Violence in Black Arts Movement Poetry
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.31185/bsj.Vol22.Iss40.1726Keywords:
Keywords: Black Arts Movement, violence, resistance, Black identity, city area, masculinity, cultural memory, political poeticsAbstract
Abstract
The Study of the Black Arts Movement of the Nineteen Sixties represents a pivotal moment in the cultural and political transformation of the African American literary way of life. Emerging in the wake of Malcolm X's assassination in 1965, the movement sought to redefine the relationship between art and politics, but also to reconstruct Black identity through considerably engaged aesthetic practices. Historians and literary students, along with Yusef M. Akbar and McCree, have suggested that this transition constituted a deliberate flow towards a praxis that placed the political movement of Black poets, writers, and visible artists as a coherent mode of dissent (Akbar, 2018: forty-five). Poetry, mainly, served due to the fact that it was the incendiary ground in which issues of race, masculinity, cultural reminiscence, and political consciousness were cast into gadgets of resistance. A special political poetics was strategically embedded within the rhetorical systems of the duration, obtrusive in the works and in the recuperation of ancient narrative. In this way, the poetics of defiance articulated through the movement retains its resonance in current racial justice struggles, establishing a temporal linkage between ancient resistance and current-day activism.
Keywords: Black Arts Movement, violence, resistance, Black identity, city area, masculinity, cultural memory, political poetics
References
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