Black Fire Reignited

In this post-soul, post-black, post-Negritude moment, the idea of codifying black cultural consciousness seems almost an antiquated one—almost, but not quite. For in order for critical discourses on black cultural history and theory to be outdated, they must have first been exhaustively explored, and this has surely not been the case. The early nineties were fraught with questions about the direction of black cultural and literary studies and much hand-wringing over whether cultural studies was equipped to address longstanding deficiencies in academic scholarship with respect to race and culture. Whether led by British cultural theorists i.e. Stuart Hall and others who challenged stagnant, essentialized categories of racial identity, or by a cadre of American scholars like Morrison, Gates, West, and others who wanted to complicate readings of black literary and cultural texts and challenge the narrow definitions of cultural canons,

spheres of race and culture continued to be contested.

But what of the Black Arts Movement? Was this seminal movement being integrated into discussions about the transformations in race and culture? According to David Lionel Smith, the Black Arts Movement was not a part of our historical or theoretical conversation. Smith addresses this dearth in his 1991 essay “The Black Arts Movement and Its Critics,” where he laments the lack of scholarship on the Black Arts Movement and lays the groundwork for the territory that must be explored. Throwing down the gauntlet, he draws attention to the gaping holes in the discourse, asserting that “basic questions about the Black Arts Movement—such as when did it begin and end, which writers and styles did it include and exclude, what were its cultural origins and characteristic tendencies, who were its factions, and how were its works developed and disseminated—await serious discussion” ¹ (94).

In the mid- to late nineties, discussion of the Black Arts Movement was perhaps obscured by a resurgence of black cinematic production in Britain and in the United States and the rise of hip hop music and culture which captured the attention of even the most conservative scholars and academics. But in recent years, Smith’s call has been answered as there is renewed interest in the “Movement” and its artists. This interest is explicitly evidenced in the re-release of Black Fire: An Anthology of Afro-American Writing, edited by Amiri Baraka and Larry Neal, first released in 1968 and re-released by Black Classic Press in 2007.² Other significant work includes Mike Sell’s Avant-Garde Performance and the Limits of Criticism (2005), which devotes a third of the text to imagining the Black Arts Movement as an avant-garde textual and performative moment.

Gene Jarrett provides an illuminating review of two other significant works published in 2005, The Black Arts Movement: Literary Nationalism in the 1960s and 1970s, by James Smethurst, and “After Mecca”: Women Poets and the Black Arts Movement. Both works make substantive contributions to our understanding of the Black Arts Movement. Jarrett categorizes Smethurst’s work as “an enormous repository of information,” and “the best resource to date about the African American figures, cultural institutions and ideological contexts of the movement’s early stages”³ (1243–44). Writing on “After Mecca” Jarrett writes, “[it] helpfully covers the period from 1968 to 1978, concentrating on the interconnections of race, gender and sexuality” (1244). Both works contribute mightily to a foundation of scholarship on the Black Arts Movement.

But on to what may yet be the most broad-based and significant work (and the only anthology) to tackle the Black Arts Movement. New Thoughts on the Black Arts Movement (2006) covers with depth and breadth this cultural renaissance, seamlessly weaving together essays that provide a foundational or introductory perspective with those that offer a more in-depth analysis. In their introduction, New Thoughts editors Lisa Gail Collins and Margo Natalie Crawford sound a clarion call of their own as they debunk some of the suffocating mythologies that have obfuscated much of the artistry and political complexity of...