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3 Introduction The Black Arts Movement: Let Me Count the Ways The Black Arts Movement (BAM) of the late 1960s to mid-1970s remains an elusive and complex configuration of ideologies mutually and often paradoxically reinforced through the artistic, activist, and intellectual collaborations and exchanges between the movement’s key participants and their critics. Indeed, the concept of collaboration came to signify an ideal within as much as a threat to the Black Arts Movement and Black Power Movement, as well as many other activist initiatives across the country at this time. Although there is much debate amongst scholars about when the Black Arts Movement actually began and ended, or whether or not it ended at all, even today, many individuals remain imprisoned because of their actual or alleged investment in and associations with the collaborative missions developed by activist groups like Black Artists in the interest of social justice and political empowerment for various oppressed communities.1 Ultimately, the concept of collaboration both in practice and in vision motivated a culture of intense debate between Black Artists and their critics, and such conversations animated the landscape of black cultural expression. Furthermore, the BAM’s legacy of collaboration as it was manifested in the form of politically inspired, nation-building initiatives remains influential to the work of those committed to the empowerment of black communities of the African Diaspora and other marginalized communities worldwide. As confirmed by Lisa Gail Collins and Margo Natalie Crawford, the editors of the groundbreaking collection New Thoughts on the Black Arts Movement (2006), “Collaboration and dialogue were at the heart of the Black Arts Movement.”2 However, rather than seize upon the rather romantic notion that the development of a collective, collaborative concept of politically inspired art was necessarily and always an inspiring or effective paradigm for achieving Black Arts goals for self-defined Black Artists, I want to contribute to the discussion Introduction 4 of the concept of collaboration as a presumed “ideal” by addressing its varied dimensions and import as it relates to the realization of the BAM’s aesthetic. More specifically, in this project, I discuss the ways in which collaboration was interrogated, undermined, and indeed parodied within the writings of a select list of understudied and in some cases “unsung” women writers, whose perspectives productively mitigated the essentialist and oftentimes normalizing and counterprogressive aspects of this in/ famous collaborative moment. As many scholars have recently noted, women writers of the BAM pushed the boundaries of the black aesthetic; however, as I discuss, too often the contributions of women artists, activists, and intellectuals have been evaluated as those which pushed the gendered boundaries of the movement’s aesthetic, when in fact the artistic and activist work of many of these women reflects their consideration for a host of other cultural and political aspects of Black Art that ultimately went beyond the BAM’s often cited sexist features.3 Some of the most widely recognized women artists of the BAM era—such as Mari Evans, Nikki Giovanni, and Sonia Sanchez, for instance, as well as women who received less attention, like Chicago writers Johari Amini, Carolyn Rodgers, and later Angela Jackson —produced work that not only honored the black female perspective and expressed a commitment to an inclusive concept of Black Art, but as I argue throughout this project, their work ultimately reflects the ways in which the BAM was strengthened rather than weakened by a broad range of artistic ideals and perspectives. As such, a critique of their work provides an opportunity to measure the BAM’s culture beyond its most recognized, polarizing, and indeed alluring controversies. The poetry of Amini, Rodgers, and Jackson, for instance, reflects the extent to which women artists experimented with and in fact queered the conventions of Black Art from their presumed positions of “marginality,” and how they consequently and paradoxically managed to transform the aesthetic for which their male peers have been credited with constructing . It is noteworthy that all three writers were affiliated with Chicago’s Organization of Black American Culture (OBAC)—a local BAM initiative that emerged as one of the most successful and longest-running organizations of this historical moment. Ultimately, my evaluation of the work of Amini, Rodgers, and Jackson is an exploration into the ways in which one group of women advanced a pluralistic coalition-building aesthetic from their positions of sexual and artistic power rather than powerlessness. As Julia Foulkes...

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