The Black Arts Movement
The Black Arts Movement
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黑人艺术运动
DOI：
10.1002/9781444323474.ch20
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发表时间：
2010
影响因子：
1.9
通讯作者：
J. Smethurst
中科院分区：
文献类型：
--
作者：
J. Smethurst
关于任何文化运动，人们都不可避免地会问一些基本的问题。那是什么？什么时候开始的？它什么时候结束的？它在短期和长期的影响是什么？这些问题往往相当令人头疼，而且紧密联系在一起。有时，被认为是一场成功运动的基本立场或美学的东西，在假定运动结束后很久仍作为批评甚至流行的概念存在，例如，浪漫主义和超现实主义。有时，艺术家们拒绝接受别人认为的这场运动的消亡，并继续宣布他们几十年来的坚持。再一次，艺术家们仍然宣称自己是超现实主义运动的成员，在通常被视为该运动全盛时期的四分之三个世纪之后。同样，一旦一场运动蓬勃发展，也有一种向后阅读的趋势，包括被视为志趣相投的早期艺术家，即使他们不会将自己理解为象征主义者、达达主义者、新黑人文艺复兴的成员、Beats等等。所有这些烦恼都伴随着理解20世纪60年代和70年代的黑人艺术运动(BAM)及其遗产的任何尝试。BAM及其与之有着千丝万缕联系的政治运动--黑人力量--的主要遗产之一，是它们深刻地影响了非裔美国人的文学、艺术、文化、政治和身份认同的理解，无论是在非裔美国人社区内部还是外部。人们可以从美国第44任总统巴拉克·奥巴马的著作中以及围绕他的竞选活动的政治言论中清楚地看到这一点。在1995年出版的《父亲的梦想》一书中，奥巴马描述了他与激进的黑人诗人兼记者弗兰克·马歇尔·戴维斯在檀香山的关系。从奥巴马的描述来看，称戴维斯为导师太过分了，但戴维斯确实为年轻的奥巴马提供了一个严肃的黑人作家和知识分子的活生生的例子。就本文而言，这篇文章的有趣之处在于奥巴马通过《黑人艺术》和《黑人力量》解读戴维斯的方式，描述了戴维斯的《旧的黑人力量，达希基的自我》(96)和他的母亲一样生活在同样的60年代的时间扭曲中。他没有把戴维斯描绘在20世纪30年代和40年代的左翼黑人环境中
There are a few basic questions that one inevitably asks about any cultural movement. What was it? When did begin? When did it end? What was its effect in both the short term and the long term? These questions are often quite vexed and closely tied together. Sometimes what is perceived as the basic stance or aesthetic of a successful movement lives on as a critical or even popular concept long after the supposed end of the movement, as in the cases, for example, of Romanticism and Surrealism. Sometimes artists refuse to accept what others see as the passing of the movement and continue to declare their adherence for decades. Again, artists still proclaim themselves members of a Surrealist movement three-quarters of a century after what is usually seen as the movement’s heyday. Similarly, once a movement flourishes, there is also a tendency to read backward, to include earlier artists seen as kindred spirits even if they would not have understood themselves as Symbolists, Dadaists, members of the New Negro Renaissance, Beats, and so on. All these vexations attend any attempt to understand the Black Arts Movement (BAM) of the 1960s and 1970s and its legacies. One of the major legacies of BAM and the political movement to which it was inextricably bound, Black Power, is that they have deeply inflected how African American literature, art, culture, politics, and identity have been understood, both inside and outside the African American community. One can see this clearly in the writings of the 44th President of the United States, Barack Obama, and in the political rhetoric surrounding his election campaign. In Dreams from My Father (1995), Obama describes his relationship with the radical black poet and journalist Frank Marshall Davis in Honolulu. Judging from Obama’s account, it would be too much to call Davis a mentor, but Davis did provide the young Obama a living example of a serious black writer and intellectual. For the purposes of this essay, what is interesting about this account is the way Obama reads Davis through Black Arts and Black Power, describing Davis’s “old Black Power, dashiki self”“living in the same sixties time warp”(96) as his mother. He does not portray Davis in the context of the leftwing black milieu of the 1930s and 1940s in