This introductory chapter explains how, for African Americans the decade’s political disappointments and its social paradoxes also signaled a necessary transformation in culture. It details how the notion of transition, particularly as it informs understandings of poetry, prose, fiction, film, and music that emerge as important indications of the 1960s zeitgeist, and it offers an account of 1960s writers, musicians, and intellectuals who met this political moment in history with a renewed commitment to art. The period represents the moment when “Black” became a political identity, one in which social justice became inseparable from aesthetic practice. In this context, the rise of Black Power nationalism, which is often read as a radicalized version of self-defense in the face of increasing violence, features as a prominent theme to interrogate 1960s declarations of race, personal and collective empowerment, political action, and aesthetics. At the same time, however, experimentation, now a challenge to convention and a call for new ways of being and thinking, became an often overlooked, yet common artistic practice in which avant-gardes in many forms – “free jazz,” poetry, art collectives, and the novel – exposed the potentials and the contradictions that invite new evaluations and investigations.

In 1953, one year after the publication of Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man, Hugh Hefner launched his men's magazine, Playboy. The magazine's centerfold featured a nude Marilyn Monroe posed against a striking red velvet curtain. The photograph was taken in 1949 as Ellison was working diligently on the novel, and it became a quintessential example of American femininity, an icon of American cultural history. As a photographer, art student, and collector of painting and portraiture, Ellison understood the power of visual images. He liked to look at pictures. In his novel, Ellison describes a nude woman that seems to invoke the Playboy image: ''the red robe swept aside like a veil, and I went breathless at the petite and generously curved nude, framed delicate and firm in the glass.'' This nameless woman, ''acting a symbolic role of life and feminine fertility'' (Invisible 409), has a sexual affair with the protagonist and she appears in the novel just as invisible man confronts ''The Woman Question.'' Ellison's artful description of the woman's symbolic role, like Monroe's pose, suggests complicity in a well-known and longstanding iconography of female difference and sexual objectification that critics have argued amounts to nothing more than a literary pinup.