Department of English

Black Post-Blackness: The Black Arts Movement and Twenty-First Century Aesthetics, published in The New Black Studies Series of University of Illinois Press (2017), compares the black avant-garde of the 1960s and 70s Black Arts movement and some of the most innovative spins of 21st century black aesthetics. Black Arts movement writers and visual artists are compared to a wide range of African American visual artists and writers who are at the forefront of 21st century black aesthetics. She shows that the mood of the 1970s “second wave” of the Black Arts movement is as “black post-black” as the cultural mood of 21st century black aesthetics. 

Editorial Reviews

"Black Post-Blackness moves rigorously with and against the grain of the most important work in black studies and performance studies, thereby joining it. In showing how blackness is unexhausted by the question of identity, Margo Natalie Crawford keeps its study on new, constantly renewed, persistently renewable footing."--Fred Moten, author of In the Break: The Aesthetics of the Black Radical Tradition

"An original and very important contribution to African American Studies, American literature, and African American thought. Eloquent, exciting to read, as energetic as its subject matter."--Farah Jasmine Griffin, author of Harlem Nocturne: Women Artists and Progressive Politics During World War II

"In our putatively post-racial America, nothing can bring race racing back more quickly than a discussion of post-blackness. 'Your post-black ain't like mine' isn't the title of any song, but perhaps should be. Margo Natalie Crawford coins the term, then assays the coinage. With a deep, scholarly assurance, she revisits misunderstood moments of the Black Aesthetic Movement, limning a poetics of anticipation that tells us so much about our present."--Aldon Lynn Nielsen, author of Integral Music: Languages of African American Innovation

Black Post-Blackness: The Black Arts Movement and Twenty-First-Century Aesthetics