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For nearly 50 years, a trend in African American literary history
quarantined the Black Arts era of the 1960s and 1970s, separating
it from the brilliantly creative and aesthetically experimental
writing that took off in the 1980s. According to that history, the
new literature discarded and distanced the anti-aesthetic posture
of the Black Arts moment which emphasized racial tension, strident
polemics, and romantic solidarity with the Black underclass. Yet
according to the author, the six novels that John Edgar Wideman
wrote from 1987 to 2017 complicate this reductive characterization
of the black arts. They overflow with the criminal element: accused
rapists and murderers; victims of unsanctioned lynching and
sanctioned executions. As they engage in aesthetic experimentation,
they express continuities with a spirit of restless invention and
improvisation that derive from an ongoing engagement with African
or Black Atlantic cosmology. They thus enable reassessment of the
black arts legacy, entering the world on their own terms, producing
their own reality, and working through the black arts notion of
functional art. They are the result of a magical Black Atlantic
craft that brings writing beyond written representation,
transforming the novel itself into a functional tool - a charm --
of protection and healing.
For nearly 50 years, a trend in African American literary history
quarantined the Black Arts era of the 1960s and 1970s, separating
it from the brilliantly creative and aesthetically experimental
writing that took off in the 1980s. According to that history, the
new literature discarded and distanced the anti-aesthetic posture
of the Black Arts moment which emphasized racial tension, strident
polemics, and romantic solidarity with the Black underclass. Yet
according to the author, the six novels that John Edgar Wideman
wrote from 1987 to 2017 complicate this reductive characterization
of the black arts. They overflow with the criminal element: accused
rapists and murderers; victims of unsanctioned lynching and
sanctioned executions. As they engage in aesthetic experimentation,
they express continuities with a spirit of restless invention and
improvisation that derive from an ongoing engagement with African
or Black Atlantic cosmology. They thus enable reassessment of the
black arts legacy, entering the world on their own terms, producing
their own reality, and working through the black arts notion of
functional art. They are the result of a magical Black Atlantic
craft that brings writing beyond written representation,
transforming the novel itself into a functional tool - a charm --
of protection and healing.
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