Description
Book SynopsisTrade Review"Fenderson traces the rise and fall of Black Arts Movement through Fuller's professional and personal endeavors and elucidates the larger implications of the movement through the microcosm of Fuller and his environs. Fenderson convincingly contends that Fuller should take his rightful place in the scholarship as a pivotal intellectual architect who helped build the artistic component of the Black power movement." --
Journal of American History"
Building the Black Arts Movement is both thoroughly researched and beautifully written with a sharp class and gender analysis. As such, it will reshape how historians approach this movement and its historical actors." --
Journal of African American History"Fenderson succeeds in challenging readers to rethink Fuller's times by presenting a counternarrative to the oftentimes overly harmonious representation of Black social movements in the United States." --
Journal of Folklore Research"Jonathan Fenderson’s book is a masterwork of African American intellectual and cultural history, bringing to light a man whose name should be mentioned more often in the histories of contemporary America." --
Society for U.S. Intellectual History"Very powerfully and marvelously written--a page turner. Fenderson's book is bound to reach a wide audience with this mastery of narrative and exposition. Indeed, I don't think that the story of the Black Arts Movement has been told in such a sweeping narrative of that era."--Komozi Woodard, author of A Nation within a Nation: Amiri Baraka (LeRoi Jones) and Black Power Politics
"Jonathan Fenderson's Building the Black Arts Movement is a brilliant study of one of the key figures of the Black Arts and Black Power movements. Fenderson's account of Fuller is also a history of Black Arts and Black Power in Chicago that in turn illuminates the ideological, aesthetic, and institutional development of black political and cultural radicalism in the 1960s and 1970s."--James Smethurst, author of The Black Arts Movement: Literary Nationalism in the 1960s and 1970s
