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Visionary Women Writers of Chicago's Black Arts Movement
A disproportionate number of male writers, including such figures as Amiri Baraka, Larry Neal, Maulana Karenga, and Haki Madhubuti, continue to be credited for constructing the iconic and ideological foundations for what would be perpetuated as the Black Art Movement. Though there has arisen an increasing amount of scholarship that recognizes leading women artists, activists, and leaders of this period, these new perspectives have yet to recognize adequately the ways women aspired to far more than a mere dismantling of male-oriented ideals.
InVisionary Women Writers of Chicago's Black Arts Movement, Carmen L. Phelps examines the work of several women artists working in Chicago, a key focal point for the energy and production of the movement. Angela Jackson, Johari Amiri, and Carolyn Rodgers reflect in their writing specific cultural, local, and regional insights, and demonstrate the capaciousness of Black Art rather than its constraints. Expanding from these three writers, Phelps analyzes the breadth of women's writing in BAM. In doing so, Phelps argues that these and other women attained advantageous and unique positions to represent the potential of the BAM aesthetic, even if their experiences and artistic perspectives were informed by both social conventions and constraints. In this book, Phelps's examination brings forward a powerful and crucial contribution to the aesthetics and history of a movement that still inspires.
eBook
Visionary Women Writers of Chicago's Black Arts Movement
A disproportionate number of male writers, including such figures as Amiri Baraka, Larry Neal, Maulana Karenga, and Haki Madhubuti, continue to be credited for constructing the iconic and ideological foundations for what would be perpetuated as the Black Art Movement. Though there has arisen an increasing amount of scholarship that recognizes leading women artists, activists, and leaders of this period, these new perspectives have yet to recognize adequately the ways women aspired to far more than a mere dismantling of male-oriented ideals.
In Visionary Women Writers of Chicago's Black Arts Movement , Carmen L. Phelps examines the work of several women artists working in Chicago, a key focal point for the energy and production of the movement. Angela Jackson, Johari Amiri, and Carolyn Rodgers reflect in their writing specific cultural, local, and regional insights, and demonstrate the capaciousness of Black Art rather than its constraints. Expanding from these three writers, Phelps analyzes the breadth of women's writing in BAM. In doing so, Phelps argues that these and other women attained advantageous and unique positions to represent the potential of the BAM aesthetic, even if their experiences and artistic perspectives were informed by both social conventions and constraints. In this book, Phelps's examination brings forward a powerful and crucial contribution to the aesthetics and history of a movement that still inspires.
eBook
Muddying Clear Waters
Women writers of the BAM were often susceptible to gendered critiques, and writers like Chicago poet Carolyn Rodgers received their fair share of these, particularly from their male peers. The relationship between gender and artistic production and/or performance was reinforced through such critiques, which subsequently impacted the BAM’s objectives and continues to influence the ways in which readers and scholars perceive the legacy of the movement today. “As they articulated black manhood through the pen, the gun, the penis, and the microphone, male poets in the Black Arts Movement defined and reified revolutionary black male identity” (Pollard 173). Chicago Black
Book Chapter
Building a Home, Building a Nation
If much of the work of Black Artists of the late sixties and early seventies conveyed their collective aspirations to pursue methods of achieving social, political, and cultural empowerment for black communities of the African Diaspora, then Angela Jackson’s “a beginning for new beginnings,” published in her first collection of poetry,VooDoo/Love Magic(1975), suggests that black communities were still “wading. waiting” for such aspirations to be realized. As the narrator of this poem expresses, “the Fight is in the living thru.” Like her OBAC predecessors Johari Amini and Carolyn Rodgers, Jackson demonstrates in her work an unyielding commitment to
Book Chapter
Women Writing Kinship in Chicago’s Black Arts Movement
For artists, activists, and intellectuals of the Black Arts Movement, the collective goal of asserting a new and clearly defined relationship between politics and art in a way that distinguished the movement from that which had been defined by artists of the Harlem Renaissance era in particular cannot be overstated. “The antibourgeois stance of the Black Arts Movement and its dismissal of the Harlem Renaissance as a failure was not merely an expression of generational revolt: it was also a carefully considered political position” (Thomas 311). However, the collaborative, group-oriented aspect of Black Arts goals oftentimes distracts scholars from determining
Book Chapter
Mirrors of Deception
In Johari Amini’s “Evolution,” the narrator expresses that mother Africa, as a geographical, historical, and cultural ideal, expands to “black”—a “humaneness movement breathing filling / vasculating knowledge creating soul.” Such an idea is appropriated throughout Amini’s earliest work, published while she served as a member of the Black Arts Organization for Black American Culture (OBAC). Dedicated to “all black people,” her first published collection of poetry,Images in Black(1967), is a critique of images, iconography, and visual references that commonly served as aesthetic conventions defining black culture and identity for the purpose of projecting preeminent community and nation-building goals
Book Chapter
Mixing Metaphors
Although the legacy of the BAM is often critiqued within the context of the activist practices and art produced by its participants at the height of the movement, it can also be evaluated in later work, since many Black Artists remained prolific beyond the BAM. In many aspects, self-defined Black Artists continue to reprise BAM ideals in more recent work, which further substantiates the idea that the Black Arts aesthetic was and remains an evolving concept. Artists, activists, and intellectuals who worked toward the realization of the BAM and who were most immediately inspired by and committed to its agenda
Book Chapter
Dysfunctional Functionality
It is important to consider how the agenda of the Black Arts Movement was shaped by and paradoxically instituted through a collaboration of competing and discordant voices. Whether artists, activists, and intellectuals defined themselves as “Black Artists” during this era or not, many of them favored a socially progressive agenda for pursuing cultural empowerment for black communities. “Historically within the United States, black resistance to domination has been pacifist, militarist, or a creative combination of the two” (James 143). Consequently, this crosscurrent of perspectives proved to be integral to the fomentation of BAM ideals. As those who opposed various aspects
Book Chapter