In 1971, 20 years after Hughes wrote Harlem,
Nathan Huggins invokes Hughes's prediction and concurs with a judgement of many
cultural critics in the years following the 1920s that the artists of the Harlem
renaissance failed to explode as 1960s radical Black Arts Movement would.
In 1971, 20 years after Hughes wrote Harlem,
Nathan Huggins invokes Hughes prediction and concurs with the judgement of many
cultural critics in the years following the 1920s that the Harlem Renaissance
failed to explode as the 1960s radical black art movement would.
Writers as different as Melvin Tolsen and
Eldridge Cleaver have exploded in the american mind.
They shape thought, image, and language.
That is something that the Harlem literati could not have dared.
His phrase,
Harlem Literati once more demotes the Renaissance to a mere coterie of seats.
And calls up Thurman's criticism of the Niggerati.
The Black Arts Movement, the cultural arm of the black power movement
certainly realized Jesus' warning, that the dream deferred would explode.
Their revolutionary poetics remade Africa American poetry during the 1960s and 70s.
But the self determination and cultural consciousness necessary for such
transformation the reshaping of thought, image, language began in the 1920s.
Indeed Jabulani Kamau Makalani would look back the Harlem Renaissance, from
the perspective of the Black Arts Movement and maintain its symbolic importance.
The Renaissance symbolized the fact that black people in America,
freed from the constraints of chattel slavery, were now able to seriously
grapple with the question of culture and a collective direction for themselves.
Though the two artistic movements have been sharply contrasted,
the Harlem Renaissance as merely aesthetic,
the Black Arts movement is exceedingly political.
The collective direction of the Harlem Renaissance inexorably
led later African American poets to the Black Arts Movement,
whose collective direction in turn led another generation to
the New Black Aesthetic poetry of the late 20th and 21st centuries.
By the 1980s,
Black Poets were again growing interested in the wide spectrum of poetic means.
The black aesthetic, jazz poetry, hip-hop, spoken word and
also the conventional verse forms that had served Harlem renaissance poets so well.
Today, African American poets exercise freely their rights to
build a tradition as hybrid as that which the jazz masters created, as Henry.
Start that over.
>> Sure.
>> Today, African American poets exercise freely their rights
to build a tradition as hybrid as that which the jazz masters created.
As Charles Henry role observes,
a tradition that ignores the imposed boundaries of race, class, nation and
even poetic form that do violence to human beings in the west.
To win those rights, it took both a renaissance and a revolution.
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