60 for 60: Recent Black Literature—The Political Dimensions

By E.R. Pulgar

I recently got around to re-reading Robin Coste Lewis’s genius “Voyage of the Sable Venus.” As a poet interested in erasures and cut-ups, and as a queer Venezuelan immigrant deeply concerned with and invested in the liberation of every marginalized community, I was deeply moved by her project. To use the very language of oppressive art institutions, pamphlets, and works to weave the narrative of Black liberation and conceive of a future for the Black community that was forcibly taken to this country is something I held onto as I looked through Columbia Journal‘s archives, another institution that has regrettably done little in the way of publishing Black voices. I’m honored to work here at a pivotal moment, when the largest strike in the country is taking place on my campus and when the current editorial team at the Journal is making a conscious effort to elevate Black voices.

To this end, when it came time to choose a piece from our archives to highlight, it was a no-brainer to choose this crucial essay by Amiri Baraka on the political dimensions of the recent Black literature of the time. This essay, which appeared in the tenth issue of the Journal in 1986, covers the Black Arts movement—from the work of Frederick Douglass up to the ’80s at the height of the Black Liberation Movement and the Harlem Renaissance—through the lens of Marxist-Leninism, Feminism, and Nationalism. It’s a read that still feels fresh, one that we can interpret through the continued lens of struggle and solidarity. Black Lives Matter, have mattered, will matter in the future, and those of us who care to make this future possible must continue to uplift Black voices. In the words of Baraka, “it seems important even critical that we constantly reintroduce our classic literature to a mass black and multi-national audience.” Here, a drop in that ocean I long to see flourish.

Recent Black Literature—The Political Dimensions

(Nationalism, Marxism, Feminism)

Amiri Baraka


Generally, in any period of social and political upsurge there is an art and literature that reflects that upsurge. For the African American people there have been three major examples of this phenomenon. In the 19th century, between 1830 and the Civil War, there was a fantastic outpouring of literature, all pointing toward the intensification of conflict and raising of political consciousness that saw its resolution in the Civil War.

The Slave narratives, from the escaping slaves from the south, were actually the beginnings of African American literature, as a formal written genre, or body of work. The works of Frederick Douglass, Moses Roper, Linda Brent, The Krafts, Henry Bibb, William Wells Brown, H. “Box” Brown, Jacob Stroyer, and others were not only a formidable body of anti-slavery literature but the dazzling indication that indeed there was an African American nationality formed in the cauldron of slavery from the many African nationalities that were brought to the United States on slaves ships. A nationality with its own indigenous social and psychological development and with its own culture, albeit impossible without the overall American culture, just as the overall American culture was and is impossible without it.

There was also a literature produced during the period by the free blacks of the north, those revolutionary democrats like David Walker, Henry Highland Garnet, C.H. Langston that came out of the general thrust and agitation of the black convention movement and anti-slavery organizing of the more militant sector of the black abolitionist movement. So that both the Slave Narratives and the Black Abolitionist Literature, together, were a mighty attack on slavery as well as the consolidation of a native African American literature that must be read and understood if one wants to talk knowledgeably about 19th century American literature, along with the Melvilles and Whitmans.

Of course, by the time of the destruction of the Reconstruction, after the Civil War, much of this literature was out of print… purposefully so. And it was not until another social, political, and artistic upsurge, the Harlem Renaissance of the 20s, that this literature was raised in something like a general mass public way (See ‘The Negro Digs Up His Past” by Arthur Schomburg in Alain Locke’s The New Negro). But then that was  part  of  the Renaissance, a reawakening of the Black Liberation Movement (not that it had ever gone fully to sleep) from under  the pitiless attacks by the forces of white supremacy who systematically destroyed the revolutionary thrust and promise of the Civil War and Reconstruction by means of the terror, intimidation, and massacres of the white supremacy murder gang, the Ku Klux Klan, and then by a series of legal and quasi-legal statutes committed by local judiciaries and  the U.S. Supreme Court,  with the absolute collaboration of both the northern industrialists and bankers who now controlled the U.S. from Wall Street and the defeated Slavocrat ex-plantation owners who were now their compradors.

The glorious outpouring of Literature, Art, Music in the Renaissance was a reflection of the social and political movement of the people themselves. The same national democratic movement which characterizes the Black Liberation Movement at all times, now in a specific upsurge, was responsible for the construction of the Niagara Movement, Universal Negro Improvement Association, the African Blood Brotherhood, was also the same upsurge that the militant magazines, Messenger, Crusader, as well as the paintings, poetry, novels, sculpture, and music of that fantastic period. The Langston Hughes, Claude McKays, Zora Neale Hurstons, as well as the Aaron Douglases and Duke Ellingtons and the thousands of others, known and unknown, were all part of that enormous expression of a people in motion, from south to north, from rural to urban, from peasants to workers.

But by the thirties many of the signal works of that Renaissance were made obscure by a white capitalist controlled production process, partially disabled by the Great Depression, but also willing to dismiss the greatest creations of the African American people as a momentary, albeit profit-making, fad, as Langston Hughes said, ‘When Harlem was in vogue”!

The last such upsurge that we are discussing was, of course, in the 60s. The Black Arts Movement, was, in one reading, the reflection of the sharp explosion of the Black Liberation Movement. The writers and dramatists and musicians and painters did what they did in conscious and unconscious reflection of the sharpening of the African American National Liberation Struggle. The very fact that the arts movement was called the Black Arts Movement spoke to the rising level of national consciousness embodied not only in those works but the social and political movement itself.

These works also served, in the main, to further the goals of the social movement, just as the anti-slavery and Renaissance works had done. “Free jazz,” for instance and its focus on breaking the chordal chains of commercial music, was simply a parallel to the black struggle for freedom as a whole.

But the black art of the 60s, like the African American art of those previous movements, was by the late 70s out of print and intentionally obscured. For essentially the same reasons, the production process necessary to continue these works’ reproduction was largely in the hands of black people’s enemies who had published and recorded these works during the 60s, largely because of the mass black onslaught and also because they could make a profit.

But with the Black Liberation Movement in disarray by the late 70s as a result of its own internal contradictions (i.e., the lack of consistent scientific organization), attacks by the state which even killed maximum leaders like Malcolm X and Martin Luther King, and the lack of a multinational revolutionary party that could tie together and lead all of the mass democratic movements in this country- the art movement which had  reflected  and  at  the same time inspired this political upsurge was also less focused and less ubiquitous.

For their part the publishers now not only refused to keep in print the 60s works and authors but would not print many new works. Instead a great deal of the work they printed and authors they pushed had to reflect their own anti-militant stance. A non­-struggle art and literature began to be pushed almost exclusively in the same way that Booker T. Washington’s political line was promoted to sanction the destruction of the reconstruction, the 1882 ruling that the Civil Rights Act of 1875 was unconstitutional and separate but unequal.

A whole school of non-struggle, even anti-struggle, art and literature began to be trumpeted and the art and literature of the 60s was stigmatized as non-art simply because it was struggle oriented!

So that by the time Jimmy Carter was giving way to Ronald Reagan, there was a Negro art and literature that, incredibly enough, was just about as reactionary as they. Though obviously, this could never be the mainstream of African American art and literature, which is always in tune with the strivings of the black masses, more or less, but this was and to a great extent still is the work these white racist monopoly capitalist publishers push.

As a result of the reactionary social period the whole society is in, including a continuing push to the right by Ronald Reagan’s sector of the bourgeoisie, not only is there an outright  reactionary school of Negro literature being touted  as its most  refined sector, but an entire aura of opportunism and economism has developed in which many would-be famous artist aspirants oppose struggle oriented art as “non-art” so that they can get published or be abstractly displayed in prestigious galleries. In music, these types often either construct a soi-disant African American music that usually lacks the genuine emotional complexity of black popular music; i.e., blues (even though it might thump commercially or try to con us with fusion and even tail European concert music as its greyish consort).

As for the feminist perspective, in the last few years the bourgeoisie has attempted to lure the genuine popular movement against women’s oppression, by pushing its non-struggle bourgeois feminist wing (largely white and petty bourgeois) while ignoring its multinational and militant mainstream, and at the same time openly opposing even the ERA.

The bourgeoisie’s focus on the women’s movement is similar to their exploitation of the black movement. They will publish and produce a great deal of women’s literature for a very short period, maximize their profit, and when the present upsurge dies down (as it must without a genuine Marxist-Leninist party), almost cease publishing women’s movement literature altogether—and in a few years print almost exclusively only that “women’s literature” that opposes the genuine struggle for women’s rights.

At the same time they will give the most play, even now, to those bourgeois feminists who seek to split the women’s movement away from the whole of the democratic anti-imperialist movement of which it is an organic part.

In some ways it is like black nationalism of the 60s, which was but one part of the whole Black Liberation Movement. It was easier, for instance, for me to get works published when I was shouting “Hate Whitey” than when I had made an analysis that the only way to end racism and white supremacy was to organize the multinational working class into a revolutionary Marxist-Leninist Communist party and smash white racist monopoly capitalism forever.

So, too, it is much easier for bourgeois feminists who think men are the enemy to get published, etc., than for those women activists who understand that the material or economic base of male chauvinism and women’s oppression is the system of white racist monopoly capitalism.

So, too, it is much easier for bourgeois feminists who think men are the enemy to get published, etc., than for those women activists who understand that the material or economic base of male chauvinism and women’s oppression is the system of white racist monopoly capitalism.

However, it seems to me that there has been a gradual sorting out and realignment of important forces throughout all sectors of the anti-imperialist movement in this society—perhaps in reaction to the fierce forced march to the far right led by the actor, Reagan.

 There are signs of reorganization, new organization, and reawakened militancy in the general social movement as well as among artists and cultural workers.

Certainly, the violent class struggles of the middle and late 70s that seemed to split the movement were inevitable. For instance, the polarization between the nationalist and new Marxist sectors of the movement. Neither of these sectors constitute the majority of the Black Liberation Movement, which is made up, in the main, of black workers struggling for democracy and self-determination. And obviously it will be this black majority that determines which of those other sectors is most correct and actually has the workers’ interests in mind.

As a Marxist-Leninist it is my view that the black nationalist perspective that could ignite a mass movement, as in the 60s, is already past. The grim spectacles of the various Arap Moi’s in Kenya, or Mobutu’s in Zaire and the various black nationalist and domestic capitalist states of Africa and West India have already informed the most advanced elements in the Black Liberation Movement of the backwardness and anti-majority line such a warped self determination as black capitalist state in the U.S. would become.

Although it is critical that nationalists and Marxists work together in consciously coordinated united fronts of resistance to white racist monopoly capitalism, along with all the other ideologies, political tendencies, organizations, and individuals who can oppose black national oppression and fight for democracy and self determination.

Among artists and cultural workers, there also seems to be a general realignment and regrouping, the very beginnings of a new movement. All over the country there are new organizations and new publications reflecting this political and social motion. Among groups involving black artists, The Black Writers Union, Calabash, National Association of Third World Writers, Metamorphosis, Newark Artists Collective, Southern Collective of Afro American Writers are some groups I know recently formed. There are many more.

Among other nationalities, such as Asians, Latinos, Haitians, there are similar groups recently formed and multi-national arts organizations as well.

The huge writers’ conference held in New York two years ago, sponsored by The Nation magazine, witnessed the desire by thousands of American writers of all nationalities to organize and struggle.

Many of the newer writers and even those who emerged in earlier periods have a distinctly anti-imperialist and progressive tone, despite the reactionary cast of the time. In all of these movements and organizations just mentioned, while there are nationalists, Marxists, and feminists, the great majority would not submit to being defined as any of these. As I said, to characterize the Black Liberation Movement, the majority of artists and cultural workers see themselves as fighting for democracy and objectively are anti­imperialists.

For the Black Liberation Movement, and specifically its Black Arts component, it seems important even critical that we constantly reintroduce our classic literature to a mass black and multi-national audience. The Slave Narratives, free black revolutionary democratic writers of the 19th century, DuBois and the Black Renaissance writers, the writers of the 60s Black Arts Movement, as well as all the other progressive giants of our literature must be constantly rediscovered and reinvoked since we are mainly still without our own institutions to teach and learn from our own cultural development. For this reason too many black would-be intellectuals are semi-literate when it comes to African American literature or art and most other nationalities as well.

The question of building black institutions is still a relevant issue, but it must be placed on the agenda of a functioning national black united front [not a single organization] but a consciously coordinated relationship of unity and struggle among widely diverse organizations and ideologies among the Black Liberation Movement to fight for democracy and self-determination.

This struggle for black institutions must be part of the overall struggle for democracy in which the black masses struggle for access to and control of those U.S. institutions which we have helped create with our tax money and our labor.

But finally the production of the great mass of our writing and art must be a function of the struggle for democracy and self determination itself, which ultimately can only come into full being by means of revolution and social change.

About the author:

E.R. Pulgar is a Venezuelan American poet, translator, and critic based in Harlem. Their criticism has appeared in i-D, Rolling Stone, Playboy, and elsewhere. Their poems have appeared in PANK Magazine and b l u s h. They are an MFA candidate in poetry and literary translation at Columbia University, and serve as the Online Poetry Editor of the Columbia Journal. Born in Caracas and raised in Miami, they live in New York City.