The Black Arts Enterprise and the Production of African American Poetry

Howard Rambsy II

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0472117335 ISBN 13: 9780472117338

Publisher: University of Michigan Press, 2011

<p>The Black Arts Movement of the 1960s and '70s saw an outpouring of creative expression and a burgeoning of black-owned cultural outlets, including publishing houses, performance spaces, and galleries. Central to this movement was the work of its poets, including Amiri Baraka, Nikki Giovanni, Sonia Sanchez, Larry Neal, Haki Madhubuti, and Carolyn Rodgers. Through their collaborations with various editors, publishers, visual artists, critics, and fellow writers, this diverse group produced a dynamic body of books, anthologies, periodicals, and audio recordings, and helped develop new critical approaches to African American literary art.</p><p><i>The Black Arts Enterprise and the Production of African American Poetry</i> examines the literary culture, including the small presses and literary anthologies in which BAM's poets were first published. Focusing on the material production of Black Arts poetry, the book combines genetic criticism with cultural history to shed new light on the period, its publishing culture, and the collaborations of its participants. Howard Rambsy demonstrates how significant the circulation and format of black poetic texts—not simply their content—were to the formation of an artistic movement. The book also focuses on the roles that nationalist ideology, music, and figures such as Malcolm X and John Coltrane played in the formation of Black Arts discourse, and how that discourse served to reintroduce readers to poets such as Langston Hughes, Robert Hayden, Margaret Walker Alexander, and Phillis Wheatley. </p>

Review:

"A significant contribution to the growing body of scholarship about the Black Arts Movement, Rambsy's book is a carefully observed, systematic account of the milieu out of which, and within which, this paradigm-altering movement occurred. ... [A]n indispensable source for information on this seminal moment in American culture."
--Choice

-- (08/01/2012)

"The Black Arts Enterprise and the Production of African American Poetry is the first serious study to concentrate on the creative and critical role of Black poets, their poetry, their publishers, and the cultural, economic, and political activity their work generated in the nation . . . essential reading for students of the Black Arts Movement and African American studies."
--Haki R. Madhubuti, Founder and Publisher of Third World Press

"Rambsy's book takes up in closer detail the central issues of the Black Arts Movement, and its approach will be a model for subsequent scholarship. Reverberations from the Black Arts era are still demonstrably at work in the literature of this moment, and this rereading of the BAM era brings with it a reconfiguration of our understandings of previous eras."
--Aldon Nielsen, Penn State University

"Rambsy's sharp analysis of the material production of Black Arts poetry, supported by an extraordinarily sensitive attention to significant historical and textual detail, greatly advances our knowledge of the Black Arts Movement."
--James Smethurst, University of Massachusetts Amherst

About the Author:

<p><b>Howard Rambsy II</b> is Associate Professor in the Department of English Language and Literature and director of the Black Studies Program at Southern Illinois University Edwardsville.</p>