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Full-Text Articles in Arts and Humanities
Dawnsong! The Epic Memory Of Askia Toure, James Smethurst
Dawnsong! The Epic Memory Of Askia Toure, James Smethurst
James E. Smethurst
The Black Arts Movement of the 1960s and 1970s profoundly marked culture in the United States. It changed how basic notions of race, ethnicity, nationality, gender, politics, and art were (and are) understood. However, one of the most important literary legacies of the Movement is the continuing productivity of key Black Arts writers, such as Sonia Sanchez, Amiri Baraka, Jayne Cortez, Haki Madhubuti, and Askia Toure. Toure's Dawnsong!, a particularly ambitious example of that productivity, seeks to create a new sort of African American epic, fusing Black Arts mythmaking with a radical post-Black Arts historicism.
"Don't Say Goodbye To The Porkpie Hat": Langston Hughes, The Left, And The Black Arts Movement, James Smethurst
"Don't Say Goodbye To The Porkpie Hat": Langston Hughes, The Left, And The Black Arts Movement, James Smethurst
James E. Smethurst
If one looks to uncover linkages between the Black Arts Movement of the 1960s and 1970s and the earlier radicalisms of the 1930s and 1940s, the work of Langston Hughes as a writer, editor, and cultural catalyst during the 1950s and 1960s is a good place to start. Not only was his writing a crucial forerunner of Black Arts poetry, drama, essays, and short fiction, but Hughes tirelessly promoted the careers of the young (and sometimes not so young) militant black artists then, providing practical, moral, and emotional support and encouragement. At the same time, Hughes constructively criticized both the …
Remember When Indians Were Red: Bob Kaufman, The Popular Front, And The Black Arts Movement, J Smethurst
Remember When Indians Were Red: Bob Kaufman, The Popular Front, And The Black Arts Movement, J Smethurst
James E. Smethurst
Unlike other African-American contemporaries who participated in the New American Poetry groupings of the 1950s, such as Ted Joans and Amiri Baraka, Bob Kaufman seems not to have been much engaged with the Black Arts Movement of the 1960s and 1970s. However, Kaufman's work in many respects was a crucial forerunner of the model of a popular avant-garde art rooted in African-American popular culture and connected to a radical anti-racist, anti-colonialist and internationalist sensibility that would be characteristic of much African-American nationalist art in the 1960s and 1970s. This model of what Werner Sollors has called a "populist modernism" is …