Abstract:

The epigraph from Barbara Christian’s groundbreaking essay “The Race for Theory” 1987 articulates one of the most potent charges against the Black Arts Movement aestheticians levied by a contemporary black woman literary scholar and writer. This is a charge that has been revisited thoroughly by other critics such as Cherise A. Pollard, Carmen Phelps, Cheryl Clarke, and Lorenzo Thomas, to name a few.1 These critics have interrogated the separatist and nationalist ideology of the Black Arts Movement, and the movement’s concerns with developing a black aesthetic and nation. Readers are reminded that this ideology was so pre- and pro-scriptive that it limited the full participation of writers whose creative, political, social, and sexual agendas did not toe the ideological lines.

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