Uncovering the Black Fantastic in Black Body Politics

Abstract

When Richard Iton insists that the words “black fantastic” are redundant, he offers a lucid way of breaking the boundaries between the political mobilizations of blackness and the cultural and performative mobilizations of blackness. This article uncovers the role of the black fantastic in the 1960s and '70s Black Arts Movement. I show that the movement's investment in “natural black beauty” was often inseparable from powerful, fantastic performances of the “unnatural.” The article reconsiders the Black Arts Movement's relation to contemporaneous black popular culture entertainers, such as Diana Ross, and the 21st-century performances of Erykah Badu.

Keywords:

• afrofuturism
• black nationalism
• natural black beauty
• the Black Fantastic

Notes

Color versions of one or more of the figures in the article can be found online at www.tandfonline.com/usou.

Richard Iton, In Search of the Black Fantastic: Politics and Popular Culture in the Post-Civil Rights Era (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), 289–290.

Haki Madhubuti, Groundwork: New and Selected Poems, Don L. Lee/Haki R. Madhubuti (Chicago: Third World Press, 1996), 84.

Baraka writes, “My own wife, who met me in what appeared to be the dying days of my bohemianism, really had got to me when that bohemianism had changed its color. It is my contention that much of the cultural nationalism young people fervently believe is critically important to the struggle is just a form of black bohemianism.” Amiri Baraka, The Autobiography of LeRoi Jones (Chicago: Lawrence Hill Books, 1997), 424–425.

In an editorial entitled “Mod, Modish and Militant: Keeping on Top of the Scene,” in a 1970 issue of Black World, the editor Hoyt Fuller directly engages both the problem and usefulness of play and performance in the BAM. He writes, “For some people, game-playing is a full-time preoccupation …. But the Black Revolution is not a game. Nor are the legitimate aims of the Black Revolution served by assorted poseurs and hustlers playing revolution. Across the country, a small but determined body of black men and women are dedicating their energies—and, in many cases, their lives—to the task of liberating black people from the psychological shackles which have rendered them powerless for centuries.”

In 1997, Lydia Ann Douglas directed the documentary Nappy.

Julia Fields, “I Loves a Wig,” Black World (February 1975), 47.

Ahmed Alhamisi and Harun Kofi Wangaga, eds., Black Arts (Detroit: Black Arts Publications, 1969), 19–20.

Imamu Amiri Baraka and Billy Abernathy. In Our Terribleness (Some Elements and Meaning in Black Style) (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1970). This text is unpaginated.

In In Search of the Black Fantastic, Iton writes, “In other words, my reference to a black fantastic is to some degree a pleonasm or, to borrow from Zora Neale Hurston's anthropologies of negro syntax, a double descriptive: separately and in tandem, blackness and the fantastic work to disrupt the bodily imperialisms of the colonial and corrupt the related, innocent representations of the modern” (290).

Amiri Baraka, Black Music (New York: De Capo Press, 1998 [1968]), 211.

Langston Hughes, “Dream Variation,” in Voices from the Harlem Renaissance, ed. Nathan Irvin Huggins (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995), 358.

Baraka, In Our Terribleness.

Eleanor Traylor, Keynote at Don't Say Goodbye to the Porkpie Hat: Larry Neal conference (2006, Brooklyn College).

In The Erotic Life of Racism, Sharon Holland considers the performances of race that make white people occupy time and black people occupy space.

Julia Fields, “Art, ” Black World (February 1975), 46.

Ibid.

Amiri Baraka, Tales of the Out & Gone (New York: Akashic Books, 2007), 132.

Larry Neal, “Some Reflections on the Black Aesthetic,” in African American Literary Theory, ed. Winston Napier (New York & London: New York University Press, 2000), 89–91.

Toni Morrison, Paradise (New York: Penguin, 1997), 119.

Fred Moten made this statement, during the “Black Popular Culture” panel, at the May 2014 “Feeling the Black Fantastic” symposium at Northwestern University.

Don L. Lee (Haki Madhubuti), Directionscore: Selected and New Poems (Detroit: Broadside Press, 1971), 88–90.

Baraka, Black Music, 25.