Encyclopedia of the Black Arts Movement
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- ISBN 9781538101452
- Weight: 1052g
- Dimensions: 186 x 262mm
- Publication Date: 15 May 2019
- Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing Plc
- Publication City/Country: US
- Product Form: Hardback
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The Black Arts Movement (BAM) encompassed a group of artists, musicians, novelists, and playwrights whose work combined innovative approaches to literature, film, music, visual arts, and theatre. With a heightened consciousness of black agency and autonomy—along with the radical politics of the civil rights movement, the Black Muslims, and the Black Panthers—these figures represented a collective effort to defy the status quo of American life and culture. Between the late 1950s and the end of the 1970s, the movement produced some of America’s most original and controversial artists and intellectuals.
In Encyclopedia of the Blacks Arts Movement, Verner D. Mitchell and Cynthia Davis have collected essays on the key figures of the movement, including Maya Angelou, James Baldwin, Amiri Baraka, Nikki Giovanni, Larry Neal, Sun Ra, Sonia Sanchez, Ntozake Shange, and Archie Shepp. Additional entries focus on Black Theatre magazine, the Negro Ensemble Company, lesser known individuals—including Kathleen Collins, Tom Dent, Bill Gunn, June Jordan, and Barbara Ann Teer—and groups, such as AfriCOBRA and the New York Umbra Poetry Workshop.
The Black Arts Movement represented the most prolific expression of African American literature since the Harlem Renaissance of the 1920s. Featuring essays by contemporary scholars and rare photographs of BAM artists, Encyclopedia of the Blacks Arts Movement is an essential reference for students and scholars of twentieth-century American literature and African American cultural studies.
Verner D. Mitchell is professor of English at the University of Memphis. He is the editor of This Waiting for Love: Helene Johnson, Poet of the Harlem Renaissance (2006) and coauthor (with Cynthia Davis) of four subsequent books on women writers of the Harlem Renaissance. His work has appeared in Studies in American Culture, African American Review, American Literary History,and other journals.
Cynthia Davis is professor of English at San Jacinto College in Houston, Texas, where she specializes in Caribbean and African American literatures. Her publications include Where the Wild Grape Grows: Selected Writings by Dorothy West (2004), Western Echoes of the Harlem Renaissance: The Life and Writings of Anita Scott Coleman (2008), and Literary Sisters: Dorothy West and Her Circle (2011).
Mitchell and Davis are the authors of Zora Neale Hurston: An Annotated Bibliography of Works and Criticism (Scarecrow Press, 2013).
