Spectacular Blackness: The Cultural Politics of the Black Power Movement and the Search for a Black Aesthetic

3. “We Waitin’ on You”: Black Power, Black Intellectuals, and the Search to Define a Black Aesthetic

3 “We Waitin’ on You” BlaCk Power, BlaCk inTelleCTuals, and The searCh To define a BlaCk aesTheTiC dutchman, the Black arts repertory Theater, and the Birth of the Black arts Movement On 24 March 1964, LeRoi Jones’s Dutchman opened at the Cherry Lane Theater, an off-Broadway stage. The play, which was both groundbreaking and controversial, would go on to win an Obie Award. Langston Hughes would characterize 1964 as “The Jones Year,” noting that Jones’s plays were so controversial that of the five staged in New York in 1964, two were shut down by order of the police (Black Magic, 251). Less than a year later, Jones would join up with a group of artists and activists to form the Black Arts Repertory Theater School in Harlem, which would stage a number of his plays, including Dutchman. In his 1968 manifesto “The Black Arts Movement,” Larry Neal claims that the Black Arts Repertory Theater “represented the most advanced tendencies in the movement” and presented work of “excellent artistic quality” (261). Dutchman was typical of the Black Arts Repertory Theater’s performances in its polemical narrative and its experimental, highly stylized content. Centered on the seductive interplay between a black male and a white female subway rider, an interplay that culminates in the murder of the man by the woman, the play performs what Phillip Brian Harper terms the “anxious identities and divisional logic” that would come to mark the Black Arts polemical “call” for the unification of the race against the white oppressor.1 In Larry Neal’s account of the Black Arts Repertory Theater, which lies “WE WAITIN’ ON YOU” 89 at the heart of his call for the formation of a Black Arts Movement, the theater opened, like Dutchman, to almost immediate controversy and widespread acclaim. The theater’s organizers and participants included some of the most important artists, activists, and cultural workers of the day, from Sonia Sanchez, Harold Cruse, John Coltrane, and Sun Ra to LeRoi Jones himself. The confluence of cultural, political, and intellectual events that led to the Black Arts Repertory Theater’s production of Dutchman would be replicated across the country as debates concerning the relationship between aesthetics, politics, and representation resulted in a vibrant burst of cultural production. By the summer of its opening year, however, the Black Arts Repertory Theater had ceased operations, having survived for less than three months. During its short life, the Black Arts Repertory Theater was rife with the ideological, aesthetic, and monetary crises and critical questions that would create, shape, and ultimately lead to the demise of the Black Arts Movement as a whole. In its attempt to produce “art that speaks directly to Black people,” the Black Arts Repertory Theater created a vibrant alternative to dominant Western culture that continues to be the primary way through which AfricanAmericancultureandidentityarecreatedandunderstood (Neal,“Black Arts Movement” 258). The notion of African American cultural production as “race memory . . . art consciously committed, art addressed primarily to Black and Third World people,” as Larry Neal declared in “Reflections on the Black Aesthetic,” as well as the notion that African American identity is born out of a struggle with racism, urbanity, and the consequences of slavery, are both a direct legacy of the Black Arts Movement’s struggle to redefine African American cultural production (14). In this chapter, I examine the failures and successes of the Black Arts Movement through its theorization of a “Black aesthetic” and its continuing legacy in order to challenge the commonly held assertion that this movement—with its spectacular successes and failures—offered little more than racial essentialism, a hyperbolically divisive ideology, and a formalistic and essentially flawed aesthetic theorization. I look beyond dismissive evaluations of the Black Arts Movement to argue that the historical moment of both the Black Power and the Black Arts Movements was the formative moment, not only for contemporary understanding of African American identity, but also for ideas of blackness in African American cultural production, characterized by artists and intellectuals of the era as “the new thing” but naturalized into contemporary African American culture as “authentic” Blackness. Don L. Lee noted in 1971: “The decade of 90 sPectAcUlAR BlAckness the sixties, especially that of the mid-sixties, brought us a new consciousness , a perception that has come to be known as a black consciousness. . . . Along with the new awareness, we get a form that on the surface speaks...