To Make Black Bodies Strange: Social Critique in Concert Dance of the Black Arts Movement (1998)

The Black Arts Movement of the late 1960s inspired a heightened critique of American social [dis]order by African American artists. Like their “New Negro” counterparts of a generation earlier, the group of writers and visual artists spearheading this movement denounced the seeming complacency of their immediate elders. “We Shall Overcome”, the motto of the 1963 March on Washington led by Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr, was replaced by “Up Against the Wall, Motherfucker!” a slogan popularized by playwright LeRoi Jones [Amiri Baraka], whose play Dutchman opened in New York in March of 1964.