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"After Mecca": Women Poets and the Black Arts Movement
The 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.
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.
224 pages, Paperback
First published November 22, 2004
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Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews
November 30, 2008
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April 6, 2014
"Different from the subtle tactics of revision employed by New Negro Renaissance women poets, women poets of the Black Arts Movement deployed multiple voices of recovery, reclamation, and revision and threw off the sex and gender constraints of their foresisters. Black Arts women's poetry represented their concerns as race people to the yet-to-be-converted, imagined community of black people as well as that imagined community already within the circle" (164).
Clarke, scholar and former contributor of the magazine of _Conditions_, focuses on poetry by black women during a prolific and revolutionary ten year period (1968 - 1978). Beginning with Gwendolyn Brooks' _In the Mecca_ and ending with Audre Lorde's _The Black Unicorn_, this critical work sheds light on how the poetry composed by black women during the Black Arts Movement brought in new voices and perspectives, fighting against racism, sexism and homophobia. I appreciated Clarke's readings of Ntozake Shange's _for colored girls who have considered suicide/when the rainbow is enuf_ and Nikki Giovanni's poetry during the era. Her tying of popular singers (like Billie Holiday and Aretha Franklin) with poets was also interesting, though I found these readings less compelling than her other interpretations.
Clarke, scholar and former contributor of the magazine of _Conditions_, focuses on poetry by black women during a prolific and revolutionary ten year period (1968 - 1978). Beginning with Gwendolyn Brooks' _In the Mecca_ and ending with Audre Lorde's _The Black Unicorn_, this critical work sheds light on how the poetry composed by black women during the Black Arts Movement brought in new voices and perspectives, fighting against racism, sexism and homophobia. I appreciated Clarke's readings of Ntozake Shange's _for colored girls who have considered suicide/when the rainbow is enuf_ and Nikki Giovanni's poetry during the era. Her tying of popular singers (like Billie Holiday and Aretha Franklin) with poets was also interesting, though I found these readings less compelling than her other interpretations.
Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews