Sunday, April 25, 2010

post3

Larry Neal's maifesto, "The Black Arts Movement" is an attempt to link black artworks to the social and political movements going on in the late 1960's. Neal calls for writings that inspire the community and their efforts with an emphasis on a positive interaction between aesthetics and ethics. He sees art in politics as well as political art, he doesn't want them to be separated, but rather intertwined among each other.
This manifesto was published in the summer of 1968, which was a tumultuous time in American history. 1968 was the climax of America's civil rights movement. Lyndon Baines Johnson is the president of the United States of America, but primaries and conventions are ongoing because it is an election year. 549,500 American soldiers are stationed in Vietnam at war. April 1968 civil rights leader Martin Luther King Jr. is assassinated. Riots break out all over the country. Robert Kennedy was murdered in June. All of these monumental events probably influenced Larry Neal's manifesto. He call to unite the community through arts and hopefully political interest, is sort of a way to heal the black community of the wounds they suffered that summer.

2 comments:

  1. Good connections - but! Freedom Summer and the MFDP were in 1964. By the 1968 convention, young whites were also rebelling against the democratic party because of their position on the war.

    Are there places in the essay that particularly resonate with these events?

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  2. True! I wrongly assumed the conventions were the same, but LBJ didn't end up running in '68. I was mixed up with the Kennedy assassinations. Oops.
    With all of the violence and upheaval going on with the masses in America up to the summer of 1968, Neal's audience probably needed a manifesto. The road America was taking at the time was why Neal referred to American or white aesthetics as part of a decaying Western civilization. He also said if black art and aesthetics were linked with their ethics, which white aesthetics lack, their community and purpose would be moved in a more positive direction.

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