Black Power and the Literature of Slavery
This essay examines representations of slavery produced during the peak of the Black Power movement, across a range of fields, including historiography, psychology, political analysis, theater, fiction, popular film, and literary and cultural criticism. Focusing on a cohesive body of work informed by the Black Arts Movement (by writers such as Amiri Baraka, Ronald Fair, Blyden Jackson, John Oliver Killens, Loften Mitchell, Joseph Walker, and John A. Williams) that is largely missing from the canon of post-civil rights literature about slavery, the essay argues that the formal innovations of these literary texts, such as speculative devices of temporal simultaneity and depersonalized modes of characterization, were directly sparked by Black Power discourses of psychological, political, and historical transformation.
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