Building the Black Arts Movement: Hoyt Fuller and the Cultural Politics of the 1960s

by Jonathan Fenderson

Overview

As both an activist and the dynamic editor of Negro Digest, Hoyt W. Fuller stood at the nexus of the Black Arts Movement and the broader black cultural politics of his time. Jonathan Fenderson uses historical snapshots of Fuller's life and achievements to rethink the period and establish Fuller's important role in laying the foundation for the movement. In telling Fuller's story, Fenderson provides provocative new insights into the movement's international dimensions, the ways the movement took shape at the local level, the impact of race and other factors, and the challenges—corporate, political, and personal—that Fuller and others faced in trying to build black institutions. An innovative study that approaches the movement from a historical perspective, Building the Black Arts Movement is a much-needed reassessment of the trajectory of African American culture over two explosive decades.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780252084225
Publisher:	University of Illinois Press
Publication date:	03/30/2019
Series:	New Black Studies Series
Edition description:	1st Edition
Pages:	280
Sales rank:	1,092,938
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 8.90(h) x 0.80(d)

About the Author

Jonathan Fenderson is an assistant professor of African and African American studies at Washington University in St. Louis.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments ix

Introduction: A Movement Architect 1

1 Designing the Future: Black in a Negro Company 17

2 A Local Construction Site: OB AC, Chicago, and the Black Aesthetic 55

3 Expansion Plans: Asymmetries of Pan-African Power 91

4 Scaling Back: Closure, Crisis, and Counterrevolutionary Times 119

5 Abandoning the Past: Effacing History and Confronting Silence 147

Coda Maintenance, Reconstruction, and Demolition: Contests for Black Creative Control 171

Notes 183

Bibliography 227

Index 245

Editorial Reviews

"Fenderson traces the rise and fall of Black Arts Movement through Fuller's professional and personal endeavors and elucidates the larger implications of the movement through the microcosm of Fuller and his environs. Fenderson convincingly contends that Fuller should take his rightful place in the scholarship as a pivotal intellectual architect who helped build the artistic component of the Black power movement." —Journal of American History


"Building the Black Arts Movement is both thoroughly researched and beautifully written with a sharp class and gender analysis. As such, it will reshape how historians approach this movement and its historical actors." —Journal of African American History

"Fenderson succeeds in challenging readers to rethink Fuller's times by presenting a counternarrative to the oftentimes overly harmonious representation of Black social movements in the United States." —Journal of Folklore Research

"Jonathan Fenderson’s book is a masterwork of African American intellectual and cultural history, bringing to light a man whose name should be mentioned more often in the histories of contemporary America." —Society for U.S. Intellectual History

"Very powerfully and marvelously written—a page turner. Fenderson's book is bound to reach a wide audience with this mastery of narrative and exposition. Indeed, I don't think that the story of the Black Arts Movement has been told in such a sweeping narrative of that era."—Komozi Woodard, author of A Nation within a Nation: Amiri Baraka (LeRoi Jones) and Black Power Politics

​"Jonathan Fenderson's Building the Black Arts Movement is a brilliant study of one of the key figures of the Black Arts and Black Power movements. Fenderson's account of Fuller is also a history of Black Arts and Black Power in Chicago that in turn illuminates the ideological, aesthetic, and institutional development of black political and cultural radicalism in the 1960s and 1970s."—James Smethurst, author of The Black Arts Movement: Literary Nationalism in the 1960s and 1970s

From the Publisher