Behold the Land

The Black Arts Movement in the South
Erscheinungsjahr 2021
ISBN: 978-1-4696-6304-3
Verlag: The University of North Carolina Press

Buch, Englisch, 256 Seiten, Paperback, Format (B × H): 156 mm x 234 mm, Gewicht: 425 g

Reihe: The John Hope Franklin Series in African American History and Culture

In the mid-1960s, African American artists and intellectuals formed the Black Arts movement in tandem with the Black Power movement, with creative luminaries like Amiri Baraka, Gwendolyn Brooks, Toni Cade Bambara, and Gil Scott-Heron among their number. In this follow-up to his award-winning history of the movement nationally, James Smethurst investigates the origins, development, maturation, and decline of the vital but under-studied Black Arts movement in the South from the 1960s until the early 1980s. Traveling across the South, he chronicles the movement's radical roots, its ties to interracial civil rights organizations on the Gulf Coast, and how it thrived on college campuses and in southern cities. He traces the movement's growing political power as well as its disruptive use of literature and performance to advance Black civil rights.

Though recognition of its influence has waned, the Black Arts movement's legacy in the South endures through many of its initiatives and constituencies. Ultimately, Smethurst argues that the movement's southern strain was perhaps the most consequential, successfully reaching the grassroots and leaving a tangible, local legacy unmatched anywhere else in the United States.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Smethurst, James

Fachgebiete

• Geisteswissenschaften Geschichtswissenschaft Weltgeschichte & Geschichte einzelner Länder und Gebietsräume Regional- & Stadtgeschichte
• Geisteswissenschaften Kunst Kunststile
• Geisteswissenschaften Literaturwissenschaft Literatur: Sammlungen, Anthologien
• Sozialwissenschaften Ethnologie | Volkskunde Volkskunde

Über Autor(innen)

James Smethurst is professor of Afro-American Studies at the University of Massachusetts Amherst and author of The Black Arts Movement: Literary Nationalism in the 1960s and 1970s.