Robert Hayden in Verse: New Histories of African American Poetry and the Black Arts Movement by Derik Smith

CLA Journal ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 63 (1) ◽  
pp. 121-122
Author(s):  
Warren J. Carson
Keyword(s):  
African American ◽  
American Poetry ◽  
Black Arts Movement ◽  
Black Arts ◽  
Robert Hayden

Coda Maintenance, Reconstruction, and Demolition

2019 ◽  
pp. 171-182
Author(s):  
Jonathan Fenderson
Keyword(s):  
African American ◽  
American Literature ◽  
African American Literature ◽  
Black Arts Movement ◽  
Modern Language Association ◽  
National Endowment ◽  
Modern Language ◽  
Black Arts ◽  
Arts And Humanities ◽  
The Arts

The coda gives a snapshot of three critical institutional arrangements that offer a framework for understanding the end of the Black Arts movement. Each of these three institutions--Howard University’s Institute for the Arts and Humanities; the seminar on the Reconstruction of African-American Literature, co-sponsored by the Modern Language Association and National Endowment for the Humanities; and the FBI’s Counterintelligence Program (and larger surveillance state)--were tied to Fuller’s life and the closing window of opportunity he faced at the end of the movement. More importantly, the coda contends that the presence (or absence) of these institutions in our collective memory help to shape our broader understanding of the Black Arts movement. It not only offers a three-pronged conclusion to the narrative arch of the book, but it also argues that cultural politics played a tremendous role in shaping African American intellectuals’ access to institutional resources.

scholarly journals Persistence, Art and Survival

2020 ◽  
Vol 9 (4) ◽  
pp. 50-70
Author(s):  
Elaine Cagulada
Keyword(s):  
African American ◽  
Disability Studies ◽  
Black Studies ◽  
Black Arts Movement ◽  
Black Aesthetic ◽  
Black Arts ◽  
American Subject ◽  
African American Subject ◽  
A Site ◽  
Problem Condition

A world of possibility spills from the relation between disability studies and Black Studies. In particular, there are lessons to be gleaned from the Black Arts Movement and Black aesthetic about conjuring the desirable from the undesirable. Artists of the Black Arts Movement beautifully modeled how to disrupt essentialized notions of race, where they found “new inspiration in their African ancestral heritage and imbued their work with their experience as blacks in America” (Hassan, 2011, p. 4). Of these artists, African-American photographer Roy DeCarava was engaged in a version of the Black aesthetic in the early 1960s, where his photography subverted the essentialized African-American subject. My paper explores DeCarava’s work in three ways, namely in how he, (a) approaches art as a site for encounter between the self and subjectivity, (b) engages with the Black aesthetic as survival and communication, and (c) subverts detrimental conceptions of race through embodied acts of listening and what I read as, ‘a persistent hereness.’ I interpret a persistent hereness in DeCarava’s commitment to presenting the unwavering presence of the non-essentialized African-American subject. The communities and moments he captures are here and persistently refuse, then, to disappear. Through my exploration of the Black Arts Movement in my engagement with DeCarava’s work, and specifically through his and Hughes’ (1967) book, The Sweet Flypaper of Life, we are invited to reimagine disability-as-a-problem condition (Titchkosky, 2007) and deafness as an ‘excludable type’ (Hindhede, 2011) differently. In other words, this journey hopes to reveal what the Black Arts Movement and Black aesthetic, through DeCarava, can teach Deaf and disability studies about moving with art as communication, survival, and a persistent hereness, such that different stories might be unleashed from the stories we are already written into.

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.

Another Black Magazine with a Lumumba Poem

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ira Dworkin
Keyword(s):  
African American ◽  
American Literature ◽  
African American Literature ◽  
Prime Minister ◽  
Black Arts Movement ◽  
Central Figure ◽  
Black Arts ◽  
Political Crises ◽  
The Face ◽  
Iconic Figure

This chapter charts the influence of independent Congo’s first Prime Minister Patrice Lumumba on the poetry and culture of the Black Arts movement. Although Lumumba was assassinated less than seven months after independence, he lives on as an iconic figure in the poetry that emerged during and after the Black Arts movement. Poems like “lumumba LIVES!” by Ted Joans, “Festivals & Funerals” by Jayne Cortez, and “Lumumba Blues” by Raymond Patterson are part of a genre of elegiac meditation on the Congo in post-1960 African American literature that asks how to speak in the face of haunting silences and how to imagine new political possibilities through literary engagements. These writings employ decidedly African American musical conventions to construct an elegiac discourse that ultimately locates the Congo as a central figure in modern African American poetics. These formal dynamics allow for political crises in the Congo and martyred African leaders like Lumumba to be interpellated as American subjects.

Black Post-Blackness

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Margo Natalie Crawford
Keyword(s):  
African American ◽  
American Literature ◽  
Visual Art ◽  
African American Literature ◽  
Mixed Media ◽  
Black Arts Movement ◽  
Early Years ◽  
Black Arts ◽  
Black Art ◽  
Black Aesthetics

Black Post-Blackness compares the black avant-garde of the 1960s and 1970s Black Arts Movement with the most innovative spins of twenty-first century black aesthetics. Crawford zooms in on the 1970s second wave of the Black Arts Movement and shows the connections between this final wave of the Black Arts movement and the early years of 21st century black aesthetics. She uncovers the circle of black post-blackness that pivots on the power of anticipation, abstraction, mixed media, the global South, satire, public interiority, and the fantastic. Black Post-Blackness argues that the full innovativeness of the BAM only emerges when we recognize the movement’s full anticipation of the “beyond black art” waves of 21st century black aesthetics. The BAM has much more in common with 21st century African American literature and visual art than we often realize. The push to the mixed media, abstraction, satire, and sheer experimentation in 21st century African American literature and visual art is often framed as a push away from the narrowness of the category “black art” but it is, often, a push back to the mixed media, abstraction, satire, and experimentation in the BAM.

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