The Black Aesthetic in the Age of

Globalization

Addison Gayle Memorial

Lecture, March 31, 2011
Baruch College, New
York
Simon Gikandi,
Princeton University
I. Late Pan-Africanism: From
Nairobi to Manhattan
“On the Abolition of the English
Department” (Nairobi, October 12,
1968” 

“All things are to be considered in their

relevance to our situation, and their
contribution towards understanding
ourselves…The primary duty of any
literature department is to illuminate
the spirit animating a people, to show
how it meets new challenges, and to
investigate possible areas of
development and involvement.”
• [James Ngugi, Henry Owuor-Anyumba,
Taban Lo Liyong]
Black Manifestos
Most contemporary black writing of the
last few years, the literature of the
young, has been aimed at the
destruction of the double-
consciousness. It has been aimed at
consolidating the African-American
personality. And it has not been
essentially a literature of protest. It has,
instead, turned its attention inward to
the internal problems of the group. The
problem of living in a racist society,
therefore, is something that lurks on the
immediate horizon, but which can not
be dealt with until certain political,
social and spiritual truths are
understood by the oppressed
themselves-inwardly understood.
[Larry Neal , “An Afterword” ]
The New Revolution
There is a revolution in black literature in
America. It is nationalist in direction, and it
is pro-black. That means in effect, that it is
deliberately moving outside the sphere of
traditional Western forms, limitations, and
presumptions. It is seeking new limits, new
shapes, and much of it now admittedly is
crude, reflecting the uncertainty, the
searching quality of its movement. But,
though troubled and seek. it is very, very
vital. [Hoyt Fuller, “The New Black
Literature”]
And Mode of Criticism
• The function of the critic is to demand that
the writer adhere to the proposition that a
sane universe is possible, that a new
morality and a new ethical system are
possible only when the new man has come
into being, and that the writer must devote
his talents to these ends. At every stage of
human history, there have been those,
romantic in nature, who envisioned a
world of principle and justice against the
overriding pragmatic considerations of the
moment. This must be the position of the
Black writer. The function of the Black critic
at the present time is to see that he
accepts this position. The critic will fulfill
his function by devoting himself. not to
spurious theories of art for art's sake, but
to art for the sake of Black people
everywhere. [Gayle, “The Function of
Criticism at the Present Time”]
Art and Compensation
Art and the Souls of Black
Folks…
I sit with Shakespeare and he winces not. Across the color line I
move arm in arm with Balzac and Dumas where smiling men
and welcoming women glide in gilded halls. From out the caves
of evening that swing between the strong-limbed earth and the
tracery of the stars I summon Aristotle and Aurelius and what
soul I will, and they come all graciously with no scorn nor
condescension. So, wed with Truth, I dwell above the Veil. Is
this the life you grudge us, O knightly America? Is this the life
you long to change into the dull red hideousness of Georgia?
Are you so afraid lest peering from this high Pisgah, between
Philistine and Amalekite, we sight the Promised Land?
[W.E.B Du Bois, 1902]
International Congress of
Black Writers, paris, 1956
"Here is the outrageous issue of
people without culture. Although
the true culprits in the tragedy of
colonization intentionally created
such a myth, it is still surprising
that generations of cultural and
spiritual authorities have
considered that men may live in
society without having a culture.
[…] There are no people without
culture." (Alioune Diop)
Presence Africaine

"The state is the guarantor of a culture's

memory, traditions, and characteristics
[…] Thus, the cult of our classics and their
actualization in light of our current
situation are refused to colonized people,
as well as the freedom to think of a future
commensurate with their love for the
world." (Alioune Diop. 13)
And Pan-Africanism
Congress of Black Writers
and Artists, Rome 1959
The artist who has decided to
illustrate the truths of the nation
turns paradoxically toward the past
and away from actual events. What
he ultimately intends to embrace
are in fact the castoffs of thought,
its shells and corpses, a knowledge
which has been stabilized once and
for all. But the native intellectual
who wishes to create an authentic
work of art must realize that the
truths of a nation are in the first
place its realities. He must go on
until he has found the seething pot
out of which the learning of the
future will emerge. [Fanon, “On
National Culture”]
“Reordering the White
Aesthetic”
It is not enough to try to get back to the
people in that past out of which they
have already emerged; rather we must
join them in that fluctuating movement
which they are just giving a shape to,
and which, as soon as it has started, will
be the signal for everything to be called
in question. Let there be no mistake
about it; it is to this zone of occult
instability where the people dwell that
we must come; and it is there that souls
are crystallized and that our perceptions
and our lives I are transfused with light.
[Fanon, On National Culture, 227]
II. Globalizing Blackness
“American defines the
context of , but does not
and cannot define, the
terms of that struggle.
The world, with Africa as
a base, defines our
struggle. For we are an
African people” (John
O’Neal “Black Arts” 52).
The Caribbean Artists
Movement
 

“Black awareness in our Caribbean terms is the

will to make concrete and viable our vision of
ourselves as an initiating, self-protecting ,
inventive, courageous, productive and
ultimately culturally enriched people. Black
awareness is the beginning of our search and
definition of revolution. [Andrew Salkey]
The Black Aesthetic (New
York 1972)
Black Aesthetics (Nairobi, 1972)
The relationship of a Black Identity to Black
Aesthetics is a crucial one, and has been extensively
discussed in the USA. For that reason as well as for
the definitions it provides, we have placed first in
our series the contribution of our Black American
colleague David Dorsey. His definitions and his
survey of modern East African writing make a
prolegomena to the whole book. (Pio Zirimu)
Black Being in the World
Postlude/Home
 
Where then is the nigger’s
home?
 
In Paris Brixton Kingston
Rome?
 
Here?
Or in Heaven?
 
What crime
his dark
 
dividing
skin is hiding?
 
What guilt
now drives him
 
on?
Will exile never
 
end?
 
[Kamau (Edward) Brathwaite, Rights of Passage,
1967]
And the Crisis of “Man”
The price of this transformation is the unconditional
freedom of the Negro; it is not too much to say that
he, who has been so long rejected, must now be
embraced, and at no matter what psychic or social
risk. He is the key figure in his country, and the
American future is precisely as bright or as dark as
his. And the Negro recognizes this, in a negative
way. Hence the question: Do I really want to be
integrated into a burning house? [James Baldwin,
The Fire Next Time, 1963]
For us, as a People, to try to find our Peopleness
within the context of the American nation or the
values of the West on which the nation is founded,
would be like a chicken trying to find his chickenness
in an oven. Why enjoin a struggle to become
enmeshed in the very decadence that brings
oppression on our People and to the majority of the
Peoples of the world? [John O”Neil, Black Arts:
Notebook]
III. Black Aesthetics and
Globalization
• Why did the writers and intellectuals of the black arts
movement, a movement which saw itself as revolutionary,
construct its cultural projects around the idea of the aesthetic,
a category that has been often been dismissed as conservative
and apolitical?
• How could a movement which was driven by its members
exclusion from the body of the nation, meaning the United
State, seek to legitimize itself through the imagination of the
national community?
• Given its powerful investment in neighborhoods, what
scholars of globalization now call, locality, could the Black Arts
Movement, be described as global in a conceptual sense
without imposing an extroverted allegory of reading on it
•  
The Aesthetic Ideology
Confronted with this wall of insurmountable facts, the Negro intellectual was
forced to look within, forced to take the excursion into self where truth reigned un
distorted. Whatever calm, whatever peace was to be found by rejecting the outer
reality and clinging to an inner subjective reality which could not be proved, either
to the bigoted skeptics or more important, to one's loved ones: wife and child.
[Gayle, “Black Fathers and their Sons”]

The concept of home and roots in America is the problem. People can only bring a
nation out of mutual commitment to their common good. Here, we have simply
been victims. Our concept must be a world concept, and we must see our roots as
African. We are an African People. [John O’Neil, “Black Arts: Notebook”]

The poem comes to stand for the collective conscious and unconscious of Black
America—the real impulse in back of the Black Power movement, which is the will
toward self-determination and nationhood, a radical reordering of the nature and
function of both art and artist.
[Larry Neal, “The Black Arts Movement”]
Beyond Existentialism
"Dirty nigger!" Or simply, "Look, a Negro!"
I came into the world imbued with the will to find a
meaning in things, my spirit filled with the desire to
attain to the source of the world, and then I found that I
was an object in the midst of other objects.
Sealed into that crushing objecthood, I turned
beseechingly to others… But just as I reached the other
side, I stumbled, and the movements, the attitudes, the
glances of the other fixed me there, in the sense in which
a chemical solution is fixed by a dye. I was indignant; I
demanded an explanation. Nothing happened. I burst
apart. Now the fragments have been put together again
by another self.
[Frantz Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks]
The Problem of Nationhood
People can only bring a nation out of mutual commitment to their
common good. Here, we have simply been victims. Our concept must
be a world concept, and we must see our roots as African. We are an
African people. [O’Neal, Black Arts 46]

We want a black poem.

And a Black World.
Let the world be a Black Poem
And Let All Black People Speak This Poem
Silently
or LOUD
 
[Imamu Baraka (LeRoi Jones), Black Art, 1968]
 
Art and Citizenship
You have to remember that there was contention over which
way to go .... In the readings that we were doing we were
always trying to make sure that the form we were evolving was
a form that could include the people, the community. We were
looking at black national culture for things that would be
useable for national liberation or for nationhood .... The
question was how to convey to blacks the strength and values of
Afro-American culture and politics through culture.
[Neal, “The Social Background of the Black Arts Movement”]
The Global and the Local
Neighborhoods are ideally stages for their own
self-reproduction, a process that is fundamentally
opposed to the imaginary of the nationstate,
where neighborhoods are designed to be
instances and exemplars 01 a generalizable mode
of belonging to a wider territorial imaginary, The
modes of localization most congenial to the
nation-state have a disciplinary quality about
them: in sanitation and street cleaning, in prisons
and slum clearance, in refugee camps and offices
of every kind, the nation-state localizes by fiat, by
decree, and sometimes by the overt use of force,
This sort of localization creates severe constraints,
even direct obstacles, to the survival of locality as
a context-generative rather than a context-driven
process.
[Arjun Appadurai, Modernity at Large]
Mourides in Touba
Little Senegal, New York City
Imagining America (circa
1966)
Re-Imagining America (circa
1970)
With Soul
And Style
The Afterlife of the Black
Aesthetics
Trans-Atlantic Connections
And Inspirations…