on the relationship between writers associated with the Black Arts Movement in the United States and the experimental directions in jazz that occurred during the 1960s, the decade generally associated with the evolution of the Black Arts Movement as well as the rise of the jazz avant-garde. The emergent experimentalism in the music centered on transgressive and innovative uses of improvisation that led to new approaches, sounds and interpretive meanings. While it is necessary to understand that both poetry and music of the 1960s were important sites where hegemonic processes were contested, it is equally important to draw out differences in the strategies of various black artists. Throughout this period, the attitudes, values, and goals of black artists were anything but monolithic. Instead, the interrelated worlds of black literature and musical experimentalism created a dialogic space that encouraged interrogation, innovation and articulation of new artistic ideas. Within this environment, “black music” took on heterotopic meanings; rather than a rigid, collectivized notion of “black identity” in music, the Black Arts Movement and the jazz avant-garde were marked by multiple, sometimes competing, conceptions of artistic identity. In most cases, the musicians stridently resisted any single narrative of racial and socio-aesthetic identity. The essay clarifies the complex critical positions of those involved with the Black Arts Movement and the jazz avant-garde, while challenging the possibility of any one unifying narrative about this improvised, processual music.

“It Is Time for Artists to Be Heard”: Artists and Writers for Freedom, 1963–1964

2018 ◽  
Vol 5 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Judith E. Smith
Keyword(s):  
National Culture ◽  
Cultural Nationalism ◽  
Black Arts Movement ◽  
Self Determination ◽  
Black Leadership ◽  
Black Liberation ◽  
Black Artists ◽  
Black Arts ◽  
1960S And 1970S ◽  
The 1960S

In The Black Arts Movement: Literary Nationalism in the 1960s and 1970s, James Smethurst writes: “Black arts cultural nationalism draws on a long history.” He describes the cultural nationalist stance we associate with the Black Arts Movement as involving a concept of liberation and self-determination that “entails some notion of the development or recovery of a true ‘national’ culture that is linked to an already existing folk or popular culture” and often relying on recognizable African elements. Black arts cultural nationalism expressed the linkages between Black Arts and Black Power even before they were specifically named and identified. In particular, Black arts cultural nationalism was visible in some of the ways 1940s and 1950s Black leftists engaged with commitments to Black nationhood, Black leadership, and Black liberation. Many Black leftists from the 1940s and 1950s were part of the writing and organizing that laid some of the groundwork for the movements commonly identified with Black Arts after 1965. Looking more closely at one formation of Black artists and writers from the early l960s, the Association of Artists for Freedom, illuminates one kind of precedent for the emerging Black Arts Movement.

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