Description
Book SynopsisThis study argues that American artistry in the 1960s can be understood as one of the most vital and compelling interrogations of modernity. The author posits that the legacy of slavery has made African-Americans among the most incisive critics and celebrants of the "Enlightenment inheritance".
Trade ReviewThe Harlem Renaissance and the Black Arts movement are celebrated as critical moments of racial nationalism and cultural awakening. Questioning the critical consensus about this narrative, however, James Hall reframe[s] these two literary periods in light of transnational and anti-modernist paradigms ... provocative [study] disturbing to our common sense about these seminal eras. * American Literature *
Hall deftly restores a fuller voice to sixties artists too often straightjacketed within an obligatory hermeneutics of racial protest. * American Literature *
James C. Hall invites us to revise our thinking about the 1960s in this thoughtful and generative study of the extraordinary efflorescence of poetry, fiction, autobiography, music, and painting that emerged out of that decade's African American freedom movement ... thoughtful, subtle, and persuasive. * The Journal of American History *
