| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 93.1

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| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 93.1 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

The Black Arts Movement: Literary Nationalism in the 1960s and 1970s. By James Edward Smethurst. (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2005. xvi, 471 pp. Cloth, $59.95, ISBN 0-8078-2934-X. Paper, $24.95, ISBN 0-8078-5598-7.)

The black arts movement (BAM) was a hodgepodge of black nationalist artistic sensibilities and intellectual formations that collectively challenged and momentarily superseded the integrationist aesthetics associated with the civil rights movement. The significance of the bam has remained a hotly contested topic for almost four decades. Frequently, this contentious discussion has been unable to escape rigid ideological or aesthetic polarities such as the antagonism between those who believe that a viable Afro-American literature has to be premised on the cultural distinctiveness of black Americans (vis-á-vis white Americans) and those who argue that Afro-American art could only be premised on the mulatto character of Afro-American culture. Another noteworthy contention has been the debate between those who argue that black art has to be serviceable to black politics and those who claim that any art placed too explicitly in the service of politics is doomed to aesthetic mediocrity. During the height of the bam, those polarities were embodied in the intellectual conflict between the Amiri Barakas and Addison Gayle Jr.s on one side and the Ralph Ellisons, Albert Murrays, and Robert Haydens on the other.

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