"After Mecca": Women Poets and the Black Arts MovementThe politics and music of the sixties and early seventies have been the subject of scholarship for many years, but it is only very recently that attention has turned to the cultural production of African American poets. In "After Mecca," Cheryl Clarke explores the relationship between the Black Arts Movement and black women writers of the period. Poems by Gwendolyn Brooks, Ntozake Shange, Audre Lorde, Nikki Giovanni, Sonia Sanchez, Jayne Cortez, Alice Walker, and others chart the emergence of a new and distinct black poetry and its relationship to the black community's struggle for rights and liberation. Clarke also traces the contributions of these poets to the development of feminism and lesbian-feminism, and the legacy they left for others to build on. She argues that whether black women poets of the time were writing from within the movement or writing against it, virtually all were responding to it. Using the trope of "Mecca," she explores the ways in which these writers were turning away from white, western society to create a new literacy of blackness. Provocatively written, this book is an important contribution to the fields of African American literary studies and feminist theory. |
Contents
The Loss of Lyric Space in Gwendolyn Brookss | 22 |
Black Women Poets and | 47 |
Ntozake | 94 |
Black Arts | 121 |
Notes | 171 |
| 187 | |
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Common terms and phrases
African American Afro-American Alice Walker Anthology Aretha artistic audience Audre Lorde Audre Lorde's Baraka beau willie beloved black American Black Arts Movement black community black culture black feminist critics black lesbian feminist black male black music black nationalism black nationalist black poetry Black Power Black Unicorn black women poets black women writers black writers Broadside Press Brooks's circle Civil Rights collection colored girls critique death Dudley Randall enunciates feminism gender Gwendolyn Brooks Harlem heterosexual homage homosexual Jayne Cortez jazz Jones June Jordan lady in blue lady in red liberation lines literary Loftin lover lyric Mecca ment missed love mother murder narrative narrator Negro Nikki Giovanni Ntozake Shange one's Pepita poem poetics political published race racial racism reader rejection relationship revolution revolutionary rhetoric sexual Shange's signifies sisters slave SNCC song Sonia Sanchez space speaker story struggle theorizes tion trope vernacular voice Walker woman women of color writing
References to this book
Black Literate Lives: Historical and Contemporary Perspectives Maisha T. Fisher No preview available - 2009 |