• "Spectacular Blackness is one of the sharpest discussions
of the Black Arts Movement, Black Power, and popular culture that
I have encountered. It is the best account of the cultural impact
of the Black Panther Party for Self-Defense that I have read." —James
Smethurst, University of Massachusetts, Amherst, author of The
Black Arts Movement: Literary Nationalism in the 1960s and 1970s
•"Spectacular Blackness is a most important contribution
to discussions in progress of the Black Arts Movement and the Black
Power era in general. From readings of Chester Himes and Richard
Wright to explications of Amiri Baraka and Melvin van Peebles, this
book will reward readers with a succession of carefully constructed
critiques. Spectacular Blackness is a model of what good
interdisciplinary study should look like." -- Aldon L. Nielsen,
Pennsylvania State University, author of Black Chant
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Spectacular Blackness:
The Cultural Politics of the Black Power Movement and the
Search for a Black Aesthetic |
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| Amy Abugo Ongiri |
| 240 pages, 6 x 9 |
| Cloth ISBN 978-0-8139-2859-3 • $55.00 |
| Paper ISBN 978-0-8139-2860-9 • $21.50 |
| December 2009 |
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Exploring the interface between the cultural politics of the Black Power and the Black Arts movements and the production of postwar African American popular culture, Amy Ongiri shows how the reliance of Black politics on an oppositional image of African Americans was the formative moment in the construction of "authentic blackness" as a cultural identity. While other books have adopted either a literary approach to the language, poetry, and arts of these movements or a historical analysis of them, Ongiri's captures the cultural and political interconnections of the postwar period by using an interdisciplinary methodology drawn from cinema studies and music theory. She traces the emergence of this Black aesthetic from its origin in the Black Power movement's emphasis on the creation of visual icons and the Black Arts movement's celebration of urban vernacular culture.
Amy Abugo Ongiri is Assistant Professor in the English Department and Film and Media Studies Program at the University of Florida.
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