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19 results

  • Chapter 1 - The Society of Umbra and the Coming of the Black Aesthetic

  • from I - Poetry and Music
  • Edited by Shelly Eversley
  • Book:
    African American Literature in Transition, 1960–1970
    Published online:
    10 November 2022
    Print publication:
    24 November 2022, pp 23-49

  • Summary

    This chapter traces the ways in which, in the early 1960s, the Society of Umbra, an informal community of African American writers, artists, musicians, and activists, combined elements of bohemianism and Black cultural self-determination to lay the groundwork for the Black Arts Movement. It chronicles the emergence of the group from various activist and artist organizations of the Lower East Side of New York City as these African Americans became discontent with the political limitations of bohemian nonconformity and the artistry committed only to anti-bourgeois self-cultivation. Analyzing the poetry of Lorenzo Thomas, David Henderson, and Calvin Hernton, it clarifies how these poets pursued a shared attempt to reveal how bohemian libidinal energies could be transformed from personal artistry and individual redemption into a revolutionary Black nationalist consciousness that could, in turn, lead to collective action.

  • 1 - New Black Aesthetics: Post–Civil Rights African American Poetry

  • Edited by Timothy Yu
  • Book:
    The Cambridge Companion to Twenty-First-Century American Poetry
    Published online:
    25 February 2021
    Print publication:
    11 March 2021, pp 17-30

  • Summary

    If African American poets have achieved a new kind of freedom in the twenty-first century, they have also pursued multiple styles through their modes of introspection. This broader inward-turning is continuous with the defining priorities of the Black Arts Movement, a principle that might be more aptly named self-determination. Contemporary African American poets have embraced black culture as a historical and cultural landscape to be mapped into new frontiers in order to make the individual black self and then to develop terms for the liberation of that self. These pursuits of self-examination and self-determination comprise at least four broad and overlapping realms of practice: apolitical introspection; a rethinking of African American history and heritage beyond the terms of simple affirmation; a personalized mode of collectivist protest in line with Black Arts Movement practices; and a black literary collective action enacted by the numerous African American writers collectives and workshops that have arisen since the 1960s. Poets discussed include Gregory Pardlo, Natasha Trethewey, Tyehimba Jess, Patricia Smith, Nikky Finney, Nathaniel Mackey, alongside groups such as Cave Canem and movements like #BlackPoetsSpeakOut.

  • 9 - African American women poets and the power of the word

  • from Part II - Genre, gender, and race
  • Edited by Angelyn Mitchell, Georgetown University, Washington DC, Danille K. Taylor, Dillard University, New Orleans
  • Book:
    The Cambridge Companion to African American Women's Literature
    Published online:
    28 July 2009
    Print publication:
    30 April 2009, pp 168-186

  • Summary

    One way to understand African American women's poetry - its historical evolution, its aesthetic beauty, its political power - is to start with the story of creation. According to biblical tradition, Adam was granted the power to name and this power was one measure of his authority over Eve, his wife, and Eve's predecessor, Adam's lesser-known wife Lilith. By naming everything in the world, Adam was defining what could be known and therefore controlling the nature of reality. That was his power. Legend also has it that Lilith, created from the clay like Adam rather than from his rib as Eve had been, would not relinquish the power of the word and subordinate herself to Adam simply because he was male. For her resistance, she was banished from Eden and cursed to devour her children. This story has been cited by well-known feminist critics Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar as an analogy for the difficulties women writers in Britain faced in seeking to speak for themselves in the face of a patriarchal society that privileged the status and culture of men. Not only was literary genius and its power to name defined in terms of male sexual potency, Gilbert and Gubar argue, but such definitions, when added to the conventions of aesthetic beauty that rendered women as objects, led women writers to doubt the legitimacy of their own imaginations. Placed in the context of the United States, this story illuminates how, with the effects of racism added to patriarchy, this dynamic of expression and exclusion, misnaming, self-doubt, and banishment becomes an even more devastating challenge to self-knowledge and creativity.