Anthologies of African American Writing

Black Aesthetic

"The Black Aesthetic.” Ed. Addison Gayle, Jr. Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1971. xxiv+432 pp.

● Introduction

I / Theory
● Hoyt W. Fuller / Introduction: Towards a Black Aesthetic
● Larry Neal / Some Reflections on the Black Aesthetic
● Alain Locke / Negro Youth Speaks
● Julian Mayfield / You Touch my Black Aesthetic and I'll Touch Yours
● Ron Karenga / Black Cultural Nationalism
● Addison Gayle Jr. / Cultural Strangulation: Black Literature and the White Aesthetic
● John O’Neal / Black Arts: Notebook
● Darwin T. Turner / Afro-American Literary Critics: An Introduction

II / Music
● Jimmy Stewart / Introduction to Black Aesthetics in Music
● W.E.B. DuBois / Of the Sorrow Songs
● J.A. Rogers / Jazz at Home
● Leroi Jones / The Changing Same (R & B and New Black Music)
● Ron Wellburn / The Black Aesthetic Imperative
● Leslie B. Rout, Jr. / Reflections on the Evolution of Post-War Jazz
● Ortiz M. Walton / A Comparative Analysis of the African and the Western Aesthetics

III / Poetry
● Langston Hughes / Introduction: The Negro Artist and the Racial Mountain
● Sarah Webster Fabio / Tripping with Black Writing
● James A. Emanuel / Blackness Can: A Quest for Aesthetics
● Dudley Randall / The Black Aesthetic in the Thirties, Forties, and Fifties
● Don L. Lee / Toward a Definition: Black Poetry of the Sixties (After LeRoi Jones)
● W. Keorapetse Kgositsile / Paths to the Future

IV / Drama
● Alain Locke / Introduction: The Negro and the American Theatre (1927)
● Larry Neal / The Black Arts Movement
● Loften Mitchell / I Work Here to Please You
● Ronald Milner / Black Theater - Go Home
● Clayton Riley / On Black Theater

V / Fiction
● Richard Wright / Introduction: Blueprint for Negro Writing
● Hoyt W. Fuller / The New Black Literature: Protest or Affirmation
● Carolyn F. Gerald / The Black Writer and His Role
● John Oliver Killens / The Black Writer Vis-á-Vis His Country
● Adam David Miller / Some Observations on a Black Aesthetic
● Ishmael Reed / Can a Metronome Know the Thunder or Summon a God?
● Addison Gayle, Jr. / The Function of Black Literature at the Present Time

● Biographies
● Index

• n/a

• This influential collection included sections on Theory, Music, Poetry, Drama, Fiction, and Art: "No one can understand the African-American arts in the late 1960s and early 1970s without reading this book" (Kinnamon 1997: 478).

Kinnamon 1997: 478

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