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Encyclopedia of the Black Arts Movement

Edited by Verner D. Mitchell and Cynthia Davis

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.

Rowman & Littlefield Publishers

Pages: 410 • Trim: 7⅜ x 10¼

978-1-5381-0145-2 • Hardback • May 2019 • $153.00 • (£119.00)

978-1-5381-0146-9 • eBook • May 2019 • $145.00 • (£112.00)

Subjects: Art / Reference, Art / American / African American, History / African American, Reference / Encyclopedias, Performing Arts / Reference, Literary Collections / American / African American

Encyclopedia of the Black Arts Movement

Hardback

eBook

Summary

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.

Details

Rowman & Littlefield Publishers

Pages: 410 • Trim: 7⅜ x 10¼

978-1-5381-0145-2 • Hardback • May 2019 • $153.00 • (£119.00)

978-1-5381-0146-9 • eBook • May 2019 • $145.00 • (£112.00)

Subjects: Art / Reference, Art / American / African American, History / African American, Reference / Encyclopedias, Performing Arts / Reference, Literary Collections / American / African American

Author

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).

Table of Contents

Acknowledgements
Preface
Introduction by LaToya R. Jefferson-James
Timeline
Entries
AfriCOBRA
Allen, Samuel
Angelou, Maya
Baldwin, James
“Ballad of Birmingham”
Bambara, Toni Cade
Baraka, Amiri
Black Aesthetic, The
Black Arts Movement in Algeria, The
“Black Dada Nihilismus”
Black Fire: An Anthology of Afro-American Writing
Black Theatre Issue of The Drama Review
Black Theatre Magazine
Black Women Writers (1950-1980): A Critical Evaluation
Black Women Writers and the Black Arts Movement
“Blues Ain’t No Mockin’ Bird”
Blues for Mister Charlie
Broadside Press
“Bronzeville Mother Loiters in Mississippi. Meanwhile, a Mississippi Mother Burns Bacon, A”
Brooks, Gwendolyn
Bullins, Ed
Caldwell, Ben
Caribbean Artists Movement
Catherine Carmier
Childress, Alice
Chisholm, Shirley
Coleman, Wanda
Collins, Kathleen
Davis, Angela
Deacons for Defense and Justice
Dent, Tom
Dodson, Owen
Du Bois, W. E. B.
Dutchman
Evans, Mari
Evans-Charles, Martie
Fire Next Time, The
for colored girls who have considered suicide/when the rainbow is enuf
Free-Lance Pallbearers, The
Gaines, Ernest J.
Giovanni, Nikki
Gunn, Bill
Hansberry, Lorraine
Hayden, Robert
Henderson, David
Hopkinson, Nalo
Jordan, June
Kennedy, Adrienne
Kgositsile, Keorapetse William
Knight, Etheridge
Last Poets, The
“Lesson, The"
Malcolm X
Malcolm X, Poetry on
Marginalization and the Black Arts Movement
Marson, Una
Milner, Ron
“Monday in B-Flat”
Morrison, Toni
Mumbo Jumbo
Music and the Black Arts Movement
Neal, Larry
Negro Digest / Black World / First World
Negro Ensemble Company, The
No Place to Be Somebody
One Day When I Was Lost: A Scenario Based on Alex Haley’s The Autobiography of Malcolm X
Organization of Black American Culture
Polite, Carlene Hatcher
Ra, Sun
Raisin in the Sun, A
Randall, Dudley
“Raymond’s Run”
Redmond, Eugene B.
Rodgers, Carolyn
Ross, Fran
Sanchez, Sonia
Sexual Identity and the Black Arts Movement
Shange, Ntozake
Shepp, Archie
Slave, The
Smith, Jean Wheeler
Society of Umbra, The
“Sonny’s Blues”
Soul on Ice
Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee
Teer, Barbara Ann
This Child’s Gonna Live
Thomas, Lorenzo
Till, Poetry on Emmett
Touré, Askia Muhammad
Tupac Shakur and the Black Arts Movement
Understanding the New Black Poetry
Voodoo Aesthetics and the Black Arts Movement
Your Blues Ain’t Like Mine
Selected Bibliography
Index
About the Editors and Contributors

Reviews

The Black Arts Movement (BAM) of the 1960s and early 1970s was the artistic and aesthetic side of the Black Power Movement. BAM was perhaps more global in scale and remains a subject of scholarly and intellectual interest to this day. Mitchell (Univ. of Memphis) and Davis (San Jacinto College), both professors of English and accomplished specialists in African American literature, have compiled an incisive, captivating history of this radical political and social movement, which raised race consciousness through art and was a unique 20th-century artistic movement. Arranged alphabetically, entries cover political and social leaders, artists, authors, works, and major themes of the movement; this compendium is an excellent introduction to and summary of BAM. Topics such as black women writers, marginalization, sexual identity, voodoo aesthetics, student nonviolence, poetry on Emmett Till, and the black aesthetic are cogent and well summarized. Influential longer works merit attention, but significant short stories and poems—for example, James Baldwin's “Sonny’s Blues" and Amiri Baraka's “Monday in B-Flat”—also have their own entries. Each entry includes suggestions for further reading. The encyclopedia includes a brief foreword and preface, a time line, and a helpful index.

Summing Up: Essential. Lower-division undergraduates through faculty and professionals; general readers.
— Choice Reviews

Features

3/5/2020: Library Journal named the book one of their Can't Miss Print Titles of 2019!

Link: https://www.libraryjournal.com/?detailStory=best-print-reference-2019

Thirty photos, including some from private collections

Foreword by LaToya R. Jefferson-James

Nearly 100 entries

Encyclopedia of the Black Arts Movement

Edited by Verner D. Mitchell and Cynthia Davis

Encyclopedia of the Black Arts Movement

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