Description
The Black Arts Movement (BAM) encompassed a group of artists, musicians, novelists, and playwrights whose work combined innovative approaches to literature, film, music, visual arts, and theatre. With a heightened consciousness of black agency and autonomy—along with the radical politics of the civil rights movement, the Black Muslims, and the Black Panthers—these figures represented a collective effort to defy the status quo of American life and culture. Between the late 1950s and the end of the 1970s, the movement produced some of America’s most original and controversial artists and intellectuals.
In Encyclopedia of the Blacks Arts Movement, Verner D. Mitchell and Cynthia Davis have collected essays on the key figures of the movement, including Maya Angelou, James Baldwin, Amiri Baraka, Nikki Giovanni, Larry Neal, Sun Ra, Sonia Sanchez, Ntozake Shange, and Archie Shepp. Additional entries focus on Black Theatre magazine, the Negro Ensemble Company, lesser known individuals—including Kathleen Collins, Tom Dent, Bill Gunn, June Jordan, and Barbara Ann Teer—and groups, such as AfriCOBRA and the New York Umbra Poetry Workshop.
The Black Arts Movement represented the most prolific expression of African American literature since the Harlem Renaissance of the 1920s. Featuring essays by contemporary scholars and rare photographs of BAM artists, Encyclopedia of the Blacks Arts Movement is an essential reference for students and scholars of twentieth-century American literature and African American cultural studies.
Table of Contents
Acknowledgements
Preface
Introduction by LaToya R. Jefferson-James
Timeline
Entries
AfriCOBRA
Allen, Samuel
Angelou, Maya
Baldwin, James
“Ballad of Birmingham”
Bambara, Toni Cade
Baraka, Amiri
Black Aesthetic, The
Black Arts Movement in Algeria, The
“Black Dada Nihilismus”
Black Fire: An Anthology of Afro-American Writing
Black Theatre Issue of The Drama Review
Black Theatre Magazine
Black Women Writers (1950-1980): A Critical Evaluation
Black Women Writers and the Black Arts Movement
“Blues Ain’t No Mockin’ Bird”
Blues for Mister Charlie
Broadside Press
“Bronzeville Mother Loiters in Mississippi. Meanwhile, a Mississippi Mother Burns Bacon, A”
Brooks, Gwendolyn
Bullins, Ed
Caldwell, Ben
Caribbean Artists Movement
Catherine Carmier
Childress, Alice
Chisholm, Shirley
Coleman, Wanda
Collins, Kathleen
Davis, Angela
Deacons for Defense and Justice
Dent, Tom
Dodson, Owen
Du Bois, W. E. B.
Dutchman
Evans, Mari
Evans-Charles, Martie
Fire Next Time, The
for colored girls who have considered suicide/when the rainbow is enuf
Free-Lance Pallbearers, The
Gaines, Ernest J.
Giovanni, Nikki
Gunn, Bill
Hansberry, Lorraine
Hayden, Robert
Henderson, David
Hopkinson, Nalo
Jordan, June
Kennedy, Adrienne
Kgositsile, Keorapetse William
Knight, Etheridge
Last Poets, The
“Lesson, The"
Malcolm X
Malcolm X, Poetry on
Marginalization and the Black Arts Movement
Marson, Una
Milner, Ron
“Monday in B-Flat”
Morrison, Toni
Mumbo Jumbo
Music and the Black Arts Movement
Neal, Larry
Negro Digest / Black World / First World
Negro Ensemble Company, The
No Place to Be Somebody
One Day When I Was Lost: A Scenario Based on Alex Haley’s The Autobiography of Malcolm X
Organization of Black American Culture
Polite, Carlene Hatcher
Ra, Sun
Raisin in the Sun, A
Randall, Dudley
“Raymond’s Run”
Redmond, Eugene B.
Rodgers, Carolyn
Ross, Fran
Sanchez, Sonia
Sexual Identity and the Black Arts Movement
Shange, Ntozake
Shepp, Archie
Slave, The
Smith, Jean Wheeler
Society of Umbra, The
“Sonny’s Blues”
Soul on Ice
Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee
Teer, Barbara Ann
This Child’s Gonna Live
Thomas, Lorenzo
Till, Poetry on Emmett
Touré, Askia Muhammad
Tupac Shakur and the Black Arts Movement
Understanding the New Black Poetry
Voodoo Aesthetics and the Black Arts Movement
Your Blues Ain’t Like Mine
Selected Bibliography
Index
About the Editors and Contributors
