Echoes of the Blues: A Study of the Aesthetic Thoughts of the Black Arts Movement

Yunli ZHAO

Abstract


The Black Arts Movement is also known as “the Black Aesthetic Movement” because of the distinctive aesthetic thoughts this movement advocated. During the years from 1968 to 1971, Larry Neal, Amiri Baraka, Addison Gale, Jr., Hoyt Fuller, Ron Karenga, and other key BAM members and leaders published numerous articles on black aesthetics in the periodicals such as Black Digest and Black World. The Black Aesthetic, edited by Addison Gale, Jr., contains theoretical essays by a number of BAM thinkers, many of which are recognized as seminal works of the study of BAM aesthetics. These writings cover the definition, functions, techniques, and evaluation of black aesthetics, and have become an important spiritual legacy of this movement. This paper aims to discuss the BAM aesthetics from three aspects in the light of some relevant theories and texts.


Keywords


The Black Arts Movement; Aesthetic Thoughts; Blackness

Full Text:

PDF

References


Baraka, A. (1972). Raise, Race, Rays, Race: Essays Since 1965.New York: Random House.

Bracey, J. H. Jr., Sanchez, S., & Smethurst, J. (2014). Editors’ Introduction. In J. H. Bracey Jr., S. Sanchez, & J. Smethurst (Eds.), SOS－Calling all Black People: A Black Arts Movement Reader (pp.1-10). Amherst and Boston: University of Massachusetts Press.

Cheng, X. L. (1990). An New Emerging Critical Theory: American Black Aesthetic. Foreign Literature, 6, 73-78.

Cleaver, L. E. (2014). As crinkly as Yours. In J. H. Bracey Jr., S. Sanchez, & J. Smethurst (Eds.), SOS－Calling all Black People: A Black Arts Movement Reader (pp.135-144). Amherst and Boston: University of Massachusetts Press.

Fuller, H. W. (1971). Towards a Black Aesthetic. In A. Gayle Jr. (Ed.), The Black Aesthetic. (pp. 3-11). Garden City, NY: Doubleday & Company, Inc.

Gale, A. Jr. (1971). Cultural strangulation: Black Literature and the White Aesthetic. In A. Gayle Jr. (Ed.), The Black Aesthetic. (pp.38-45). Garden City, NY: Doubleday & Company, Inc.

Gale, A. Jr. (1971). Introduction. In A. Gayle Jr. (Ed.), The Black Aesthetic. (pp. xv- xxiv). Garden City, NY: Doubleday & Company, Inc.

Gale, A. Jr. (1971). The Function of Black Literature at the Present Time. In A. Gayle Jr. (Ed.), The Black Aesthetic (pp.383-394). Garden City, NY: Doubleday & Company, Inc.

Gennari, J. (2003). Baraka’s Bohemian Blues. African American Review, 37(2/3), 258-259.

Neal, L. (1972). Any Day Now: Black art and Black Liberation. In W. King & E. Anthony (Eds.), Black Poets and Prophets (pp. 149-150). New York: New American Library.

Salaam, K. ya. (2016). The Magic of Juju: An Appreciation of the Black Arts Movement. Chicago: Third World Press.

Sanchez, S. (2014). The Poetry of the BAM: Meditation, Critique, Praise. In J. H. Bracey Jr., S. Sanchez, & J. Smethurst (Eds.), SOS－Calling all Black People: A Black Arts Movement reader (pp.243-253). Amherst and Boston: University of Massachusetts Press.

Sell, M. (2008). Don’t Forget the Triple Front!: Some Historical and Representational Dimensions of the Black Arts Movement in Academia. African American Review, 42(3/4), 625.

Smethurst, J. (2012). “Internationally Known”: The Black Arts Movement and U.S. Poetry in the Age of Hip Hop. In C. Nelson (Ed.), The Oxford Handbook of Modern and Contemporary American Poetry. Oxford: Oxford Academic.

Smith, D. L. (1991). The Black Arts Movement and Its Critics. American Literary History, 3(1), 100-101.

Teer, B. A. (2014). Needed a New Image. In J. H. Bracey Jr., S. Sanchez, & J. Smethurst (Eds.), SOS－Calling all Black people: A Black Arts Movement Reader (pp. 82-85). Amherst and Boston: University of Massachusetts Press.




DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.3968/13488

Refbacks

  • There are currently no refbacks.


Copyright (c) 2024 Higher Education of Social Science

Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.

Share us to:   

Reminder

  • How to do online submission to another Journal?
  • If you have already registered in Journal A, then how can you submit another article to Journal B? It takes two steps to make it happen:

1. Register yourself in Journal B as an Author

  • Find the journal you want to submit to in CATEGORIES, click on “VIEW JOURNAL”, “Online Submissions”, “GO TO LOGIN” and “Edit My Profile”. Check “Author” on the “Edit Profile” page, then “Save”.

2. Submission

  • Go to “User Home”, and click on “Author” under the name of Journal B. You may start a New Submission by clicking on “CLICK HERE”.


We only use three mailboxes as follows to deal with issues about paper acceptance, payment and submission of electronic versions of our journals to databases:
caooc@hotmail.com; hess@cscanada.net; hess@cscanada.org

 Articles published in Higher Education of Social Science are licensed under Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 (CC-BY).

HIGHER EDUCATION OF SOCIAL SCIENCE Editorial Office

Address: 1055 Rue Lucien-L'Allier, Unit #772, Montreal, QC H3G 3C4, Canada.
Telephone: 1-514-558 6138 
Website: Http://www.cscanada.net Http://www.cscanada.org 
E-mail: caooc@hotmail.com; office@cscanada.net

Copyright © 2010 Canadian Research & Development Center of Sciences and Cultures