The Black Arts Movement (1965-76) consisted of artists across the United States deeply concerned with the relationship between politics and the black aesthetic.In Search of Our Warrior ...Mothersexamines the ways in which black women playwrights in the movement advanced feminist and womanist perspectives from within black nationalist discourses. La Donna L. Forsgren recuperates the careers, artistic theories, and dramatic contributions of four leading playwrights: Martie Evans-Charles, J.e. Franklin, Sonia Sanchez, and Barbara Ann Teer. Using original interviews, production recordings, playbills, and unpublished manuscripts, she investigates how these women, despite operating within a context that equated the collective well-being of black people with black male agency, created works that validated black women's aspirations for autonomy and explored women's roles in the struggle for black liberation.In Search of Our Warrior Mothersdemonstrates the powerful contributions of women to the creation, interpretation, and dissemination of black aesthetic theory, thus opening an interdisciplinary conversation at the intersections of theater, performance, feminist, and African American studies and identifying and critiquing the gaps and silences within these fields.
The 1960s and ’70s witnessed hundreds of race-related uprisings across major US cities. Often provoked by white-authored shootings of Black people, these rebellions galvanized a generation of ...activists—including Black Arts Movement dramatists Amiri Baraka, Sonia Sanchez, Lola E. Jones, and Carol Freeman—to create works that sustain the hearts, minds, and souls of Black Americans. While Baraka’s Arm Yourself, Or Harm Yourself (1967) offers a representative engagement with the Black Power rhetoric of gun ownership, hegemonic masculinity, and white-authored gun violence, Sanchez’s The Bronx Is Next (1968), Jones’s The New Nigger, or Who’s Afraid of William Faulkner (1976), and Freeman’s The Suicide (1966) provide a unique departure. Collectively, their works produce womanist thought that complicates Black Power rhetoric of gun ownership and masculinist understandings of Black liberation. Recovering these less-studied works reveals not only how the Black Arts Movement was not so uniformly masculinist as it has sometimes been depicted, but also how these early womanist interventions laid a critical foundation for the Black Lives Matter movement of today.
Abstract
As an unapologetically Black feminist artist, Ntozake Shange furthered the cause of black girl representation on Broadway stages with the 1976 debut of for colored girls who have considered ...suicide / when the rainbow is enuf. Shange’s award-winning choreopoem eschews the masculinist liberation discourse of the Black Power era and instead centers the concerns of Black girls within the freedom struggle. Using twenty poems interlaced with dance and music, Shange illuminates the subjectivity of seven “colored girls” who experience sexual, emotional, and physical violence in their communities. Committed to the health and safety of the entire Black community, Shange concludes the performance with a ritual dance to foster unity and community healing from violence. Her early Black feminist intervention serves as a foundation for the artistic work of Black Lives Matter activists today, many of whom continue to use ritual performances to promote community healing in the wake of white-authored violence. Black Lives Matter movement artists and activists Gorgeous Mother Karma Gucci, Adonte Prodigy, and Amya Miyake-Mugler, for example, performed ritual Voguing at a Chicago demonstration on 3 June 2020 to bring greater visibility to the intracultural violence reaped upon Black queer and transgender girls. Their ritual Voguing, which I situate as Black queer feminist praxis in motion, reimagines the Black radical tradition as collective liberation. Collectively, the work of Shange, Gucci, Prodigy, and Mugler affirms the vital truth that none of us are free until all of us are free.
While often intended to provide concrete “proof” of racial injustice, these videos also desensitize viewers to racial violence and are quickly co-opted to justify the assault on black bodies.1 ...Considering this current state of affairs, how can instructors put reluctant white students at ease so that they feel comfortable engaging with issues of race and social justice, yet also use race-based stress to challenge dangerous ideologies and behaviors? I taught the survey course at the University of Oregon, a historically white university and college (HWCU), during this firestorm of racial tension.2 The term HWCU refers to “an institution of higher education whose histories, traditions, symbols, stories, icons, curriculum, and processes were all designed by whites, for whites, to reproduce whiteness via a white experience at the exclusion of others who, since the 1950s and 1960s, have been allowed in such spaces” (Brunsma et al. 719).According to them, many students who attend HWCUs maintain such walls through little-to-no significant contact with nonwhites at home, school, or within their communities (722)....it is that behavior we must become aware of and work to change” (2003, 37).White Americans then combined their prejudices with the application of brutal force and the police power of the states to subordinate African Americans, as the behavior of the law enforcers toward Sue Jones and her family demonstrates....stripped of their civil and political rights, black men and women were flogged, dismembered, tortured with hot irons, and put to death by rope, flame, water, gunshot, and burning oil, at the whim of whites.
At times, black student activists used theatrical and confrontational tactics to force universities to increase financial aid opportunities for minority students and establish or broaden affirmative ...action policies....I let them know that despite the unique challenges that persist for this generation of black activists, Mizzou students continue to serve as a source of inspiration for student activists across the United States....how can black student activists maintain political and social relevance within the constantly shifting age of social media?...what role will theatre and performance play in the revolution on college campuses?
This article critically examines Barbara Ann Teer's holistic performance theories, critical essays, and unpublished ritualistic revivals to demonstrate a continuation of black women's intellectual ...traditions from within Black Power discourse. This study contends that Teer's intellectual and artistic endeavors redefined the revolutionary theater of the Black Arts Movement by incorporating a holistic approach to performance that privileged the spiritual, artistic, and psychological liberation of both participants and performers. Furthermore, Teer's grassroots efforts created new woman-centered African-based mythology and promoted community activism by providing a platform to discuss the devastating effects of racism and the need to form productive relationships among black men and women of Harlem. In so doing, this article not only recovers the contributions of an important black female intellectual, artist, and activist but also reveals the nuanced tensions between Black Power and feminist movements and the heterogeneous ideologies within the Black Arts Movement.
