Ep 35: "Black Is Beautiful!": The Black Aesthetic and The Black Arts Movement, 1965-1975

Black is beautiful is not a slogan alone, but a summons, a call to consciousness, a chorus of reclamation rising from a people long told to doubt their own reflection. In this episode, Dr. Reiland Rabaka explores the Black Arts Movement, 1965 to 1975, a decade when art was insurgent and imagination was organized, when poetry marched and music mobilized, when theater testified and painting proclaimed. This was a time when culture did not trail politics. Culture led politics, setting the terms, shaping the language, sounding the future. The story of the Black Arts Movement does not begin in 1965. It begins earlier in the Harlem Renaissance, where Black artists first insisted that Black life was worthy of its own forms, languages, and light. By the 1960s, into the breach left by persistent inequality stepped the Black Power Movement, a call for self-determination, community control, and cultural pride. Alongside it rose the Black Arts Movement, the aesthetic arm of the Black Power Movement. If the Harlem Renaissance asked, "Who are we in modern America?" the Black Arts Movement answered, "We are what we make, and we will make it Black, bold, and beautiful." Dr. Rabaka examines the Black Aesthetic as a constellation of commitments that insisted Black art must emerge from Black experience, speak to Black communities, and serve Black liberation. It rejected the demand to conform to Eurocentric standards of beauty and embraced art for the people's necessity. The Black Aesthetic said: our rhythms are valid, our language is literature, our bodies are sites of knowledge, our communities are audiences and authors alike. It was both critique of a world that devalues Black life and creation of forms that revalue it. See all show notes and the special playlist on our website.