TY - JOUR
T1 - Black Arts, Black Women, Black Politics
AU - Powell, Elliott H.
N1 - Publisher Copyright:
© 2022 The Author(s).
PY - 2022
Y1 - 2022
N2 - This essay-review examines Emily J. Lordi's The Meaning of Soul: Black Music and Resilience since the 1960s (2020), Sharrell D. Luckett's African American Arts: Activism, Aesthetics, and Futurity (2019), and Kimberly Mack's Fictional Blues: Narrative Self-Invention from Bessie Smith to Jack White (2020). Although differing in scope and form, the three books are recent works that are invested in explicating Black, and especially Black women's, artistic creation as sites of and spaces for alternative Black world-making. This review argues that these works share a demand to consider how Black expressive culture is personal and political, singular and social, and how it can offer creative, collective, and intersectional strategies for living in a more liberatory world. Indeed, this review illustrates how, for past and present Black artists, and Black women artists in particular, cultural production is a key site of struggle in grappling with multiple and concomitant oppressions as well as developing alternative formations of Black living and being, inevitably showcasing the importance of Black cultural production in our contemporary world of anti-Black racism. Although differing in scope⋯ and form, the three books are recent works that are invested in explicating Black, and especially Black women's, artistic creation as sites of and spaces for alternative Black world-making.
AB - This essay-review examines Emily J. Lordi's The Meaning of Soul: Black Music and Resilience since the 1960s (2020), Sharrell D. Luckett's African American Arts: Activism, Aesthetics, and Futurity (2019), and Kimberly Mack's Fictional Blues: Narrative Self-Invention from Bessie Smith to Jack White (2020). Although differing in scope and form, the three books are recent works that are invested in explicating Black, and especially Black women's, artistic creation as sites of and spaces for alternative Black world-making. This review argues that these works share a demand to consider how Black expressive culture is personal and political, singular and social, and how it can offer creative, collective, and intersectional strategies for living in a more liberatory world. Indeed, this review illustrates how, for past and present Black artists, and Black women artists in particular, cultural production is a key site of struggle in grappling with multiple and concomitant oppressions as well as developing alternative formations of Black living and being, inevitably showcasing the importance of Black cultural production in our contemporary world of anti-Black racism. Although differing in scope⋯ and form, the three books are recent works that are invested in explicating Black, and especially Black women's, artistic creation as sites of and spaces for alternative Black world-making.
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U2 - 10.1093/alh/ajac070
DO - 10.1093/alh/ajac070
M3 - Article
AN - SCOPUS:85132231094
SN - 0896-7148
VL - 34
SP - 596
EP - 605
JO - American Literary History
JF - American Literary History
IS - 2
ER -