Corina Crisu - Polytropic Identities in the Postmodern African American Novel - Chapter I: The Black Arts Movement: “Reordering the Western Aesthetic”

Corina Crisu

Rewriting

Polytropic Identities

in the Postmodern African American Novel

Chapter I

Cultural and Theoretical Contexts:

Rewriting, Revision, and Black Postmodernism

The Black Arts Movement: “Reordering the Western Aesthetic”

In order to have an insight into the complex scenario circumscribed by the postmodern African American literature, it is essential to discuss its ambivalent relationship with the previous modernist decade. The Civil Rights Movement of the 1960s appears on the background of a historically troubled decade: the tragic costs of the Vietnam War, the presidency of John F. Kennedy, the international diplomatic crises in Cuba, the liberation movements in African countries such as Nigeria and Kenya, and the assassination of political leaders (John F. Kennedy, Malcolm X, and Martin Luther King, Jr.).

Emerging out of an unsettled political milieu, the Black Power Movement triggers a new racial consciousness. Through a sustained protest against corruption, poverty, racism, and sexism, the movement concentrates on the racial issue as a major point on the social and political agenda in the United States. Its collective, continuous efforts are intended to bring about basic social reform by means of transforming racist representations of African Americans through new ideological perspectives upon race.⁷

The social reform initiated by the Black Power Movement finds its artistic counterpart in the Black Arts Movement, which represents “the aesthetic and spiritual sister of the Black Power concept” (Neal 1994, 185). Characterized by historical revision and cultural affirmation, the objectives of the Black Arts Movement fork in two major directions: the rediscovery of African American writers and thinkers who are part of an important black tradition, and the promotion of the new African American artists cultivating specifically black cultural forms. Linking the aesthetic with the political, black authors aim at creating literary works in which personal aspirations are related to collective racial ideals. Powerful sources of inspiration for black writers are to be found in Malcolm X’s black nationalist ideas that the black people are “a race, a culture, a Nation,” or in Martin Luther King’s dream of a unified America in which all races could peacefully coexist.

To be sure, the Black Arts Movement prompts the formation of a new Black Aesthetic that militates not only for the destruction of Eurocentric forms of thinking, but also for the establishment of innovative forms of black creativity. As Larry Neal explains, the Black Arts Movement proposes “a radical reordering of the Western cultural aesthetic:”

The Black Arts Movement is radically opposed to any concept of the artist that alienates him from his community. Black Art is the aesthetic and spiritual sister of the Black Power concept. As such, it envisions an art that speaks directly to the needs and aspirations of Black America… The Black Arts and the Black Power concepts both relate broadly to the Afro-American’s desire for self-determination and nationhood. Both concepts are nationalistic (1994, 184).

Significant poets (Nikki Giovanni, Haki Madhubuti, Gwendolyn Brooks, Robert Hayden, and Sonia Sanchez), playwrights (Amiri Baraka, Ed Bullins, and Ron Milner), novelists (John A. Williams, James Allan McPherson), and literary critics (Addison Gayle, Jr., Darwin Turner, Eugenia Collier, and Arna Bontemps) raise their voices to expose the inequities of the American racism, the alienation of the black character, and blacks’ deferred dream of social welfare.⁸

One of the most remarkable spokesmen of the movement, Imamu Amiri Baraka (born LeRoy Jones) stands as a charismatic dramatist and poet. In connection with Malcolm X’s separatist line of thought, Baraka advocates the “de-Americanization of African Americans,” the racial division between black and white cultural and social spheres (Mitchell 1994, 170). He insists that black writers should endow their texts with the idiosyncratic style of their own race, eliminating white literary forms.

As Ishmael Reed points out, the consequences of the Black Arts Movement are crucial for the postmodern era:

I think what Black Arts did was inspire a whole lot of Black people to write. Moreover, there would be no multiculturalism movement without Black Arts. Latinos, Asian Americans, and others all say they began writing as a result of the example of the 1960s. Blacks gave the example that you don't have to assimilate. You could do your own thing, get into your own background, your own history, your own tradition, and your own culture. I think the challenge is for cultural sovereignty and Black Arts struck a blow for that (Reed in Salaam 1997, 1).

The Black Arts Movement is defined by several distinctive features—to be later explored by postmodern authors: it is a politically engaged form of art that suits the immediacy of street struggle; it makes use of vernacular artistic forms such a black performance and music; it turns toward Africa in search of new sources of inspiration, with an emphasis on black origins; it undertakes a revisionist project that reconsiders forgotten authors and reprints their texts; it stresses the participatory relationship between artist and audience, i. e. the artist’s reforming impact upon the others.⁹

Numerous theoreticians have commented on the relation between modernism and postmodernism both in terms of continuity and discontinuity.¹⁰ While analyzing black literary postmodernism, Madhu Dubey defines postmodernity as a continuity of modernity and treats “socioeconomic developments since the 1970s as novel in significant aspects yet part of an intense round of modernization” (2003, 18).¹¹ Accordingly, Dubey does not see the postmodern as “a socioeconomic order radically discontinuous from the modern,” even though he notices such changes from the modern “as greater global integration of capital or the spread of advance information technologies” (2003, 17).¹²

However, several African American critics have pointed out the discontinuity between modernism and postmodernism, and have stressed the major fallacies of the Black Arts Movement: its generalizing perspective, its insistence on racial binarism, and its advocacy of black nationalism. Malcolm X’s and Baraka’s radical idea of division between races no longer works today, because it perpetuates racial antagonism. One of the aims of contemporary authors is to move beyond this vicious dialectic of power, in which a white supremacist model is replaced with a black one. Barbara Christian cautions us against adopting the modernist fault of “dehumanizing people by stereotyping them, by denying their variousness and complexity” (2000, 19). As Christian affirms, “in attempting to take over power… [the Black Arts Movement] became much like its opponent, monolithic and downright repressive” (2000, 18). Christian’s analysis suggests that the errors of the Black Arts Movement could be repeated today by the French feminists’ tendency to “restrict the definitions of what feminist means and overgeneralize about so much of the world that most women as well as men are excluded” (2000, 19). Christian’s comments are extremely useful in the context of this chapter, since she insists on the necessity to revise both the Black Arts Movement and the principles of white feminism. Her critique of white feminism thus illuminates the urgency of defining the main directions of black feminism—a point discussed below.

NOTES

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