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116 Chapter Five Building a Home, Building a Nation: Family in the City and Beyond in Angela Jackson’s Black Art If much of the work of Black Artists of the late sixties and early seventies conveyed their collective aspirations to pursue methods of achieving social, political, and cultural empowerment for black communities of the African Diaspora, then Angela Jackson’s “a beginning for new beginnings,” published in her first collection of poetry, VooDoo/Love Magic (1975), suggests that black communities were still “wading. waiting” for such aspirations to be realized. As the narrator of this poem expresses, “the Fight is in the living thru.” Like her OBAC predecessors Johari Amini and Carolyn Rodgers, Jackson demonstrates in her work an unyielding commitment to the nation-building goals that defined the solvency of the BAM even as she expands the aesthetic terms of the movement. In addition, many of the poems in VooDoo/Love Magic draw from the ideals of Pan-Africanism as means of achieving black nation-building goals. As Ajuan Mance argues: By the mid-1970’s the era of the Black Arts Movement had passed, ushered into obsolescence by the dramatic cultural and political shifts that marked the transition of the United States away from the volatile social upheaval of the 1960’s and into the increasingly tolerant social climate of the late twentieth century. The next twenty-five years saw the emergence of unprecedented numbers of African American women poets writing the Black female subject into poems whose topics and themes (such as racism, political activism, and socioeconomic equality) would have, in earlier decades, precluded the mention of any black subjects who were not male. (121–122) In tandem with the changing social, political, and ideological climate of the mid-to-late seventies and during the waning years of the BAM, the 117 Building a Home, Building a Nation: Angela Jackson's Black Art Chicago-based, black-owned publishing company Johnson Publications devoted an entire issue of the Black World to an exclusive discussion about the state and/or legitimacy of Black Art for new audiences. In it, an impressive list of acclaimed scholars, writers, and artists generously offered their predictions and perspectives about the status of the BAM then and moving forward.1 It was during this period that Jackson’s first two collections of poetry, VooDoo/Love Magic (1974) and The Greenville Club (1977) were published. Thus, her work provides an opportunity to assess the impact of the goals and imperatives of the movement’s aesthetic in later years. “Jackson ’s strange, penetrating visions range from the apocalyptic to the everyday , from the heaviness of injustice to the lightness of being carried away by love” (Guzman 248). More specifically, Jackson’s work reflects a reinvention of BAM aesthetics that continued to influence her work into the new postrace era, during which she continued to develop as a writer invested in the ideals of Pan-Africanism. She had a personal and artistic kinship with her female OBAC predecessors Amini and Rodgers, and, taken together, the work of all three women speaks to the BAM’s culturally and aesthetically diverse legacy beyond that for which the movement is often credited . As a means for establishing Jackson’s narrative perspective as a black woman artist who engages readers in the collective and subversively political act of reminiscing, many of the poems found in VooDoo/Love Magic and The Greenville Club engage the concept of memory as part of a culturally expressive, nation-building resource in perpetuating Black Arts goals. Unlike many of their contemporary white female artists, activists, and intellectuals, who cultivated (white) feminist ideologies and agendas during these eras, Jackson, Amini, and Rodgers not only invested themselves in the liberation struggles of black women, but their work reflects their mutual interests in perpetuating a BAM aesthetic that was socially inclusive and amenable to various perspectives and experiences defining black life, regardless of sex and gender disparities. According to Kim Whitehead: In the “heyday” of the women’s movement (1972–1982), when feminist organizing fairly exploded and even moved into the mainstream, feminist poetry played a central role in the radical, socialist, and lesbian feminist sectors that flourished outside the dominant culture. In this context, feminists wanted a poetry in which they could name the experiences that societal and poetic taboos had previously kept them from expressing, in which they could make the hidden known. As a result, they turned to...

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