Amiri Baraka and the Black Arts of Black Art

boundary 2 ◽  
1986 ◽  
Vol 15 (1/2) ◽  
pp. 235
Author(s):  
David L. Smith
Keyword(s):  
Amiri Baraka ◽  
Black Arts ◽  
Black Art

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.

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.

Introduction

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Stephen Schryer
Keyword(s):  
World War Ii ◽  
Community Action ◽  
War On Poverty ◽  
Action Program ◽  
Amiri Baraka ◽  
Process Art ◽  
Class Culture ◽  
Black Arts ◽  
The Poor ◽  
Community Action Program

Focusing on the African American poet and playwright Amiri Baraka (LeRoi Jones), the Introduction explores links between 1950s and 1960s process literature and the Community Action Program. Baraka’s Black Arts Repertory Theatre and School (BARTS) was funded through the War on Poverty, and his version of process art fulfilled the participatory requirements of the Community Action Program. Both Baraka and many welfare activists allied with the Community Action Program also drew on a binary conception of class culture popularized by the post–World War II counterculture and liberal social science. This binary conception produced two figures that alternately incited and frustrated literary and social work efforts to bridge the gap between the middle class and the poor: the juvenile delinquent and the welfare mother.

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.

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.

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