Urban Space, Masculinity, and the Poetics of Resistance in the Black Arts Movement

Abstract

The Black Arts Movement of the 1960s is a point in the cultural and political transformation of the African American literary tradition. The movement, which emerged in the wake of the assassination of Malcolm X, not only attempted to redefine the relationship between art and politics but it was also attempted to redefine the black identity by radically engaging the aesthetic practices. Historians like Yusef ‛M. Akbar and McCree have suggested that such a transition was a deliberate move towards a praxis that preempted the political action of black poets, writers, and visual artists as a coherent way of dissent. Poetry especially was the burning ground where the issue of race, maleness, cultural memory and political awareness were smelt into resistance. A kind of so-called political poetics was strategically written into the poetically rhetoric of the time, i.e. the works of Amiri Baraka, Lucille Lynn, etc., which already predetermined the experience of the community, black solidarity, and the recovery of the historical narrative. Here, the structure and the content of verse was employed in a selective way to question and challenge systems of oppression but at the same time producing possible eschatological visions of a free self. By redefining Harlem and other urbanized areas, which could be readily characterized by the discourse of violence and confinement, surveillance, etc., the movement poets captured not only the reality of the racial oppression but also the potential of group empowerment. Their choice to have the urban experience foregrounded allowed the poets to outline contexts that were materialistically repressive as they were symbolically subversive to locate urbanity-as-such as a space of political struggle and cultural reinterpretation. This paper argues that the poetry of the Black Arts Movement, especially when gathered in book form as in Black Fire, is a technique to transform marginalization in the city into a vessel of cultural and political enlightenment. It illustrates that the aesthetic cultures of resistance, masculinity and collective memory exist in a collaborative manner to recover the black identity which in turn promotes the ideological premises of Black Power. In this manner, the poetics of defiance shared by the movement resonate even now, in the modern movement of racial justice, which serves as a temporal link between the struggle of the past and the modern-day movement.