American Passages - Unit 15. Poetry of Liberation: Context Activities

15. Poetry of Liberation

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Unit Overview

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Using the Video

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Authors

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Timeline

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Activities

-	Overview Questions
-	Video Activities
-	Author Activities
-	Context Activities
-	Creative Response
-	PBL Projects

Activities: Context Activities

Black Arts: A Separate Voice

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[7138] Anonymous, LeRoi Jones (Amiri Baraka) Leads the Black Arts Parade Down 125th Toward the Black Arts Theater Repertory/School on 130th Street, New York City (1965), courtesy of The Liberator.

Questions Archive

The Black Arts movement arose alongside the Black Power movement in the 1960s. The movement flourished from 1965 to about 1975, and though it was short-lived, its legacy was long. Artists typically associated with Black Arts include Amiri Baraka, Nikki Giovanni, Ed Bullins, Harold Cruse, Adrienne Kennedy, Larry Neal, and Sonia Sanchez. Black Arts, according to writer Larry Neal, was an ethical movement, meaning that the artists, from poets and playwrights to painters and musicians, believed that art must have a political purpose and that it must be experienced by the masses. Rather than writing modernist poetry with racial themes, as poets like Gwendolyn Brooks and Robert Hayden had done in the 1940s and 1950s, the Black Arts poets worked to express a distinctly black aesthetic derived from black experience and a long African American oral tradition. Black Arts authors sought a new kind of audience; they wrote for the masses in the American ghettoes, and they wrote to bring this vast community together.

However, the Black Arts movement was controversial because it was characterized by an impulse toward separatism and militancy. In the late 1960s, a great deal of anger characterized the outlook of many African Americans. Catchphrases like "Black Pride," "Black Power," and "Black Is Beautiful" caught the attention of the black community (as well as the rest of America). Powerful symbols and images, like the Afro or the raised black fist silk-screened on shirts and posters, reinforced this new sense of racial pride. Afro-American studies departments were founded in universities across America, and English departments began to include literature by black writers on their syllabi.

The Black Arts movement had a profound impact on the poetry of the period, including poetry that emerged out of the Chicano movement, the Asian American movement, and the Native American Renaissance. Literature was judged first and foremost by its political message. Did the poetry incite action? Did the verse further the political cause for blacks? This shift in focus from aesthetics to politics was a radical moment in African American art, but in many ways, this poetry was similar to much of the other verse being written at the time by the Beats and feminists. They, like their counterparts, were protesting a whole range of societal problems. As critic David Perkins argues, the Black Arts movement "had many characteristics of an avant-garde movement. It was anti-establishment, continually self-dividing into factions, preoccupied with defining itself and its aims, prolific of manifestos and enormously confident of its own vitality and importance."

The movement lost energy in the 1970s as the political and social climate improved for blacks, thanks to the civil rights movement, and the imperative to be political and to appeal to the masses grew wearisome for many artists who wanted to grow and find new readers. The legacy of the Black Arts movement, however, remains important to current literature. The poets of the 1960s deserve much credit for changing the way the black community and the rest of society view blackness; indeed, they helped to instill a sense of pride in blacks everywhere with poems like "Coal," "Black Mother Woman," and "The Woman Thing." Their work inspired black poets to use realistic dialect and speech in their poetry, and they also urged them to express black experience more honestly than ever before. This paved the way for black poets to write in a more confessional manner, incorporating intimate personal experience into their work.

Questions

Comprehension: What are the features of the Black Arts movement? What relationship did poets and writers see between art and politics?

Comprehension: How would you describe the political and social climate within which the Black Arts movement developed?

Comprehension: What relationship do you see between the values and styles of the Black Arts movement and those of rap, hip-hop, or other musical forms in American popular culture? What is achieved when politicized art gains a mass audience? What can be lost in the process?

Context: What do you think attracted Baraka and other Black Arts writers to the Beat movement in the 1950s and 1960s? What characteristics of Beat poetry continued in the work of these African American writers?

Context: How does Audre Lorde's poetry fit into the Black Arts movement? What features does her poetry share with this new direction in poetry?

Exploration: We live in a time when entertainment and popular culture industries quickly notice, adapt, and exploit trends in alternative communities and "countercultures," to the extent that it can be difficult to tell the original or the radical from the commercial copy. In the late 1960s, rock FM radio stations sprang up across the country, and "Blaxploitation" films were produced by Hollywood to reflect and profit from the race consciousness that had grown strong in African American communities. If you are interested in the history of popular music, consider the recordings of African American groups of the late 1960s and early 1970s: Funkadelic; Sly and the Family Stone; Earth, Wind and Fire. Consider also the dramatic changes in the sound of Motown artists who were already well established by the late 1960s: The Temptations, The Supremes, Marvin Gaye, and others. If you are interested in film, sample some of the Blaxploitation films that have enjoyed a long life on video: Shaft, Superfly, Blackula, Putney Swope, Sweet Sweetback's Baad-assss Song. Such films are often grouped together at rental outlets. As you look and listen, speculate about these works as cultural artifacts. Do they show us the sensibility of the Black Arts movement? An exploitation or caricature of that sensibility? Or some mingling of the two?

Exploration: Social historians have sometimes suggested that the ideology of the Black Arts poets was essentially counter to the values of Martin Luther King Jr., who emphasized nonviolent protest and harmony among races in America and the world. Where do you see affinity between works from the Black Arts movement and the values of King and the civil rights movement? What debt might the Black Arts movement owe to King?

Exploration: In light of what you've learned about the Black Arts movement, reread the selections from Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man. In the 1960s, Ellison was often vilified by younger African American writers for being too "literary" in the white sense, for emulating forms and styles of Faulkner, Joyce, Emerson, Mark Twain, and other white authors. Does Ellison nonetheless qualify as a subversive or revolutionary writer? Compare the resistance of Invisible Man to the resistance of the Black Arts movement. What are the strengths and limitations of each as political art?

Archive
[3011] Austin Hansen, Eartha Kitt Teaching a Dance Class at Harlem YMCA (c. 1955),
courtesy of Joyce Hansen and the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, New York Public Library.
Eartha Kitt came to New York as a child and grew up in a vibrant Harlem. An acclaimed dancer, singer, international cabaret performer, and 1950s sex symbol, Kitt began her dance career with the Katherine Dunham Dance Troupe at age seventeen. Kitt was blacklisted for almost a decade after speaking out against the Vietnam War in 1968.

[6714] Romare Bearden, The Family (1976),
courtesy of the Romare Bearden Foundation/Licensed by VAGA, New York, NY.
Romare Bearden gained international recognition for the powerful visual metaphors and probing analysis of African American heritage in his collages, photomontages, watercolors, and prints. He was a member of the Harlem Artists Guild and had his first solo exhibition in 1940 at the age of twenty-nine. He had many literary friends, including James Baldwin, Ralph Ellison, and Albert Murray.

[7138] Anonymous, LeRoi Jones (Amiri Baraka) Leads the Black Arts Parade Down 125th Toward the Black Arts Theater Repertory/School on 130th Street, New York City (1965),
courtesy of The Liberator.
Influenced by civil rights activism and black nationalism, Baraka (Jones) and other African American artists opened the Black Arts Theater in Harlem in 1965.

[7140] Emory, One of Our Main Purposes Is to Unify Brothers and Sisters in the North with Our Brothers and Sisters in the South (c. 1970),
courtesy of the Library of Congress [LC-USZC4-10248].
Political poster for the Black Panthers. In the 1960s and 1970s, the Black Panthers and black nationalist writers emphasized the need for solidarity among African Americans and people of African descent throughout the world.

[7234] Anonymous, "The Evil System of Colonialism and Imperialism Arose and Throve with the Enslavement of Negroes and the Trade in Negroes, and It Will Surely Come to an End with the Complete Emancipation of Black People" (c. 1970),
courtesy of the Library of Congress [LC-USZ62-995].
This poster shows the power of action and demonstration in effecting change for disenfranchised, marginalized, and persecuted peoples. It draws on and is titled after a quotation from Mao Tse-tung.

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