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Black Arts Movement
5 articles on Black Arts Movement
Black Arts Movement
Source: Encyclopedia of African American History, 1896 to the Present: From the Age of Segregation to the Twenty-first Century
The Black Arts Movement was a loosely affiliated group of politically motivated activist poets, painters, musicians, dramatists, and other artists working in American urban centers, beginning roughly in 1965 and losing momentum by the mid-1970s. It is considered to be the artistic arm of the Black Power movement. Though African American fiction and visual art expressed a similar radicalism and appeared under the scope of Black Arts, the movement's emphasis on performative expression gave precedence to vernacular poetry and the dramatic arts.The poet LeRoi Jonesis generally credited with developing what would become the Black Arts Movement. Though Malcolm X was killed by black assassins, Jones and other black artists and activists interpreted the murder as a plot engineered by agents of the rich and powerful. In response to ...
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Source: Africana: The Encyclopedia of the African and African American Experience, Second Edition
Word Count: 1267Black Nationalist African American arts movement focusing on music, literature, drama, and the visual arts. The Black Arts Movement was a loose network of Black Nationalist African American artists and intellectuals during the mid-1960s to the mid-1970s. In many respects, the Black Arts Movement was the cultural wing of the Black Power Movement. Like the Black Power Movement, its participants held a variety of political beliefs, ranging from revolutionary Marxism to versions of what was understood as the cultures and ideologies of traditional precolonial Africa. Despite this range of often-conflicting beliefs, there was a generally shared concept of African American liberation and the right of African Americans to determine their own destiny. There was also usually some common notion of the development or recovery of an authentic national black culture that was linked to an existing African American folk or popular culture. ...
Read full articleBlack Arts Movement: An Interpretation
Source: Africana: The Encyclopedia of the African and African American Experience, Second Edition
Word Count: 2839 Includes: Black Arts and the Black Aesthetic | Principle Voices | Achievements | LegacyIn 1964, when James Meredith was shot while on a voter registration drive in Memphis, Tennessee, a young Stokely Carmichael, who continued the march, announced that it was time for what he called Black Power. For a number of African Americans the strategy of the Civil Rights Movement—with its objective of Integration—was beginning to appear demeaning and even irrelevant. Certainly, with the passing of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965, a key phase of the battle seemed over.Indeed, in that same year the Watts area of Los Angeles was torched by those for whom legislative changes seemed to have no bearing on their daily lives. Two years later, what were euphemistically called civil disturbances broke out across the country, and, in 1968, following the assassination of ...
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Source: Black Women in America, Second Edition
The term Black Arts Movement refers to the historical period between 1960 and 1975 when African American writers, artists, educators, and intellectuals attempted to redefine black cultural identity in the United States by emphasizing the black aesthetic. Participants in the movement viewed the black aesthetic as a serious effort to produce literature or works of art and advance black cultural life through a system of beliefs and theories based on the political, economic, social, and cultural history of blacks. A central goal of the movement was to promote the creativity of black artists to the African American community while basing their interpretations of the black experience on an aesthetic observed from this same experience.During the twentieth century, two ...
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Source: The Oxford Encyclopedia of American Literature
Word Count: 4332 Includes: The Black Arts Movement and the Evolution of African-American Literature | Immediate Antecedents and the Black Arts Label | Proliferation of the Movement and The Black Aesthetic | Backlash Against the Black Aesthetic | Legacy of the Black Arts Movement | Further ReadingThe term “Black Arts Movement” describes a set of attitudes, influential from 1965 to 1976, about African-American cultural production, which assumed that political activism was a primary responsibility of black artists. It also decreed that the only valid political end of black artists' efforts was liberation from white political and artistic power structures. Just as white people were to be stripped of their right to proscribe or define black identity, white aesthetic standards were to be overthrown and replaced with creative values arising from the black community. Larry Neal, one of the movement's founders, noted in his essay The Black Arts Movement (1968) that this agenda made the Black Arts Movement “the aesthetic and spiritual sister of the Black Power concept.” Like Black Power, the Black Arts ideology had ...
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