New Day in Babylon: he Black Power Movement and American Culture, 1965-1975

by William L. Van Deburg

Overview

The most comprehensive account available of the rise and fall of the Black Power Movement and of its dramatic transformation of both African-American and larger American culture. With a gift for storytelling and an ear for street talk, William Van Deburg chronicles a decade of deep change, from the armed struggles of the Black Panther party to the cultural nationalism of artists and writers creating a new aesthetic. Van Deburg contends that although its tactical gains were sometimes short-lived, the Black Power movement did succeed in making a revolution—one in culture and consciousness—that has changed the context of race in America.

"New Day in Babylon is an extremely intelligent synthesis, a densely textured evocation of one of American history's most revolutionary transformations in ethnic group consciousness."—Bob Blauner, New York Times

Winner of the Gustavus Myers Center Outstanding Book Award, 1993

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780226172354
Publisher:	University of Chicago Press
Publication date:	09/01/1993
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	250
File size:	22 MB
Note:	This product may take a few minutes to download.

About the Author

Please fill in author biography

Table of Contents

Preface
Introduction: A Black Power Paradigm
1. What Is "Black Power"?
2. Precursors and Preconditions: Why Was There a Black Power Movement?
3. Who Were the "Militants"?
Black Power on Campus
Black Power in Sports
Black Power and Labor
Black Power and "Total Institutions"
4. The Ideologies of Black Power
Pluralism
Nationalism
5. Black Power in Afro-American Culture: Folk Expressions
Soul Style
Soul Music
Soul Talk
Soulful Tales
Soul Theology
6. Black Power and American Culture: Literary and Performing Arts
Defining "Whitey"
Identifying "Toms"
Understanding Black History
Achieving Liberation
Conclusion: Whatever Happened to Black Power?
Notes
Index

Editorial Reviews

Van Deburg (Afro-American studies, U. of Wisconsin, Madison) does a great service by documenting and interpreting a decade of deep change. Those who seek a course for the future would do well to study the voices of that period's political and cultural explosion. Annotation c. Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com)

Booknews

Van Deburg, who teaches African American studies at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, presents the U.S. Black Power movement as "a revolutionary cultural concept . . . [which encouraged] black Americans . . . [to] define and establish their own values while rejecting the cultural prescriptions of their oppressors." With Malcolm X as "a Black Power paradigm," young activists disillusioned with integration and nonviolence and seeking a solid basis for African American self-esteem and unity made new demands: on campus, in sports, within the labor movement, and inside "total institutions" like prisons and the armed forces. Van Deburg outlines the competition between pluralism and nationalism for ideological dominance and the ways the new movement found expression in "the visual, linguistic, and culinary arts, [as well as in] folklore, music, and religion." He discusses the impact of black culture on the nation's literary and artistic culture. In its insistence that "the Black Power movement brought irrevocable changes in Afro-Americans' attitudes both about themselves and about the legitimacy of the white world order," "New Day in Babylon" is a well-written, well-documented corrective to studies that concentrate exclusively on the movement's limited political and economic gains.

Mary Carroll