Visionary Women Writers of Chicago's Black Arts Movement

Chapter Two: Women Writing Kinship in Chicago’s Black Arts Movement

56 Chapter Two 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 the extent to which the body of work produced by self-defined Black Artists remains eclectic. The activist intentions expressed in the Black Arts poem “You Name It,” by Carolyn Rodgers, in which the narrator declares that she “will write about Black people re-po-sses-sing this earth,” was a sentiment shared by many Black Artists during a period in which the act of producing nationbuilding art was perceived by government authorities as criminal activity. Yet women writers like Rodgers brazenly engaged politics and art through the deployment of popular aesthetics that moved beyond the framework of some of the BAM’s most recognized, celebrated, and contested features. More specifically, Rodgers and her contemporary, Johari Amini, as well as their younger OBAC successor, Angela Jackson, performed as Black Artists in simultaneously conventional and paradoxical ways, drawing from the influences of their peers in the development of an intertextually informed body of art while progressively expanding the BAM’s most popular though restrictive features. As such, their work remains part of a tradition of artistic activism in which women continue to play essential roles, and which, at 57 Women Writing Kinship in Chicago's Black Arts Movement its best, honors the cross-cultural and pluralistic potential of community inspired initiatives and nation-building projects. However, I hesitate to suggest that their work represents a “feminist” agenda, wherein women artists, activists, and intellectuals “found themselves questioning the gendered roles they had been playing in a repressive American culture” and began “searching for an appropriate literary avenue to express this experience,” as scholar Kim Whitehead suggests. As Black Arts women, Amini, Rodgers, and Jackson, for instance, immersed themselves in the broader community and within coalition-building objectives for the benefit and empowerment of all black people. Although I agree with Whitehead’s notion that, like many feminist poets representing other cultural traditions, Amini, Rodgers, and Jackson negotiated multiple locations of spatial, ideological, and psychological performance in the production of Black Art, I am careful not to define their work as “feminist” because I see elements of it that are much more ideologically inclusive than and in tension with the conventions of feminist poetry. As Whitehead argues, even as a multicultural concept, the feminist poetry movement “depended upon the creation and development of parallel, feminist institutions.” Given my reading of the paradoxically progressive though aesthetically conventional nature of their earliest Black Arts poetry, Amini, Rodgers, and Jackson, for example, were less invested in developing “institutions” of a feminist nature than they were in advancing the cultural and political interests of the black masses and their Black Arts peers. As a result of their participation in the OBAC collaborative effort, not only can contemporary and future generations of readers see evidence of the artistic diversity and breadth of the writing culture of the BAM reproduced through women’s perspectives, but they can also assess the ways in which women artists who earned less credit for having contributed to the ever-evolving poetics of the BAM succeeded in progressively challenging some of the movement’s most valued features from their often cited positions of so-called marginality. Although New York City is credited for having produced the most influential coterie of Black Arts participants, the legacies of this period have roots in cities such as Chicago, St. Louis, Detroit, Philadelphia, Houston, Cleveland, and Los Angeles as well. James Smethurst’s project The Black Arts Movement: Literary Nationalism in the 1960’s and 1970’s (2005) provides an impressive historiography of the ways in which the BAM agenda was realized within the culturally specific context of various geo/political locations: Women Writing Kinship in Chicago's Black Arts Movement 58 Though...