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.

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.

Introduction

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Margo Natalie Crawford
Keyword(s):  
Identity Politics ◽  
21St Century ◽  
Black Arts Movement ◽  
Early Years ◽  
Visual Artists ◽  
Black Arts ◽  
Experimental Art ◽  
Black Art ◽  
Second Wave ◽  
Cultural Movement

This introduction presents the theory of “black post-blackness” as a way of rethinking the mood of the 1970s, second wave of the Black Arts Movement. Crawford uncovers the inseparability, during the second wave of this cultural movement, of the hailing of blackness and the questioning of blackness. This introduction shows that this holding on to a blackness that keeps sliding away is the black post-blackness that shapes the 1970s second wave of the Black Arts Movement and resurfaces in the early years of the 21st century as writers and visual artists shape blackness into an unbelonging that creates belonging. Crawford argues that the connections between 21st century experimental black art and the experimental art of the Black Arts Movement matter, because post-black too often signals post-Black Arts Movement. She critiques a linear understanding of the move from black identity politics to freedom. This introduction presents the circle of black post-blackness as an alternative to the linear periodization that fails to see how blackness anticipates post-blackness.

Poetics of the Enclave

2018 ◽  
pp. 91-108
Author(s):  
Timo Müller
Keyword(s):  
Black Arts Movement ◽  
Black Aesthetic ◽  
Black Arts ◽  
Recent Scholarship ◽  
Margaret Walker ◽  
1960S And 1970S ◽  
June Jordan ◽  
White Form ◽  
The 1960S

This chapter examines the previously neglected role of the sonnet in the Black Arts movement of the 1960s and 1970s. Leading theorists of the movement denounced the sonnet as a paradigmatic “white” form that constrained black self-expression and had to be excluded from the black nation. The demand for an oral, authentic, collective poetry led poets to dismantle the traditional sonnet structure and adapt the form to cultural nationalist demands. The chapter reviews the role of traditional poetic forms in the black aesthetic and discusses strategies of camouflaging or demarcating the sonnet in the work of June Jordan, Joe Mitchell, Conrad Kent Rivers, Quincy Troupe, and Margaret Walker. These strategies confirm the view in recent scholarship that the Black Arts movement exerted both a confining and a creative influence on poets of the time.

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.

The Politics of Abstraction

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Margo Natalie Crawford
Keyword(s):  
21St Century ◽  
Black Arts Movement ◽  
Abstract Art ◽  
Black Arts ◽  
Direct Continuation ◽  
Strategic Essentialism

The second chapter shows that the Black Arts Movement called upon abstraction as the movement hailed blackness. Crawford argues that the black abstract art of the 21st century is a direct continuation of the Black Arts Movement working of abstraction for its blackest possibilities. The paintings of the Afri-COBRA collective are as central to this chapter as the 21st century sculpture of Barbara Chase-Riboud and the 21st century paintings of Kerry James Marshall. This chapter argues that we have failed to see the connections between strategic essentialism and what Crawford names “strategic abstraction.”

Building the Black Arts Movement

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jonathan Fenderson
Keyword(s):  
Critical Role ◽  
Culture Wars ◽  
Black Arts Movement ◽  
Institution Building ◽  
Black Arts ◽  
Editorial Work ◽  
History Of ◽  
The 1960S ◽  
Creative Artists

This book is the first to document and analyze Hoyt Fuller’s profound influence on the Black Arts movement. Using historical snapshots of Fuller’s life and activism as a means to rethink the period, Building the Black Arts Movement provides a fresh take on the general trajectory of African American literary (and cultural) studies as the field developed over the course of two explosive decades in the mid-twentieth century. The book argues that the Black Arts movement can be understood as a pivotal and volatile moment in the long history of America’s culture wars. Moreover, by shifting our focus from creative artists and repositioning Fuller at the center of the movement--as one of its most underappreciated architects--the book grants new insights into the critical role of editorial work, the international dimensions of the movement, the complexities of sexuality, and the challenges of Black institution building during the 1960s and ’70s.

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.

Epilogue

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Margo Natalie Crawford
Keyword(s):  
21St Century ◽  
Black Arts Movement ◽  
Black Arts ◽  
Black Aesthetics ◽  
Sense Of Home

This epilogue argues that feeling black post-black leads Black Arts Movement and 21st century artists to rethink how people live and create home in liminality. Crawford compares the images of home in Mat Johnson’s novel Loving Day and Nikki Giovanni’s poetry volume My House. This epilogue draws upon Nathanial Mackey’s theory of tidalectics (the circular dialectic of black aesthetics). Crawford unveils the love, sense of home, and anticipation that shape the tidalectics of black post-blackness.

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