The Black Arts Movement and Its Critics

Abstract

Professional critics of the 1980s and 1990s generally hold writing of the Arts Movement in low esteem. Though the literary output by black writers of the 1960s and early 1970s was substantial, there is a of scholarly literature on this body of work. Various characteristics common to Arts writing make it unappealing to many literary scholars: it often confuses social theory with aesthetics, failing to articulate the complex relationship between the two; much of it is predicated upon crude, strident forms of nationalism that do not lend themselves to careful analysis; and too often the work is marred by the swaggering rhetoric of ethnic and gender chauvinism. The extremes of this writing are so egregious that we may come to equate all the work of the movement with its worst tendencies. By paucity I do not mean that the scholarly literature is weak or that there simply needs to be more of it. I mean, rather, that even the most rudimentary work in this area is yet to be done. We do not have a single book, critical or historical, scholarly or journalistic, devoted explicitly to the Arts Movement. Carolyn Fowler's extensive bibliography on the movement is a valuable research tool, but it was published privately in an edition that is available only directly from the author. A fair amount has been written on Arts theater; many articles and several books have been written on the work of Amiri Baraka. Yet except for Eugene B. Redmond's useful, albeit sketchy, history of black poetry, Drumvoices (1976), Reginald Martin's intriguing monograph, Ishmael Reed and the New Aesthetic Critics (1988), and a few notable articles, the Arts Movement remains unresearched. A review of the MLA Bibliography for the past 10 years gives the clearest picture of this dearth. Under the cross-indexed headings Black Aesthetic, Black Arts Movement, and Black Poetry Movement, one finds seldom more than three or four listings in any given year. Because roughly a third of those articles have appeared in European or Australian journals, in most years there