Black Arts and Black Power Revisited

(3 Credit Hours) · Undergraduate

This interdisciplinary course examines the historiography of the Black Power and Black Arts movements of the sixties and seventies. The poet and theorist Larry Neal defined the Black Arts Movement as “the aesthetic and spiritual sister of the Black Power concept,” encouraging artists to use their work to celebrate Black art and confront contradictions within Western society. The Black Arts Movement encompassed all areas of Black cultural expression—from poetry, art, dance, and music to theatre, film, and television. As historiographers, we will approach the Black Power and Black Arts movements as a sequence of debates, rather than a consistent or monolithic practice. We will investigate how artists, theorists, and activists of the sixties and seventies fostered competing definitions of Black power, yet shared an unwavering commitment to the struggle for Black liberation. Throughout the course, we will focus on the following questions: • What were major aims, organizations, and critical debates within the Black Power movement? • Who were the key figures and lesser-known (today) individuals who furthered Black cultural and political thought of the sixties and seventies? • How did Black women artists and activists amplify, complicate, and/or critique the prevailing notions of Black Power? • What relationship did the Black Power and Black Arts movements have with the rise of the women’s liberation movement and Black feminist drama? • What relevance, if any, does the Black Power struggle of the past have to today’s fight for Black Lives? In so doing, we will explore various articulations of “Black power,” “self-determination” and “nationhood”; engage with critical approaches to the “Black aesthetic”; and consider the role of intersectionality within Black Power discourse.