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.

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.

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.

Along the Streets of Bronzeville

2013 ◽  
Author(s):  
Elizabeth Schroeder Schlabach
Keyword(s):  
African American ◽  
Langston Hughes ◽  
Gwendolyn Brooks ◽  
Black Arts ◽  
African American Authors ◽  
Chicago Renaissance ◽  
The 1960S ◽  
State Street ◽  
American Authors ◽  
South Side Chicago

This book examines the flowering of African American creativity, activism, and scholarship in the South Side Chicago district known as Bronzeville during the period between the Harlem Renaissance in the 1920s and the Black Arts Movement of the 1960s. Poverty stricken, segregated, and bursting at the seams with migrants, Bronzeville was the community that provided inspiration, training, and work for an entire generation of diversely talented African American authors and artists who came of age during the years between the two world wars. This book investigates the institutions and streetscapes of Black Chicago that fueled an entire literary and artistic movement. It argues that African American authors and artists—such as Gwendolyn Brooks, Richard Wright, Langston Hughes, painter Archibald Motley, and many others—viewed and presented black reality from a specific geographic vantage point: the view along the streets of Bronzeville. The book explores how the particular rhythms and scenes of daily life in Bronzeville locations, such as the State Street “Stroll” district or the bustling intersection of 47th Street and South Parkway, figured into the creative works and experiences of the artists and writers of the Black Chicago Renaissance.

The Satire of Black Post-Blackness

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Margo Natalie Crawford
Keyword(s):  
21St Century ◽  
Black Arts Movement ◽  
Ishmael Reed ◽  
Charles Johnson ◽  
Amiri Baraka ◽  
Black Arts ◽  
Cultural Productions ◽  
Editorial Cartoons ◽  
Paul Beatty

The fifth chapter argues that feeling “black post-black” is a disorienting situation that lends itself to satire. Crawford analyzes the ways in which satire has begun to define 21st century African American cultural productions as both blackness and whiteness are satirized. The satire of the Black Arts Movement is shown to be much more invested in satirizing whiteness as opposed to the 21st century post-black tendency to foreground the satirizing of blackness. In addition to the analysis of novels, drama, and poetry, this chapter also uncovers the role of satire in editorial cartoons included in Black World, one of the key journals of the Black Arts Movement. This chapter foregrounds the satire of Charles Johnson, Carlene Hatcher Polite, Amiri Baraka, Ishmael Reed, Percival Everett, Paul Beatty, Mat Johnson, and others.

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.

The Counter-Literacy of Black Mixed Media

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Margo Natalie Crawford
Keyword(s):  
Mixed Media ◽  
Black Arts Movement ◽  
Open Book ◽  
Black Book ◽  
Amiri Baraka ◽  
Black Arts ◽  
Word And Image ◽  
Black Art ◽  
June Jordan ◽  
Glenn Ligon

The third chapter brings the mixed media of the BAM and the 21st century together as Crawford shows that black art, after the Black Arts Movement, continues to create an alternative way of approaching art as process, not as object. The first part of this chapter shapes this process-oriented counter-literacy around the Black Arts Movement textual productions of the black book as the open book. She explores the openness of word and image texts and argues that they produce the lack of closure of black post-blackness. Through the text paintings of Glenn Ligon and the word and image books of Amiri Baraka, June Jordan, John Keene, Christopher Stackhouse, and others, this chapter unveils the unbound nature of mixed media as one of the most innovative legacies of the Black Arts Movement.

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