Black Post-Blackness

With the publication of New Thoughts on the Black Arts Movement in 2006, editors Margo Natalie Crawford and Lisa Gail Collins helped usher in a new wave of scholarship that assesses the significance of the Black Arts Movement (BAM). Crawford’s new monograph, Black Post-Blackness: The Black Arts Movement and Twenty-First-Century Aesthetics, is another vital contribution to that important work. The book thoughtfully explores the continuities of innovation between the BAM and twenty-first-century radical African American literature and visual art. Affirming the BAM as “the first cultural movement determined to make art that is specifically and unapologetically black” (2), Crawford breaks from critical tradition in arguing that the quest of purportedly “post-black” art movements in the twenty-first century to traverse a “wide horizon of shaping and unshaping blackness” (2) aligns with, rather than departs from, the BAM, especially the “second wave” of BAM aesthetic explorations in the early 1970s. Crawford’s undertaking necessitates a nonlinear approach to thinking about the relationship between these eras, one that privileges the “back-and-forth, black radical tradition of continuity and rupture” (3). Instead of positing historical progression between periods when black radical aesthetics flourished, Crawford connects these periods through a shared aesthetic, employing the concept she coins for the book’s title. “Black post-blackness,” she states, is “a new way of thinking about radical black aesthetics as a constant push to what is imaginable and a constant holding on to the radicalness of black life in an antiblack world” (ix). Black radical aesthetic movements imagine what is possible beyond the concepts of Blackness that exist in their time and space, and in doing so, they anticipate and are akin to the innovations of future movements. Thus, subsequent eras’ attempts to move beyond previous conceptions of black art actually reach back to the innovative and experimental practices of radicals in previous eras. In relation to the BAM in particular, Crawford argues that in order to fully appreciate the movement’s innovativeness, we must acknowledge its “full anticipation of the ‘beyond black art’ waves of twenty-first-century black aesthetics” (3), as well as understand African American literary and visual art in the twenty-first century as both “a push away from the narrowness of the category ‘black art’” and “a push back to the mixed media, abstraction, satire, and experimentation in the BAM” (4).

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