Writing Nation: Giovanni, Sanchez, and Lorde and the Black Arts Movement

Abstract

The epigraph from Barbara Christian’s groundbreaking essay “The Race for Theory” 1987 articulates one of the most potent charges against the Black Arts Movement aestheticians levied by a contemporary black woman literary scholar and writer. This is a charge that has been revisited thoroughly by other critics such as Cherise A. Pollard, Carmen Phelps, Cheryl Clarke, and Lorenzo Thomas, to name a few.1 These critics have interrogated the separatist and nationalist ideology of the Black Arts Movement, and the movement’s concerns with developing a black aesthetic and nation. Readers are reminded that this ideology was so pre- and pro-scriptive that it limited the full participation of writers whose creative, political, social, and sexual agendas did not toe the ideological lines.