The Black Arts Movement

by Smethurst, James Edward

• ISBN13: 9780807829349
• ISBN10: 080782934X
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2005-04-01
• Publisher: Univ of North Carolina Pr

Summary

Emerging from a matrix of Old Left, black nationalist, and bohemian ideologies and institutions, African American artists and intellectuals in the 1960s coalesced to form the Black Arts Movement, the cultural wing of the Black Power Movement. In this comprehensive analysis, James Smethurst examines the formation of the Black Arts Movement and demonstrates how it deeply influenced the production and reception of literature and art in the United States through its negotiations of the ideological climate of the Cold War, decolonization, and the civil rights movement. Taking a regional approach, Smethurst examines variations in the character of the local expressions of the nascent Black Arts Movement, a movement distinctive in its geographical reach and diversity, while always keeping the frame of the larger movement in view. The Black Arts Movement, he argues, fundamentally changed American attitudes about the relationship between popular culture and "high" art and dramatically transformed the landscape of public funding for the arts.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments	ix
Abbreviations	xiii
Introduction	1	(22)
1. Foreground and Underground: The Left, Nationalism, and the Origins of the Black Arts Matrix	23	(34)
2. Artists Imagine the Nation, the Nation Imagines Art: The Black Arts Movement and Popular Culture, History, Gender, Performance, and Textuality	57	(43)
3. New York Altar City: New York, the Northeast, and the Development of Black Arts Cadres and Ideologies	100	(79)
4. Institutions for the People: Chicago, Detroit, and the Black Arts Movement in the Midwest	179	(68)
5. Bandung World: The West Coast, the Black Arts Movement, and the Development of Revolutionary Nationalism, Cultural Nationalism, Third Worldism, and Multiculturalism	247	(72)
6. Behold the Land: Regionalism, the Black Nation, and the Black Arts Movement in the South	319	(48)
Conclusion	367	(8)
APPENDIX 1. Birth Dates of Selected Black Arts and Black Power Figures	375	(2)
APPENDIX 2. Time Line of the Early Black Arts and Black Power Movements	377	(4)
Notes	381	(48)
Bibliography	429	(30)
Index	459