Black Arts Movement | B-Town Thinking

Comments I delivered for a panel on Amiri Baraka’s essays at the 2015 MLA Annual Convention in Vancouver. The panel was organized by the Divisions on Non-Fiction Prose Studies and Black American Literature and Culture. Margo Natalie Crawford, Jeremy M. Glick, William J. Harris, and Aldon Lynn Nielsen also spoke on the panel, Brian J. Norman and Dana A. Williams presiding.

When we talk about the Black Arts Movement—or, for that matter, most movements—how can we do so? By that I mean, how can we address not only the flux of movement, but also the diversity of thought and action shaped by regional conditions and philosophical differences? How can we take stock of the activity of movement broadly but also specifically—what it looked like on the ground? And in the case of the Black Arts Movement’s most emblematic figure, Amiri Baraka, whom we honor here, how shall we assess the volume and diversity of his movement work and his contributions to the development of art, culture, politics, and consciousness?

Cover, Black Revolutionary Theater, Special issue of The Drama Review, Summer 1968

In order to think about these questions, I want to turn to the spring of 1967 and to a unique document of that moment, Baraka’s “Communications Project”, published in 1968 in the “Black Revolutionary Theatre” special issue of The Drama Review.[1] Ed Bullins served as guest editor; the issue contains primarily plays, by Bullins, Sonia Sanchez, Marvin X, Jimmy Garrett, Baraka and others. Of the few critical pieces, Larry Neal’s seminal essay “The Black Arts Movement” is probably the issue’s most widely circulated piece, and alongside other essays by Neal, Addison Gayle, Carolyn Rodgers, Baraka, among others, it is certainly one of the most emblematic pieces of Black Arts criticism.

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Coming back from the MELUS (Society for the Study of Multi-Ethnic Literatures of the United States) Conference in Pittsburgh, where I presented on a panel titled, “Irish American, Italian American, Jewish American, and Mennonite Literary Traditions and Narrative Voices.”

The abstract of my paper:

“Singing the Black Aesthetic Blues: Bernard Malamud’s The Tenants”

Recent attention to Kenneth Warren’s use of the past tense in the question “What Was African American Literature?” has come not because the question is entirely new but because of the historical moment in which it has appeared. Reconsiderations of Jim Crow and Black Power literary history and aesthetics are inextricably linked to contemporary concerns with the direction of ethnic literatures and ethnic studies in a post-nationalist period marked by “comparative race studies” and the “post-racial.” In this paper, I take up a variation of Warren’s question in the context of the Black Arts Movement and Bernard Malamud’s The Tenants (1971): what makes a “black text” black? And what is at stake in such a definition, not only within its historical context but for our contemporary moment as well. At the height of the Black Arts Movement, white Jewish author Malamud’s The Tenants attempts to represent the debate about the relationship between literature and race but also “black” writing itself. Thus, integrated into the novel are passages of Malamud’s ventriloquizing of Black Arts literature. Malamud is no Amiri Baraka, but he takes his charge and the question seriously, and thus presents the reader with an interesting challenge during a moment in which the parameters of “authentic” black literature were debated often and contentiously. I take up racial representation, appropriation, and self-expression in The Tenants in order to historicize the development of ethnic literatures and to continue to expand the discussion of how to approach texts that present problems of categorization.

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Amiri Baraka’s “Communications Project”

@ MELUS Conference 2013, Pittsburgh, PA

Berkeley, California, USA