Black is a Color: (A History of African American Art): Book Review

History of African Americans: Exploring Diverse Roots by Thomas J. Davis chronicles the remarkable past of African Americans from the earliest arrival of their ancestors to the election of President Barack Obama. This work was produced to recognize every triumph and tragedy that separates African Americans as a group from others in America. By distinguishing the rich and unique history of African Americans, History of African Americans: Exploring Diverse Roots provides an account of inspiration, courage, and progress. Each chapter details a significant piece of African American history, and the book includes numerous concise portraits of prominent African Americans and their contributions to progressing social life in the United States.

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On the Blackness of Post-Blackness

Black and More than Black ◽

10.14325/mississippi/9781496824516.003.0002 ◽

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.

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African American Art Beyond the Harlem Renaissance

The Routledge Companion to African American Art History ◽

10.4324/9781351045193-5 ◽

2019 ◽

pp. 41-49

Author(s):

John Ott

Keyword(s):

African American ◽

Harlem Renaissance ◽

American Art ◽

African American Art ◽

The Harlem Renaissance

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