A01=James Smethurst
African American cultural history
Author_James Smethurst
Black Arts and electoral politics
Black Arts and urban geography
Black Arts Movement in the South
Black Studies MovementNeighborhood Arts Center
BLKARTSOUTH
Category=AGA
Category=DNT
Category=JBSL
Category=NHK
eq_anthologies-novellas-short-stories
eq_art-fashion-photography
eq_bestseller
eq_biography-true-stories
eq_fiction
eq_history
eq_isMigrated=1
eq_isMigrated=2
eq_nobargain
eq_non-fiction
eq_society-politics
Free Southern Theater
Historically Black Colleges and Universities
public art in the South
Southern Black Cultural Alliance
Product details
- ISBN 9781469663036
- Weight: 513g
- Dimensions: 155 x 233mm
- Publication Date: 07 Jun 2021
- Publisher: The University of North Carolina Press
- Publication City/Country: US
- Product Form: Hardback
Secure
checkout
Fast Shipping
Easy returns
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.
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.
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.
