Abstract
In his poem “Return of the Native,” Amiri Baraka describes the urban area of Harlem as “violent and transforming.”1 The same could be said of the 1960s Black Aesthetic, the artistic arm of the Black Arts Movement, and its impact on the way we perceive ethnic urban experiences. While the Black Aesthetic seeks to destroy a homogenous American culture and celebrate black culture, it also appeals to Asian Americans, changing the way they thought of their own ethnic culture. For both groups, the Black Aesthetic represents an urban aesthetic of cultural production. While other black aesthetics have supplanted the 1960s Black Aesthetic, contemporary African American writers like Ishmael Reed and Chinese American writers like Frank Chin continue to utilize elements of the Black Aesthetic in their work. Their use demonstrates not only the saliency of the Black Aesthetic, but also its inadequacy in relation to certain contemporary realities.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution.
Buying options
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Learn about institutional subscriptionsPreview
Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.
Notes
Amiri Baraka, “Return of the Native,” in The LeRoi Jones/Amiri Baraka Reader, edited by William J. Harris (New York: Thunder’s Mouth Press, 1991) 217.
Robin D.G. Kelley, Yo’ Mama’s Disfunktional!: Fighting the Culture Wars in Urban America (Boston, MA: Beacon Press, 1997) 22–23.
Patricia Morton, Disfigured Images: The Historical Assault on Afro-American Women (Westport, CT: Praeger, 1991) 80.
Vijay Prashad, Everybody Was Kung Fu Fighting: Afro-Asian Connections and the Myth of Cultural Unity (Boston, MA: Beacon Press, 2001) 137.
Robin Kelley, Freedom Dreams: The Black Radical Imagination (Boston, MA: Beacon Press, 2002) 68.
Fred Ho, “Fists for Revolution: The Revolutionary History of I Wor Kuen/League of Revolutionary Struggle,” in Legacy to Liberation: Politics and Culture and Revolutionary Asian Pacific America, edited by Fred Ho (New York: Big Red Media, Inc., 2000) 6.
Lawrence R. Rodgers, Canaan Bound: The African-American Great Migration Novel (Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press, 1997) 11.
Sucheng Chan, Asian Americans: An Interpretative History (New York: Twayne Publishers, 1991) 47.
Ronald Takaki, Strangers From a Different Shore: A History of Asian Americans (New York: Penguin, 1990) 239.
Jack M. Bloom, “Ghetto Revolts, Black Power, and the Limits of the Civil Rights Coalition,” in The American Civil Rights Movement Readings and Interpretations, edited by Raymond DAngelo (New York: McGraw-Hill, 2001) 383.
William Wei, The Asian American Movement (Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press, 1993), 13.
Harvard Sitkoff, The Struggle for Black Equality, rev. ed. (Canada: HarperCollins, 1993), 164.
Angelyn Mitchell, “Introduction: Voices Within the Circle: A Historical Overview of African American Literary Criticism,” in Within the Circle: An Anthology of African American Literary Criticism from the Harlem Renaissance to the Present, edited by Angelyn Mitchell (Durham: Duke University Press, 1994) 8–9.
Larry Neal, “The Black Arts Movement,” in Within the Circle, edited by Angelyn Mitchell (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1994) 186.
Hoyt Fuller, “The New Black Literature: Protest or Affirmation,” in The Black Aesthetic, edited by Addison Gayle, Jr. (Garden City: Anchor Books, 1972) 337.
Lisa Lowe, Immigrant Acts: On Asian American Cultural Politics (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1996) 9.
Ishmael Reed, Japanese by Spring (New York: Penguin Books, 1996) 125.
Frank Chin, Gunga Din Highway (Minneapolis, MN: Coffee House Press, 1994) 261.
Jeffrey Paul Chan, Frank Chin, Lawson Inada, and Shawn Wong, “An Introduction to Chinese-American and Japanese-American Literatures,” in Three American Literatures, edited by Houston Baker (New York: MLA, 1982) 208.
Robert Hill, ed., The FBI’s RACON: Racial Conditions in America During World War II (Boston, MA: Northeastern University Press, 1995) 512.
Ernest Allen, “Waiting for Tojo: The Pro-Japan Vigil of Black Missourians, 1932–1943,” Gateway Heritage 16, 2 ( 1995): 43.
Ian Harris, Messages Men Hear: Constructing Masculinities (London: Taylor & Francis, 1995) 18.
Janet Helms, “An Update on Helm’s White and People of Color Racial Identity Models,” in Handbook of Multicultural Counseling, edited by Joseph G. Ponterotto (Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications, 1995) 184.
Amiri Baraka, “State/meant,” in The Leroi Jones/Amiri Baraka Reader, ed. William J. Harris (New York: Thunder’s Mouth Press, 1989) 169.
Frank Chin, “Confessions of a Chinatown Cowboy,” in Bulletproof Buddhists and Other Essays (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 1998) 67.
Richard Major and Janet Billson, Cool Pose: The Dilemmas of Black Manhood in America (New York: Lexington Books, 1992) 4.
Frank Wu, Yellow: Race in America Beyond Black and White (New York: Basic Books, 2002) 66.
Houston Baker, Jr., Blues, Ideology, and Afro-American Literature: A Vernacular Theory (Chicago, IL: The University of Chicago Press, 1984) 83.
Copyright information
© 2006 Gayle T. Tate and Lewis A. Randolph
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Anderson, C.S. (2006). Panthers and Dragons On the Page: The Afro-Asian Dynamic in the Black Aesthetic. In: The Black Urban Community. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-73572-3_25
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-73572-3_25
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, New York
Print ISBN: 978-1-4039-7068-8
Online ISBN: 978-1-349-73572-3
eBook Packages: Palgrave History CollectionHistory (R0)