Description:
In the late 1960s and early 1970s, prominent figures in the Black Arts Movement (BAM) converted to Islam and took new names. Poets such as Amiri Baraka, Sonia Sanchez, Askia Muhammad Touré, and Marvin X incorporated Islamic words and expressions, references to the Qur'an, and Arabic script, as well as symbols like the crescent star and depictions of Islamic architecture and clothing. They connected places like Harlem, Chicago, Newark, and Oakland to locales in the Muslim world such as Timbuktu, Songhai, and Mecca. These artists also played a pivotal role in developing Black studies and creating alternatives to the Eurocentrism of the American educational system.
Ellen McLarney explores how BAM writers identified with Islam as integral to the African American cultural, spiritual, and intellectual heritage. Examining poetry, visual art, music, drama, and mixed-media collaborations, she traces the emergence of a new kind of Islamic art rooted in the African American experience. Their works protested scientific racism, police brutality, colonial domination, and economic oppression while resurrecting a suppressed Islamic past and sharing spiritual visions of a new kind of future. Based on interviews, fieldwork, archival research, and close analysis of key works, this book reveals how BAM redefined Black art, Islamic poetics, and Black Muslim aesthetics in the struggle for racial justice.Review Quotes: There is a rhythm to the Black Arts Movement that scholarship has too often missed. Black Arts, Black Muslims hears it in Islam--in spoken word and script; in sound, symbol, and gesture; in the ethical demands carried by art itself. With archival depth and critical grace, Ellen McLarney shows how Black writers and artists drew on Islamic traditions to contest racial violence, recover obscured pasts, and imagine otherwise futures. Attuned to inheritance as much as innovation, this book stands as a defining work on Black art, American Islam, and the long freedom struggle.--Zain Abdullah, author of Black Mecca: The African Muslims of Harlem