Introduction

Black Politics ◽

Double Consciousness ◽

Literary Aesthetics ◽

Black Arts ◽

Relationship Of ◽

The chapter length introduction, “The Post Era,” historicizes both popular cultural (i.e. colorblindness and post-racialism) and scholarly attempts to periodize contemporary African American culture and literary aesthetics (i.e. post-soul, post-black, and postrace). It connects these conceptualizations with the revision of Du Bois’s idea of double consciousness. The introduction locates these shifts in the new millennium in the context of Black politics and the rise of Barack Obama. It also addresses the relationship of the current moment in African American literature with past movements, focusing especially on the post era’s repudiation of the Black Arts Movement.

THE AFRICAN AMERICAN EXPERIENCE: AN INTRODUCTION

10.46630/aae.2021 ◽

2021 ◽

Author(s):

Ana Kocić Stanković

Keyword(s):

African American ◽

American Literature ◽

American Studies ◽

African American Studies ◽

Integrative Approach ◽

Topic Area ◽

Academic Courses ◽

The U.S

My purpose in compiling this book was to produce a “student-friendly” course book in African American Studies, the elective course I designed and introduced into the English Department curriculum at the Faculty of Philosophy, University of Niš. The book is meant to provide a brief introduction into the history and culture of African Americans in the U.S., but could also be of interest to the general public, and, hopefully, may add to the practice of teaching African American literature and history already established at Serbian universities. The main purpose of the book is to get the readers/students acquainted with the key events in African American history, the most important political and cultural figures and the most prominent themes in African American culture. One of the goals would also be to spark further interest in this topic area and open possibilities for similar postgraduate academic courses. As most available books in African American studies deal either with history or literature, I have made an attempt to consider the subject from the perspective of cultural studies, integrating historical data with sociological, political and cultural commentary. I have deemed that such an integrative approach would provide the best insight into the study area and give the fullest picture of the African American contribution to the U.S. and world history and culture. The book is divided into eight chapters covering the period from the origins of the Atlantic slave trade to the contemporary period. The concept of individual chapters is as follows: an outline of the most important events, developments and historical figures of a particular period is followed by two or three brief excerpts from some of the most important works by major African American writers which illustrate the most important theme(s) covered in the chapter, accompanied by a brief commentary with topics and questions for further study.

Justifying the Margin: The Construction of “Soul” in Russian and African-American Texts

Slavic Review ◽

10.2307/2500135 ◽

1992 ◽

Vol 51 (4) ◽

pp. 749-757 ◽

Cited By ~ 5

Author(s):

Dale E. Peterson

Keyword(s):

Nineteenth Century ◽

African American ◽

American Literature ◽

Free Expression ◽

New Negro ◽

Interesting Fact ◽

Black Arts ◽

Alain Locke ◽

Emancipation Proclamation

The scholarly world has little noted nor long remembered the interesting fact that the emancipation proclamation of a culturally separate African-American literature was accompanied by a generous acknowledgment of Russian precedent. In 1925 Alain Locke issued the first manifesto of the modern Black Arts movement, The New Negro. There could not have been a clearer call for the free expression of a suppressed native voice: “we have lately had an art that was stiltedly selfconscious, and racially rhetorical rather than racially expressive. Our poets have now stopped speaking for the Negro—they speak as Negroes.“ Even so, this liberating word of the Harlem Renaissance was uttered with a sideward glance at the prior success of nineteenth century Russia's soulful literature and music. Locke himself cited the testimony of his brilliant contemporary, the author of Cane, a poetic distillation of the pungent essence of slavery's culture of oppression: “for vital originality of substance, the young Negro writers dig deep into the racy peasant undersoil of the race life.

Radical Aesthetics and Modern Black Nationalism

10.5406/illinois/9780252040122.001.0001 ◽

2016 ◽

Cited By ~ 23

Author(s):

GerShun Avilez

Keyword(s):

African American ◽

American Literature ◽

Cultural Production ◽

Visual Art ◽

Gender And Sexuality ◽

Black Arts ◽

Artistic Production ◽

Black Nationalist ◽

Experimental Works

This book explores the long-overlooked links between Black Nationalist activism and the renaissance of artistic experimentation emerging from recent African American literature, visual art, and film. The book charts a new genealogy of contemporary African American artistic production that illuminates how questions of gender and sexuality guided artistic experimentation in the Black Arts Movement from the mid-1960s to the mid-1970s. As the book shows, the artistic production of the Black Arts era provides a set of critical methodologies and paradigms rooted in the disidentification with Black Nationalist discourses. The book studies how this emerging subjectivity, termed aesthetic radicalism, critiqued nationalist rhetoric in the past. It also continues to offer novel means for expressing black intimacy and embodiment via experimental works of art and innovative artistic methods. A bold addition to an advancing field, this book rewrites recent black cultural production even as it uncovers unexpected ways of locating black radicalism.

Coda Maintenance, Reconstruction, and Demolition

Building the Black Arts Movement ◽

10.5622/illinois/9780252042430.003.0007 ◽

2019 ◽

pp. 171-182

Author(s):

Jonathan Fenderson

Keyword(s):

African American ◽

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.

The Impact of Social Movements on the Development of African American Museums

The Public Historian ◽

10.1525/tph.2018.40.3.44 ◽

2018 ◽

Vol 40 (3) ◽

pp. 44-73 ◽

Cited By ~ 1

Author(s):

John E. Fleming

Keyword(s):

African American ◽

Civil Rights ◽

American Culture ◽

Black People ◽

Freedom Struggle ◽

Black Arts ◽

Black Museums ◽

The Impact ◽

The effort to preserve African American history is firmly grounded in the struggle for freedom and equality. Black people understood the relationship between heritage and the freedom struggle. Such struggles in the pre and post Civil War eras spurred the preservation of African and African American culture first in libraries and archives and later museums. The civil rights, Black Power, Black Arts and Black Studies movements helped advance social and political change, which in turn spurred the development of Black museums as formal institutions for preserving African American culture.

Tracking Faulkner in the Paths of Black Modernism

Faulkner and the Black Literatures of the Americas ◽

10.14325/mississippi/9781496806345.003.0004 ◽

2016 ◽

Author(s):

George Hutchinson ◽

Jay Watson

Keyword(s):

African American ◽

World War Ii ◽

Civil Rights ◽

American Literature ◽

Civil Rights Movement ◽

White Southerners ◽

Black Characters ◽

Black Modernism ◽

This essay tracks the relationship between Faulkner’s career and the development of modern African American literature. It shows how the development of black modernism created a new environment for his work, for his work’s reception, and ultimately for his literary imagination—as well as how black writers responded to his work. Faulkner’s approach to fiction developed out of many of the same intellectual cross-currents that gave rise to interest in African American writing, and the shift in his use of black characters in the 1940s registers his awareness of black-authored fiction and his anger over American racism in the midst of World War II. Finally, the essay addresses his problematic response to the Civil Rights movement in relationship to critiques of white southerners’ “tragic misconceptions of time” by Martin Luther King, Jr. and Toni Morrison.

Out on the floor: the politics of dancing on the Northern Soul scene

Popular Music ◽

10.1017/s0261143006000985 ◽

2006 ◽

Vol 25 (3) ◽

pp. 431-445 ◽

Cited By ~ 7

Author(s):

TIM WALL

Keyword(s):

African American ◽

Cultural Context ◽

American Culture ◽

Ethnographic Study ◽

Music Culture ◽

Physical Movement ◽

Full Analysis ◽

Relationship Of ◽

The Northern Soul scene is a dance-based music culture that originated in the English North and Midlands in the early 1970s. It still thrives today with a mix of forty-year-olds and new converts, and its celebration of 1960s' soul has an international following. Centred on the detail of the dance techniques, and musical and cultural context, the analysis presented here is developed from an ethnographic study. It uses a concept of competence and the example of a classic record to explore the meanings of dance for the scene's participants. The importance of solidarity, senses of identity through gender, place and ethnicity, and the relationship of the scene with African–American culture are explored. The study draws conclusions about the way that dance can be theorised and analysed, and argues that a full analysis requires an exploration of the relationship of physical movement to space, music and senses of identity.

Another Black Magazine with a Lumumba Poem

Congo Love Song ◽

10.5149/northcarolina/9781469632711.003.0009 ◽

2017 ◽

Author(s):

Ira Dworkin

Keyword(s):

African American ◽

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 Arts Publishing and the Politics of Design

Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Literature ◽

10.1093/acrefore/9780190201098.013.905 ◽

2019 ◽

Author(s):

Kinohi Nishikawa

Keyword(s):

African American ◽

American Literature ◽

Literary Texts ◽

Early 21St Century ◽

Black Arts ◽

History Of ◽

Politics Of Design ◽

American Poets ◽

Material Conditions

The Black Arts movement heralded an important turn in the history of African American literature. Between 1965 and 1975, a loose confederation of African American poets, playwrights, artists, and intellectuals set out to remake the world in their own image. Fed up with what they considered to be the oppressive logic of Euro-American cultural standards, these practitioners theorized and executed a program of black aesthetic self-determination. Contemporary critics followed suit, emphasizing Black Arts’ conjoined investments in nationalist politics and radical poetics—the discursive level at which the movement reshaped African American letters. That remained the dominant way of understanding the movement until the early 21st century, when scholars began examining Black Arts’ publishing networks and institutions, or the material conditions for creative expression. Since then, scholars have shown how the movement’s effort to redefine the black voice was achieved through a concomitant effort to redesign the black text. Their research has pointed to the need for historicizing the politics of design in this moment of literary transformation. For Black Arts publishers, the work of photographers, illustrators, and graphic designers was important not only for bringing specific literary texts to life but for inviting everyday readers into a robust, race-affirming literary culture.

Black Post-Blackness

10.5406/illinois/9780252041006.001.0001 ◽

2017 ◽

Cited By ~ 27

Author(s):

Margo Natalie Crawford

Keyword(s):

African American ◽

American Literature ◽

Visual Art ◽

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.