ABSTRACT
The effect of the Black Arts Movement was not simply to “radicalize” African American literature by asserting that it had a political obligation, but also to refocus the tradition and to open it up to new possibilities for free expression. The major works of the 1960s were based firmly in folk culture and black vernacular speech, and many were published by small or alternative presses that were considered marginal or underground. Works that might have been dismissed as bitter, angry, or offensive at the beginning of that decade nearly became the norm, and any literary work that did not rail against racial injustice was likely to be overlooked. This expectation was not to last indefinitely, and there is currently vigorous debate about whether or not black literature in the twenty-first century has the same political obligations it had in the 1960s and early 1970s. Still, the Black Arts Movement has had one lasting effect: African American literature has garnered more attention and produced more debate in the past half-century than ever before. Moreover, in the aftermath of the Black Arts Movement, which was weighted
toward male writers and a conventionally masculine sensibility, black women writers rose to the foreground in the 1970s and 1980s, a trend which reached a crescendo (if not an apex) when Toni Morrison received the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1993, the first and currently only African American writer to earn this prestigious award. It could be argued that fiction writers Morrison, Toni Cade Bambara, Alice Walker, and Gloria Naylor, poets Nikki Giovanni, Audre Lorde, and Lucille Clifton, and playwright Ntozake Shange were influenced simultaneously by the radical politics of both the Black Arts Movement and of second-wave feminism. At the same time, these writers incorporated other traditions, infusing their work with folklore, mythology, history, and individual self-expression. Building on the achievements of a group called the Combahee River Collective, whose essay “A Black Feminist Statement” (1977) was a foundational document in the movement
to empower black feminists, Walker coined the term “womanism” to apply feminist principles to African American women’s writing, arguing that “feminism” did not address the particular concerns of black women. Morrison, for her part, has claimed that she doesn’t want to be held to any ideology or “ism.” Both writers assert their individuality and their distinctiveness through these positions. It is clear that not all black writers, male or female, shared the same concerns or
perspectives in the years following the decline of the Black Arts Movement. What is also clear is that the period saw an extraordinary, sustained display of talent and artistic genius that brought African American literature to new heights. In addition to the rise of black feminism, this period also engaged deeply with history in literary contexts. Both of these trends have had long-term effects on the trajectory of black writing.
