The Blues Revival and the Black Arts Movement

This chapter, which originally appeared in somewhat different form in New Thoughts on the Black Arts Movement (2006), places that Black literary and cultural revolution in dialogue with another cultural earthquake of the 1960s, the emergence of a mass white audience for blues music. For some Black Arts writers and thinkers like Ron Karenga, Sonia Sanchez, and Haki Madhubuti (Don L. Lee), the blues savored of black southern abjection and were, in Karenga’s dismissive judgment, “invalid,” an outmoded form without the political utility urgently needed in a time of Black revolution. Yet for many others, led by Larry Neal, the blues were a cherished ancestral rootsock and inalienably Black cultural inheritance—“the essential vector of the Afro-American sensibility and identity.” Even as the blues were being debated within the Black intelligentsia, a white blues revolution was transpiring, one in which white fans imagined themselves forming a beloved community with aged Black blues players who had been brought back into national circulation at festivals and college gigs, and in which white blues artists like Paul Butterfield and Janis Joplin, enjoying mass popularity, drew the fierce condemnation of Black Arts writers Ron Welburn and Stephen E. Henderson.

The Briar Patch

This chapter explores how, according to the most common interpretation, the briar patch stands as a metaphor for culture, sometimes a subculture sustained by either de facto or de jure segregation. Some critics, including Larry Neal, suggest that the rabbit's escape proves the problem of subjectivity posed in the encounter with the tar baby was never as difficult as other critics have believed. According to Neal, the recognition denied first by the property owner and then by the tar baby is consistently available to the rabbit in the briar patch. The “confusion and absurdity” dramatized when the rabbit believes the tar baby will talk back to him is not an example of the existential quandary of blackness.

Larry Neal and Jeffrey G. Williamson, The Cambridge History of Capitalism: Volume 1, The Rise of Capitalism: From Ancient Origins to 1848; Volume II, The Spread of Capitalism: From 1848 to the Present.

The Cambridge History of Capitalism, a formidable compendium of thirty-four essays spread over two volumes (each well over five hundred pages in length), was first conceived by the economic historians Larry Neal and Jeffrey Williamson in 2005. At that time, the “history of capitalism” was not yet a term of art in history departments; even in graduate workshops at Harvard, the locus classicus of the later movement, “political economy” was still the preferred phrase. By the time the book was published in 2014, much had changed: Harvard now offered a program on the “study of capitalism,” Cornell was convening a summer boot camp on the “history of capitalism,” Columbia had a book series on the history of “U.S. capitalism,” the Journal of American History had assembled a roundtable on the theme, and the front page of the New York Times had taken notice. Questions that long seemed the province of other disciplines had come to the forefront in history departments.