The Black Arts Era 1960-1975

Audre Lorde

• West Indian descent, born in NYC
• Published first poem at 17
• Became a teacher and activist
• embraced African creation myths
• struggled with breast cancer 14 years
• "The white fathers told us: I think therefore I am. The Black mother within each of us--the poet--whispers in our dreams: I feel, therefore I can be free."

Michael S. Harper

Audre Lorde

Amiri Baraka

• Main architect and propelling force of the Black Arts movement
• Defined by perpetual redefinition of self

Themes

Characteristics

• Personal and confessional tone

• Invocation of African American vernacular music traditions, especially

through improvisational techniques and rhythms

• Poetry that consists of chants, hymns, musical allusions, and references to famous black musicians

• Use of secular music forms, especially jazz techniques, themes, artists

• Emphasis on the legendary jazz artist John Coltrane as inspiration for both poetic forms and subjects

Themes

• Insistence on the right of oppressed peoples to express and define themselves

• Vernacular discourses, with emphasis on the power of speech acts, self-expression, and self-assertion

• Racial and sexual identities, complexly defined and articulated

• Beauty of human differences

• Feminist theory/Black feminist spirituality

• Denunciation of racism, imperialism, and homophobia--social activism

• Critique of oppressive and imperialistic cultural norms

• Critical need for human beings to discuss as well as embrace differences among themselves

• Identity as "woman, black lesbian feminist mother lover poet"

Characteristics

• Dialogues with other writers and leaders, especially across differences

• Penetrating critique of social systems

• Confessional but polemical style and tone

• Writes in several different genres (poetry, myth, autobiography, essay, epistle), sometimes creating generic hybrid texts

• Activist vision

• Economic imperatives for black people

• African American history and culture

• Definitions of “the Black Aesthetic”

• Critique of bourgeois pretentiousness

• Faith in power of black vernacular music traditions to heal social evils

• Links between African identities and African American identities

• The trauma and still poignant pain of slavery and the Middle Passage

• Assimilation vs. resistance or revolution

• Rejection of Western myths and aesthetics

Michael S. Harper

characteristics

themes

• Born NYC, moved LA, middle class
• put in vocational school, resisted
• academic life, but conflicted (also worked in "real world" as postal worker...other blue collar jobs)
• "My poems are rhythmic rather than metric, the pulse is jazz, the tradition generally oral..."

Michael S. Harper

• Double consciousness

• Black folk myths, mysteries, and recoveries

• Black reconstruction and reintegration of a troubled, racist past

• Black redemption

• African American familial love

• Intersection, blurred lines ostensibly separating myth or history and

music

• Human possibility, combination, and diversity

Themes

• Double consciousness

• Black folk myths, mysteries, and recoveries

• History, African American ancestral past, intersection of past and present

• Black reconstruction and reintegration of a troubled, racist past

• Intersection, blurred lines ostensibly separating myth or history and music

• Human possibility, combination, and diversity/redemption

• Personal and confessional tone

• Invocation of African American vernacular music traditions, especially through improvisational techniques and rhythms

• Poetry that consists of chants, hymns, musical allusions, and references to famous black musicians

• Poetic and rhetorical replications of musical instruments, sounds, and visions

• Use of secular music forms, especially jazz techniques, themes, artists

• Emphasis on the legendary jazz artist John Coltrane as inspiration for

both poetic forms and subjects

questions

• Compare and contrast Harper’s use of black vernacular music traditions with W. E. B. Du Bois’s use of the same traditions as well as Du Bois's concept of the double consciousness.
• Compare and contrast Harper's engagement of Coltrane with Sanchez.

Authors

Black Art

Power

• Occasion for poem is the acquittal of a white policeman for shooting a 10 year old black boy, what to do with her emotions.
• Characters: the speaker, the policeman, the jurywoman, the boy
• power of rhetoric to move people to action and the requirement in poetry to take risks.
• to know yourself is to know the power of poetry
• metaphor of the desert for her emotional state
• the speaker must learn the difference between poetry and rhetoric (must empower herself through words) or she will become an accomplice to violence

Amiri Baraka

Adrienne Kennedy

Audre Lorde

Sonia Sanchez

Michael S. Harper

black aesthetic

activism

Poetry is not a Luxury

“Black Art” is a manifesto for the era’s black aesthetic, and the poem itself both theorizes and practices the tenets of the movement. How does Baraka’s poem present both aesthetic

and political arguments?

• Baraka, like many Black Arts writers, sought to convey or share experience in his work. His alterations of verses, his shifts from speech into song, and his imitations of the sounds of instruments (onamonapia) link his work with the improvisatory ethos of jazz.”Does the poem manage to transcend the page and become something like an experience— that is, something more than just print?

"For women, poetry is not a luxury, It is a vital necessity of our existence. It forms the quality of light within which we predicate our hopes and reams toward survival and change, first made into a language, then into more tangible action" (644).

Adrienne Kennedy

Sonia Sanchez

characteristics

• Examine Sanchez’s use of sound, nonstandard grammar and syntax, and punctuation in “a/coltrane/poem.” What is the function of sound

on the page (compare to Baraka's "Black Art" and Michael S. Harper)?

• Besides the textual rendering of sound, what other aspects of “a/coltrane/poem” mark it as something more than a poem to be read silently but as a work to be felt or experienced?

• Individual and collective (existential) transformations

• Role of women in the struggle for civil rights

• Power of music to shape community consciousness

• Blackness as empowering

• Militant nationalism as solution to oppression

Themes

• Interracial marriage

• Amalgamation, miscegenation, and madness

• Race, gender, and social ostracism

• Vexed relationships between Africans and African Americans

• Blurred line between reality and fantasy

• Fragmented, irreconcilable identities— split personalities

• Existential crises

• Death, murder, suicide

• Whiteness as hegemonic dominance and national obsession

Characteristics

• Structural distortions to reflect interior chaos

• Dramatic monologues (vocabulary term)

• Repetition

• Dreamscape, nightmare

• Revision of the figure of the tragic mulatta

• Distortion of black subjectivity

• Dominant white imagery, especially in costumes and stage props

themes

• Read W. E. B. Du Bois’s theory of double consciousness as articulated in The Souls of Black Folk. To what extent does that theory operate in Funnyhouse?
• How does color function in the play? Masks?
• What is the significance of hair in Funnyhouse of a Negro? Why is Sarah carrying her hair, lamenting the loss of her hair, and talking about mother’s loss of hair
• Along with color juxtapositions and the recurring use of hair as a symbol, Kennedy also uses the knocking sound throughout Funnyhouse. What does this knocking represent, and why does it continue?
• What binaries are set up in Funnyhouse and what do they mean?

• Vernacular idioms and rhythms, vocal intonations and aphasia (language disorder)

• African American vernacular English (urban)

• Call and response performativity

• Profane language

• Stylistic innovation/inventive syntax

• Celebration of African ritual and community speech

The Black Arts Era 1960-1975

Characteristics

a literature for, by, and about African Americans

• time of great political upheaval (Woolworth's, Civil Rights, bombings, assassinatons, highs and lows)
• defined by innovation and restlessness in exploration of identity
• dissatisfaction with satisfaction, desire to move from metaphor to action
• call for a separate Black Nation, Nation of Islam, Black Power (Ali)
• featured more poetry and theater because of their performative nature
• idea of performance as practicing revolution
• "good" or "bad" art irrelevant. Important is the ability to MOVE an audience
• experimentation, commitment to aesthetic struggle, and spiritual dedication
• extensive vernacular (jazz, image, mixed media, sermons, mixed genre)

THANK YOU!