Spirituality in the Black Arts Movement (original) (raw)
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SPIRITUALITY IN THE BLACK ARTS MOVEMENT NADJIBA BOUALLEGUE
Article, 2024
The article investigates the significance of spirituality in the works of the Black Arts Movement poets. By examining the poetry of Amiri Baraka and Maya Angelou, the study uncovers the various facets of spirituality that African Americans embrace, including “Africanized” Christianity, jazz poetry, and Islam. The article aims to show if spirituality is merely a way to celebrate cultural diversity or a vehicle for social change. It draws on Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari’s theory of minor literature to demonstrate that the Black Arts Movement is a minor literature, whereby cultural markers such as spirituality are politicized. Because spirituality endows the Black Arts Movement with a political value and a collective enunciation, this movement becomes a revolutionary force that aims to enact social change. This politicized spirituality is symptomatic of a desire to foster a strong, positive bond with Africa, which is an antidote to the strangeness of mainstream society. The remembrance of the African past through Afrocentric spirituality is a tool for defining and redefining one’s sense of belonging. It is also a quest for an essentially black aesthetic.
Art as Resistance: Black Aestheticism in Amiri Baraka' and Maya Angelou's Selected Poetry
The broad range of postcolonial literature deals with the issues of racism, anti-colonial rhetoric and rights acceptance, and it presents itself as resistance to common beliefs of universal euro-centrism. The present dissertation endeavors to highlight the socio-cultural and literary aspects of art which provides the external settings of the age it is being produced in and also unveils the overt ideology imbedded in literature. Moreover, it relies on two central questions: how African-Americans art becomes a voice of collective black consciousness and in what manners artistic compositions alter the conceptions and pre-perceptions of the natives under colonization. It contends that Angelou' and Baraka's poetry and its aesthetics not only pinpoint the black cultural stereotypes but also become a channel to disseminate the shared problems and consciousness of the color people. This research propounds to explore the black experience embedded in art and explores how art has always been a vessel for demonstration of collective experience of a community. By addressing the intricacies of black aesthetics in Afro-American art, this research props up new dimensions to study black experience and especially the concept of Eurocentrism in new folds in the contemporary age; this research paper, all in all, explores and analysis black experience along with black aesthetics in art.
The Sacred Act of Reading: Spirituality, Performance, and Power in Afro-Diasporic Literature
2020
spiritual power is accessed through the physical movements of a group of people. The sonic nature of these diasporan liturgies provides an acoustic, spiritual gloss on Hannah Arendt’s formulation of power as “the human ability not just to act but to act in concert” (On Violence 44, emphasis mine). The collective nature of spiritual re-possession is not a surprise in Myal considering the ways in which the novel uses ritual performance to illustrate how subjugated persons must also actively participate in a regime of power. The groups of living and deceased persons who band together to seek spiritual healing “fight” oppression with what can only be described as spiritual aggression. Because these revolutionary characters have come to understand the material nature of abstract belief, they can wage battle against seemingly imaginary relations within a liminal space between the material and abstract worlds. Brodber’s characters choose sound as their primary vehicle for traveling between...
SPIRITUALITY AND RELIGION IN AFRICAN AMERICAN LITERARY TRADITION
AMITESH PUBLISHER & COMPANY, 2024
This research paper explores the profound influence of spirituality and religion on African American literature, tracing its historical significance, contemporary perspectives, and enduring themes. The paper begins by providing a brief overview of the African American literary tradition, highlighting the intertwined relationship between spirituality, religion, and literature. It examines the roots of African spirituality and the impact of slavery on African American religious practices, leading to the emergence of Christianity among African Americans. The paper then deals key themes in African American literature, including liberation, identity, resilience, and social justice, illustrating how these themes are intricately connected to spiritual and religious experiences. Through analysis of selected literary works such as "Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl" by Harriet Jacobs, "Their Eyes Were Watching God" by Zora Neale Hurston, and "The Colour Purple" by Alice Walker, the paper explores the ways in which spirituality and religion are portrayed and their significance in character development and narrative arcs. The paper discusses the historical significance of African American spirituals and gospel music as forms of resistance and expression, as well as their representation in contemporary literature. It reflects on the enduring relevance of spirituality and religion in African American culture, emphasizing the importance of acknowledging and celebrating these aspects in literature.
This article analyzes the discourse of social change and African-American spirituality and how these have become intertwined with music as discursive vehicles for identity construction. We first focus on Muslimhiphop.com, a website which features several African-American Muslim artists. Second, we relate the above to the jazz avant-garde of the early 1960s. Islamic hip hop can be considered an alternative to mainstream hip hop and a medium for negotiating a Muslim identity and embracing social change. Similarly, free jazz expression once supported African-American society in establishing its status, beliefs, and rights.
The Black Arts Movement and the Black Aesthetic: Where Do We Go from Here?
The Journal of Pan-African Studies, 2018
fields of concentration include African-American criticism and theory, African-American poetry and fiction, Black feminist theory, Black lesbian writers, and African Religion and Philosophy in Black Women's Fiction. Her monograph in progress is entitled "Kaleidoscopic Critical Reflections of the Black Arts Movement."
KEYNOTE • Let the World be a Black Poem ! Writing for, in and to the Wretched of the Earth
2022
Any reader of black literature — whether African-American or Franco/Afro-Caribbean — will have recognized in this title two major references in this field, two essential authors: Amiri Baraka (LeRoi Jones) and Frantz Fanon. “Let the world be a Black poem” is a verse from his poem Black Art. The scansion of the latter by the activist and poet Baraka is a jazzistical invitation to fight against segregation and the Jim Crow laws that still prevailed in the country. The Wretched of the Earth (Les Damnés de la Terre) is a literal quote of the masterful work of the Martinican psychiatrist, thinker and activist Frantz Fanon, Omar, companion in the fight of independence-seeking Algeria and its people. In terms of literature and sociology, almost everything is said through these two works. Literature is elevated here to the rank of weapons of war and mobilization, of emancipation and community progress. Incidentally, how can we not accept as absolute the inalienability of the unbreakable link, in our view, between literature and sociology? Notwithstanding the fact that sociology is our favorite field, our art (poetry, performance and even choreographic creation) is undeniably engaged! During the conference around Frantz Fanon which I attended and participated in a few years ago at the University of Mostaganem itself, I was shocked by some literary analysis made of the work of Toni Morrison. Questions and analyzes were brought and provoked my indignation somewhat, while I perceived the ineffable deficiency in terms of sociology of black worlds. How can one read or write about these literatures and these communities without considering the contexts that shaped them? Thus, I decided to draw inspiration from it for this keynote that I am invited to deliver to highlight the fundamental usefulness of literature for our black communities. I will sometimes use an inclusive approach (within reason), since I will express myself and analyze the theme at hand from my own perspective: as woman, black (mixed race), Caribbean, Afrodescendent, womanist activist and of a certain Negritude , and committed researcher. My argument will answer the following question: how is literature sociologically emancipatory for oppressed peoples? After having documented the past and contemporary sociological, historical contexts of the Black Diaspora and the rules of literary analysis that it seems essential for us to see applied, we will explore the best-known literary genres to bring to light what makes them sociological keys, since they are testimonials, social chronicles, tools of advancement and evolution, but also of identity and national/ist construction: journal/diary (i.e. The Color Purple by Alice Walker), poetry (Notebook of a Return to the Native Land / Cahier d'un retour au pays natal / Aimé Césaire, Amiri Baraka’s poetry, Cette igname brisée qu’est ma terre natale / This Broken Yam That Is My Native Land by Sonny Rupaire or even Balles d'or / Golden Bullets by Guy Tirolien…), novel (works by Raphaël Confiant, Maryse Condé, Patrick Chamoiseau, etc.), short stories ( Haïti noire, for example) and essay (Peau Noire, Masques Blancs / Black Skin, White Masks or Les Damnés de la Terre / The Wretched of the Earth by Frantz Fanon, …). Without being exhaustive here, this overview will allow us a bibliographical approach, as well as an exploration of other questions raised: Can we write in the name of art for art's sake when we write in a dominated country? Keywords Americas — French Overseas – USA — Blackstream — Literature — Postcoloniality— Decolonial — Black Art Movements.
The Personal and the Political in the Literature of African Descent
Academia Letters, 2021
In the literature of African descent, the political commitment that connects the black individual to his or her group, both united by the same struggle for freedom, mirrors the theoretical perception of Deleuze & Guattari (1986), who claim close relationships between the individual and the communal within their concept of Minor literature. The French thinkers assert that Minor Literature validatesthe view that minor writers's writing "is political" and "its cramped space forces each individual intrigue to connect immediately to politics." As a result, a minor person's "individual concern thus becomes all the more necessary, essential, magnified, because a whole other story is vibrating within it." (DELEUZE & GUATTARI 1986: 17) In addition, they argue that "everything takes on a collective value" within a minor literature, which highlights the idea that "what each author says individually already constitutes a common action, and what he or she says or does is necessarily political, even if the others aren't in agreement." (DELEUZE & GUATTARI 1986: 17) In her decision to replicate the two French thinkers' perspective, subscribing or challenging it, Grewal (1998) finds in Morrison's novels similar personal-political relationships and individual-communal connections. Grewal suggests that "Morrison's novels aim to redistribute the pressure of accountability from the axis of the individual to that of the collective. Her art draws its imperatives from personal and collective histories" and, in so doing, her writing fuses "the liberation narrative of black history itself" with the interrogation of "national identity and social memory", besides linking "a people dispersed by difference to a common past." (GREWAL 1998: 11) Additionally, Gates (1988) amplifies the scope of both Deleuze/Guattari's (1986) and Grewal's (1998) statement regarding the conflation of the individual and the communal and amalgamating of the personal and the political. His concept of Signifyin(g) fits in here due to the intertextual and dialogical aspects present in black literature, which is the central topic
LeRoi Jones to Amiri Baraka: A Philosophical Journey of a Black Author
This text examines three early writings by LeRoi Jones/Amiri Baraka, a radical Black intellectual whose stance toward the role of African Americans within American society underwent a significant change in the early 1960s. He belongs to a generation of Black authors who began to publicly advocate the use of violence in the struggle for an overall improvement of the socioeconomic status of African Americans. Heavily influenced early on by the Beat Generation and liberalism of Greenwich Village, Baraka emerged in the sixties as perhaps the most powerful literary voice of Black intellectual circles in the United States. In particular three of his early texts – Blues People: Negro Music in White America, Dutchman and The System of Dante’s Hell – reflect his views of the African American situation in the context of the 1960s and are therefore analyzed in this paper in terms of the intellectual transformation of Baraka from a mere advocate of Black culture to a militant Black Nationalist advocating an revolution against white supremacy.