Black Arts Movement

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An Examination of The Black Arts Movement

In a 1968 essay, "The Black Arts Movement", Larry Neal proclaimed the Black Arts Movement was “the aesthetic and spiritual sister of the Black Power concept”. The Black Arts movement, usually referred to as a 1960s movement, solidified in 1965 and broke apart around 1975. The movement’s major players were Amiri Baraka/Leroi Jones, Adrienne Kennedy, Ron Karenga, Larry Neal, Sonia Sanchez, and many more Black artists at this particular time in American history. This Black intellectual revolution examined and targeted many assumptions in the artistic world, specifically the role of the text, the timelessness of art, the responsibility of artists to their communities, and the significance of oral forms in the struggles of Black folk . This paper will explore several concepts promoted by the Black Arts Movement, in particular, cultural nationalism, the Black Aesthetic and the role of the artist in the community.
Cultural nationalism was founded on the belief that blacks and whites have separate values, histories, intellectual traditions and lifestyles; therefore, in reality, there are two separate Americas. Cultural nationalism was often expressed as an abstract and aesthetic return to the motherland (rarely an actual return) and a recognition of traditional African roots, that biased education and stereotyped representations in the mass media had torn from the souls of African-Americans. Ron Karenga, one of the most prominent voices of the cultural nationalist, states, in his essay “Black Cultural Nationalists”, “Let our art remind us of our distaste for the enemy, our love for each other, and our commitment to the revolutionary struggle that will be fought with the rhythmic reality of a permanent revolution". The goal of the cultural nationalist was the realization of a Black community based on a common descent and language. Moreover, the cultural nationalis...