During the 1960s and 1970s, a cadre of poets, playwrights, visual artists, musicians, and other visionaries came together to create a renaissance in African American literature and art. This charged chapter in the history of African American culture-which came to be known as the Black Arts Movement-has remained largely neglected by subsequent generations of critics.

In this path-breaking and long overdue anthology, Lisa Gail Collins and Margo Natalie Crawford bring together seventeen original essays that uncover the rich complexity of this self-conscious cultural movement. New Thoughts on the Black Arts Movement includes essays that reexamine well-known figures such as Amiri Baraka, Larry Neal, Gwendolyn Brooks, Sonia Sanchez, Betye Saar, Jeff Donaldson, and Haki Madhubuti. In addition, the anthology expands the scope of the movement by offering essays that explore the racial and sexual politics of the era, links with other period cultural movements, the arts in prison, the role of Black colleges and universities, gender politics and the rise of feminism, color fetishism, photography, music, and more.

An invigorating look at a movement that has long begged for reexamination, this collection lucidly interprets the complex debates that surround this tumultuous era and demonstrates that the celebration of this movement need not be separated from its critique.

Contributors include Houston A. Baker, Emily Bernard, Lee Bernstein, Lisa Gail Collins, Margo Natalie Crawford, Erina Duganne, Adam Gussow, Rod Hernandez, Kellie Jones, Mary Ellen Lennon, Alondra Nelson, Cherise A. Pollard, James Smethurst, Cherise Smith, Lorrie Smith, Wendy S. Walters, and Michelle Joan Wilkinson.

Lisa Gail Collins is an assistant professor of art history and Africana studies at Vassar College in Poughkeepsie, New York. She is the author of The Art of History: African American Women Artists Engage the Past and coauthor (with Lisa Mintz Messinger) of African-American Artists, 1929-1945: Prints, Drawings, and Paintings in The Metropolitan Museum of Art. Margo Natalie Crawford is an assistant professor of African American literature and culture in the department of English at Indiana University. She is the author of the forthcoming books Rewriting Blackness: Beyond Authenticity and Hybridity and Mother to Son: Gwendolyn Brooks and Haki Madhubuti.

Acknowledgments
Introduction: Power to the People!: The Art of Black Power,
Lisa Gail Collins and Margo Natalie Crawford
I. Cities and Sites
1. Black Light on the Wall of Respect: the Chicago Black Arts Movement
Margo Natalie Crawford
2. Black West, Thoughts on Art in Los Angeles
Kellie Jones
3. The Black Arts Movement and Historically Black Colleges and
Universities
James Smethurst
4. A Question of Relevancy: New York Museums and the Black Arts
Movement, 1968-1971
Mary Ellen Lennon
5. Blackness in Present Future Tense: Broadside Press, Motown Records,
and Detroit Techno
Wendy S. Walters
II. Genres and Ideologies
6. A Black Mass as Black Gothic: Myth and Bioscience in Black Cultural
Nationalism
Alondra Nelson
7. Natural Black Beauty and Black Drag
Margo Natalie Crawford
8. Sexual Subversions, Political Inversions: Women's Poetry and the
Politics of the Black Arts Movement
Cherise A. Pollard
9. Transcending the Fixity of Race: The Kamoinge Workshop and the
Question of a "Black Aesthetic" in Photography
Erina Duganne
10. Moneta Sleet, Jr. as Active Participant: The Selma March and the
Black Arts Movement
Cherise Smith
11. "If Bessie Smith Had Killed Some White People": Racial Legacies,
the Blues Revival, and the Black Arts Movement
Adam Gussow
III. Predecessors, Peers, and Legacies
12. A Familiar Strangeness: The Spectre of Whiteness in the Harlem
Renaissance and the Black Arts Movement
Emily Bernard
13. The Art of Transformation: Parallels in the Black Arts and Feminist
Art Movements
Lisa Gail Collins
14. Prison Writers and the Black Arts Movement
Lee Bernstein
15. "To Make a Poet Black": Canonizing Puerto Rican Poets in the Black Arts Movement"
Michelle Joan Wilkinson
16. Latin Soul: Cross-Cultural Connections between the Black Arts
Movement and Pocho-Che
Rod Hernandez
17. Black Arts to Def Jam: Performing Black "Spirit Work" Across
Generations
Lorrie Smith
Afterword: "This Bridge Called "Our Tradition": Notes on Blueblack, 'Round'midnight, Blacklight Connection
Houston A. Baker, Jr.
Contributors
Index