Black Post-Blackness: The Black Arts Movement and Twenty-First-Century Aesthetics by Margo Natalie Crawford (review)

The term "post-blackness" may raise the specter of facile disavowals of the enduring realities of racism in the United States. However, Margo Crawford resituates its origins in the field of African American culture. In so doing, she reclaims its generative power and deploys it with great care and nuance in theorizing "Black post-blackness." Crawford's theorizing of the Black Arts Movement's "simultaneous investment in blackness and a type of freedom that broke the boundaries of blackness" (Crawford, 4) is rooted in a temporalizing of the movement's engagement with race. It emphasizes the anticipation, the questioning of what is to come, as articulated in the artistic production of Black Arts Movement poets. This study pays close attention to the visual and sonic landscape of African American artistic production and connects contemporary works to the earlier productions of the Black Arts Movement.