Atomic Afrofuturism and Amiri Baraka's Compulsive Futures

2019 ◽  
Vol 41 (1) ◽  
pp. 51-67
Author(s):  
Kristin George Bagdanov
Keyword(s):  
African American ◽  
Cold War ◽  
Lived Experiences ◽  
Langston Hughes ◽  
Amiri Baraka ◽  
Sun Ra ◽  
Cornell University ◽  
American Artists ◽  
African American Artists ◽  
The Cold War

In 1984, the same year that scholars were gathering at Cornell University to theorise ‘Nuclear Criticism,’ Amiri Baraka was formulating his own version of nuclear futurity in Primitive World: An Anti-Nuclear Jazz Musical. Baraka's musical manifests and conceptualises atomic afrofuturism, a historically specific affirmation of black existence that was forged while facing nuclear apocalypse. Nuclear Criticism, which lost much of its exigency after the end of the Cold War, needs to evolve to account for the present nuclear era, as its focus on totalities leaves it ill-equipped for incorporating the disparate lived experiences of those who have already experienced the apocalypse and for whom nuclear apocalypse is a repetition or extension of white supremacy's agenda of extinction. This article offers a genealogy of atomic afrofuturism, examining how throughout the cold war period African American artists like Sun Ra, Langston Hughes and Amiri Baraka were exploring the post-apocalyptic conditions of black existence, including its conflicting temporalities and tenses, while much of America still believed the apocalypse was imminent, not immanent. And so it is Derrida's anti-apocalyptic missives together with Baraka's anti-nuclear musical that can offer the framework Nuclear Criticism so desperately desires for imagining the unimaginable.

Douglas, Aaron (1899–1979)

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Catrina Hill
Keyword(s):  
African American ◽  
Public Library ◽  
Langston Hughes ◽  
African Art ◽  
Illustrated Books ◽  
Claude Mckay ◽  
New York Public Library ◽  
Tribal Art ◽  
American Artists ◽  
African American Artists

Aaron Douglas was an African American artist and educator often referred to as the father of "Black Art." He was a leading figure of the artistic movement known as the Harlem Renaissance. Douglas is best known for his work of the 1920s and 1930s, which featured abstracted silhouettes combined with African tribal art and ancient Egyptian profile heads. European artists like Matisse, Modigliani and Picasso had been influenced by African tribal art for decades, but Douglas was among the first African American artists to blend African art with modern abstraction. Douglas produced illustrations for such magazines as The Crisis, Survey Graphic and Opportunity along with co-founding the short-lived Fire!! A Quarterly Journal Devoted to the Younger Negro Artists. He also illustrated books by several well-known literary figures, including Alain Locke, James Weldon Johnson, Langston Hughes, Countee Cullen, and Claude McKay. He is recognized for several public murals, including the Birth o’ the Blues at the Sherman Hotel in Chicago, Evolution of Negro Dance at the Harlem YMCA, and Aspects of Negro Life at the 135th Street Branch of the New York Public Library. As a professor of fine art Douglas encouraged generations of African American artists to create their own modern Black aesthetic.

Modernism and the Affects of Racial Blackness

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Lindon Barrett
Keyword(s):  
African American ◽  
Harlem Renaissance ◽  
Langston Hughes ◽  
Gender And Sexuality ◽  
Avant Garde ◽  
American Artists ◽  
African American Artists ◽  
George Schuyler ◽  
Focus Point ◽  
The Harlem Renaissance

This chapter focuses on the dispute between two important figures of the Harlem Renaissance: George Schuyler and Langston Hughes. Schuyler's critique of the African American avant-garde in his essay “The Negro-Art Hokum” (1926) and Hughes's response in “The Negro Artist and the Racial Mountain” (1926) provide a focus point to understand how African American artists and intellectuals imagined their relationship both to Western modernization and avant-garde cultural modernism. This chapter stands as a separate essay from Barrett's surviving manuscript, as it appears to be intended for a different publication; its inclusion here is meant to supplement discussion from the previous chapters, although Schuyler and Hughes did not tackle the gender and sexuality aspects of Barrett's arguments so far posited in this book.

scholarly journals “We Are Not Copyists”: Socialist Networks and Non-alignment from Below in A. Philip Randolph’s Asian Journey

2019 ◽  
Vol 53 (2) ◽  
pp. 402-428
Author(s):  
Su Lin Lewis
Keyword(s):  
African American ◽  
Cold War ◽  
Civil Rights ◽  
Early Years ◽  
Soviet Bloc ◽  
Labor Movements ◽  
Trade Unionist ◽  
The Cold War ◽  
Cultural Freedom ◽  
Hearts And Minds

Abstract In 1952, A. Philip Randolph, the head of America’s largest black union and a prominent civil rights campaigner, traveled to Japan and Burma funded by the American Committee for Cultural Freedom. In Asia, he encountered socialists and trade unionists struggling to negotiate the fractious divides between communism and capitalism within postwar states. In Burma, in particular, Western powers, the Soviet bloc, and powerful Asian neighbors used propaganda, aid missions, and subsidized travel to offer competing visions of development while accusing each other of new forms of imperialism and foreign interference. In such an environment, a battle for hearts and minds within Asian labor movements constituted the front lines of the early years of the Cold War. Randolph’s journey shows us how Asian socialists and trade unionists responded to powerful foreign interests by articulating an early sense of non-alignment, forged in part through emerging Asian socialist networks, well before this was an official strategy. The Asian actors with whom Randolph interacted in Japan and Burma mirrored his own struggles as a socialist, a trade unionist, and a “railway man” while furthering his campaign for civil rights at home. This article uses Randolph’s journey to examine parallels and divergences between African-American and Asian socialists and trade unionists during the early Cold War, an age characterized by deepening splits in the politics of the Left.

On the Blackness of Post-Blackness

2019 ◽  
pp. 33-60
Author(s):  
Cameron Leader-Picone
Keyword(s):  
African American ◽  
American Art ◽  
Original Formulation ◽  
African American Art ◽  
Linked Fate ◽  
Racial Categorization ◽  
Individual Agency ◽  
Black Art ◽  
American Artists ◽  
African American Artists

This chapter argues that Colson Whitehead’s novel Sag Harbormirrors post-Black art’s emphasis on simultaneously rejecting and embracing the racial categorization of African American art. In doing so, Whitehead’s novel represents a qualified liberation for African American artists that optimistically imagines a freedom from racial categorizations that is still rooted in them. This chapter analyzes Whitehead’s novel in the context of the competing definitions of post-Blackness offered by Touré in Who’s Afraid of Post-Blackness? as well as in the original formulation by Thelma Golden. Employing a framework of “racial individualism,” the chapter argues that a loosening sense of linked fate has led to the privileging of individual agency over Black identity. In doing so, post-Blackness serves to discursively liberate African American artists from any prescriptive ideal of what constitutes black art without implying either a desire or intent to not address issues of race.

‘Our Technology Was Vernacular’: Radical Technicities in African American Experimental Writing

2020 ◽  
pp. 214-264
Author(s):  
Eric B. White
Keyword(s):  
African American ◽  
Civil Rights ◽  
Langston Hughes ◽  
Experimental Writing ◽  
Amiri Baraka ◽  
Black Vernacular ◽  
Spatial Practice ◽  
Industrial Modernity ◽  
Black Life ◽  
Definition Of

Chapter 5 focuses on technicities of African American vanguardists, including Langston Hughes, Gwendolyn Bennett, Ralph Ellison and Amiri Baraka. These writers joined the civil rights lawyer and writer Pauli Murray in recognising illegal rail travel and other appropriations of infrastructure as signifyin(g) spatial practices. Building on research by sociologists, historians of technology and literary critics, the chapter uses a techno-bathetic framework to explore how railroads became signifyin(g) machines for the everyday technicities of black life throughout the twentieth century. The long-running crises sparked by the Scottsboro trials encouraged African American avant-gardes to formulate a vernacular, counter-servile technicity that served as a hinge between rhetorical and spatial practice. When Ellison claimed that ‘[o]ur technology was vernacular’, the shared valences he identifies between language, technology and strategies of adaptation and appropriation elides closely with Rayvon Fouché’s conception of ‘black vernacular technological creativity’ and Henry Louis Gates, Jr’s definition of motivated signifyin(g). African American vanguardists dragged the invisible and over-determined rail networks, and the spaces that framed them, back into plain sight, and made them the targets of sustained attack. The chapter argues that by doing so, these writers practiced a nuanced vernacular technicity articulated across the longue durée of industrial modernity.

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