Radical Aesthetics and Modern Black Nationalism

2016 ◽  
Author(s):  
GerShun Avilez
Keyword(s):  
African American ◽  
American Literature ◽  
Cultural Production ◽  
Visual Art ◽  
African American Literature ◽  
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.

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.

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

Slavic Review ◽  
1992 ◽  
Vol 51 (4) ◽  
pp. 749-757 ◽  
Author(s):  
Dale E. Peterson
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
African American ◽  
American Literature ◽  
African 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.

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.

Cosmologies of Black Cultural Production: A Conversation with Afrosurrealist Filmmaker Christopher Harris

2016 ◽  
Vol 69 (4) ◽  
pp. 47-56
Author(s):  
Terri Francis
Keyword(s):  
African American ◽  
American Literature ◽  
Toni Morrison ◽  
Cultural Production ◽  
African American Literature ◽  
Experimental Poetics ◽  
American Artists ◽  
African American Artists

FQ Contributing Editor Terri Francis interviews filmmaker Christopher Harris, situating Afrosurrealist filmmaking within a constellation of African American artists and writers that includes the painter Kerry James Marshall, novelist Toni Morrison, poet Elizabeth Alexander, and composer Roscoe Mitchell. The discussion revolves around the experimental poetics of African American literature that provide Harris with flares of revelation that light the path for his diverse projects. Harris's oeuvre is in dialogue with the nature of the film medium and with what it means to work, observe, and think, as an artist, living between the ideals of American happiness and the realities of American inequality.

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 Arts Publishing and the Politics of Design

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kinohi Nishikawa
Keyword(s):  
African American ◽  
American Literature ◽  
African 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.

Introduction

2019 ◽  
pp. 3-32
Author(s):  
Cameron Leader-Picone
Keyword(s):  
African American ◽  
American Literature ◽  
African American Literature ◽  
Black Politics ◽  
Double Consciousness ◽  
African American Culture ◽  
Literary Aesthetics ◽  
Black Arts ◽  
Relationship Of ◽  
The Relationship

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.

Post-Soul Satire

2014 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
African American ◽  
Civil Rights ◽  
American Literature ◽  
Visual Arts ◽  
Cultural Production ◽  
African American Literature ◽  
Interdisciplinary Approach ◽  
African American Culture ◽  
Internet Culture ◽  
African American Artists

This volume collects essays that explore the variety of satiric productions in contemporary African American culture. Often dubbed “Post-Soul,” the artists of this period mark a change in political and aesthetic concerns from those embraced by artists of the Civil Rights period. Building off of Bertram Ashe’s notion of “blaxploration” – or the troubling of African American identity – this volume investigates the variety of means that African American artists have used to trouble the understanding of what it means to be black in contemporary America. The chapters in this collection offers the first interdisciplinary approach to the study of satire in contemporary African American literature, film, television, theatre, music, visual arts, and internet culture. The essays in this collection work to discern the means by which “Post-Soul Satire” addresses both in-group and external satiric critique of many aspects of contemporary African American cultural production.

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