Notes
165 Notes Introduction 1. See the documentary Cointelpro 101 released by the Freedom Archives regarding the history of government surveillance of activist social justice organizations. 2. See “Power to the People!: The Art of Black Power,” introduction in New Thoughts on the Black Arts Movement, ed. Lisa Gail Collins and Margo Natalie Crawford (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2006), 1–22, for an overview of the collection’s focus on some of the more intricate and understudied aspects of the BAM. 3. For instance, see Crawford’s essay “Must Revolution Be a Family Affair?: Revisiting The Black Woman” in Want to Start a Revolution?: Radical Women in the Black Freedom Struggle, ed. Dayo F. Gore, Jeanne Theoharis, and Komozi Woodard (New York: New York University Press, 2009), 185–205; Pollard’s “Sexual Subversions, Political Inversions: Women’s Poetry and the Politics of the Black Arts Movement” in New Thoughts on the Black Arts Movement, ed. Lisa Gail Collins and Margo Natalie Crawford (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2006), 173–186; and Traylor’s “Women Writers of the Black Arts Movement” in The Cambridge Companion to African American Women’s Literature, ed. Angelyn Mitchell and Danille K. Taylor (Cambridge; New York: Cambridge University Press, 2009), 50–70. 4. For more insight about the cross-cultural activism inspired by the Black Arts Movement and Black Power Movement, see, for instance, T. V. Reed’s The Art of Protest: Culture and Activism from the Civil Rights Movement to the Streets of Seattle (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2005) and Fred Ho’s Wicked Theory, Naked Practice: A Fred Ho Reader, ed. Diane Fujino and Bill V. Mullen (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2009). 5. Benston’s project, Performing Blackness: Enactments of African-American Modernism (London: Routledge, 2000), introduces useful theoretical paradigms for evaluating the performative aspect of BAM culture, wherein the author calls for new ways of considering the subject. 6. For more on this, see T. V. Reed’s The Art of Protest: Culture and Activism from the Civil Rights Movement to the Streets of Seattle (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2005). 7. Baraka, Neal, and Stewart each published short pieces addressing the BAM aesthetic, which appear in Black Fire: An Anthology of Afro-American Writing, ed. Baraka and Neal (Baltimore: Black Classics Press, 1968). Notes 166 8. Ibid. 9. Ibid. 10. See chapter seven of James Smethurst’s The Black Arts Movement: Literary Nationalism in the 1960’s and 1970’s (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2005), 179–243. 11. For a critique of this subject, see Angela Davis’s “Afro-Images: Politics, Fashion, and Nostalgia” in The Angela Y. Davis Reader, ed. Joy James (Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishers Inc., 1999), 289–293. 12. Audre Lorde’s poem can be found in The Collected Poems of Audre Lorde (New York: W.W. Norton & Co., Inc., 1978). 13. These are but a few names from an impressive list of pioneering black feminist scholars who have developed inspired critiques of black women’s traditions, including writing and/or literature of political, social, and cultural resistance. Others include Cheryl Wall, Claudia Tate, and Hazel Carby, for instance. 14. For instance, Ajuan Maria Mance discusses several major works by Carolyn Rodgers in Inventing Black Women (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 2007), and Tony Bolden devotes a healthy discussion to Carolyn Rodgers in Afro-Blue: Improvisations in African American Poetry and Culture (Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2004), 24. In addition, Rodgers’s work is evaluated within the context of feminist culture as well in Kim Whitehead’s The Feminist Poetry Movement (Jackson, MS: University Press of Mississippi, 1996) and Karen Jackson Ford’s Gender and the Poetics of Excess (Jackson, MS: University Press of Mississippi, 1997). 15. Rodgers mentions the ways in which poet and writer Margaret Walker influenced her own work at the conference on Black Arts in Chicago, hosted at Northwestern University in Evanston, Illinois, in 2007. The poem “For My People” can be found in This Is My Century: New and Collected Poems (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1989). 16. Bruce Weber wrote an extensive review of Rodgers and her life’s work in a New York Times online obituary section, published on April 19, 2010. http://www.nytimes .com/2010/04/19/books/19rodgers.html. 17. Madhubuti was quoted as having said such about Rodgers in multiple venues, including the September 2010 edition of The Writer’s Chronicle and Chickenbones, an online journal reporting...
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