one. End of the Beginning of the Post-Soul time. Clearly, it's time. As I begin this introduction, in the spring of 2006, landmark anniversaries press in on me from every side: 20 years ago, Greg Tate wrote Cult-Nats Meet Freaky-Deke: the Return of the Black Aesthetic for the Village Voice in the fall of 1986. And Spike Lee's She's Gotta Have It--that totemic anthem--was released in the summer of 1986, as well. More personally, I first taught Trey Ellis's essay The New Black Aesthetic in 1991, 15 years ago, and I inaugurated my aesthetic course in the Spring semester of 1996--exactly 10 years ago. Over the course of those 20 years, I have obsessively observed this peculiar, post-Civil Rights movement aesthetic: inhaled and analyzed its various manifestos as they appeared in the early years, watched it on screens in darkened movie theaters, listened to it pounding out of my speakers, attended and sponsored its various readings, concerts, lectures, and symposia, gazed on it in galleries and museums and turned its pages from books--all the while debating its very existence with friends, students, and colleagues. Twenty years. And now it's time for African Americanists to weigh in, en masse. Twenty years, it seems to me, is the proper scholarly distance from which scholars can and should begin in earnest to critique, explore, and seek to understand this aesthetic. time for African Americanists to construct--or, at least, begin the process of constructing--a more or less coherent critical conversation about the art of this post era. Editing this special issue is the latest in a series of steps I have taken toward attempting to establish a critical framework for the study of post-Civil Rights movement art in general and the aesthetic in particular. (1) After all, at this point, there is little consensus on anything regarding the fledgling scholarship on the era: names, for instance, range from The New Black Aesthetic to postliberated to post-soul to post-black to NewBlack--and beyond. (2) There is disagreement over whether the era should be restricted, as I believe it should be, to artists and writers who were born or came of age after the Civil Rights movement, and there is disagreement on when the era begins and whether or not it has ended (regrettably, some scholars already see sub-generational breaks such as the post-post-soul, for instance). (3) primary reason I sought to participate in this special issue on the aesthetic (which is, obviously, my own preferred term) was in the hope that some of these issues might begin to be addressed, implicitly if not explicitly. If this special number issue moves us closer to critical understanding, if it clears some critical space within which we can argue about the aesthetic (PSA) in ways that are more clearly defined than they have been up to now, I will consider the effort a success. Obviously, though, with all this scholarly disagreement, when I say It's time, it is not as if we are beginning from a standing start. Commentary on the PSA began, as I suggest above, with Tate's stage-whisper of an article in the Voice, and then emerged with Ellis's full-throated essay, The New Black Aesthetic. Ellis has referred to his essay as much maligned, and I would say he is not too far off in that description (Senna and Wazow 21). But the essay is also extremely valuable in that it provides a jumping-off point for discussion of the aesthetic. term seminal often precedes references to The New Black Aesthetic, and that is an appropriate description as well. Along with Cult-Nats Meet Freaky-Deke, The New Black Aesthetic signaled the emergence of the aesthetic, identifying and loosely organizing it for interested parties, myself included. essay is, however, at the same time confusing, diffuse, contradictory--and partisan. Both Ellis and Tate were eagerly trumpeting the arrival of this new aesthetic, and they were followed, chiefly, by Nelson George with his 1992 Buppies, B-boys, Baps and Bohos: Notes on Post-Soul Black Culture (the book that coined the term and that features an introduction less eager and more skeptical than Tate's and Ellis's essays). …