Black Arts, Black Muslims - (Black Lives in the Diaspora: Past / Present / Future) by Ellen McLarney

Book Synopsis

In the late 1960s and early 1970s, prominent figures in the Black Arts Movement (BAM) converted to Islam and took new names. Poets such as Amiri Baraka, Sonia Sanchez, Askia Muhammad Touré, and Marvin X incorporated Islamic words and expressions, references to the Qur'an, and Arabic script, as well as symbols like the crescent star and depictions of Islamic architecture and clothing. They connected places like Harlem, Chicago, Newark, and Oakland to locales in the Muslim world such as Timbuktu, Songhai, and Mecca. These artists also played a pivotal role in developing Black studies and creating alternatives to the Eurocentrism of the American educational system.

Ellen McLarney explores how BAM writers identified with Islam as integral to the African American cultural, spiritual, and intellectual heritage. Examining poetry, visual art, music, drama, and mixed-media collaborations, she traces the emergence of a new kind of Islamic art rooted in the African American experience. Their works protested scientific racism, police brutality, colonial domination, and economic oppression while resurrecting a suppressed Islamic past and sharing spiritual visions of a new kind of future. Based on interviews, fieldwork, archival research, and close analysis of key works, this book reveals how BAM redefined Black art, Islamic poetics, and Black Muslim aesthetics in the struggle for racial justice.

Review Quotes

In Black Arts, Black Muslims, Ellen McLarney uniquely and adeptly places multiple versions and interpretations of Islam, and self-identified Muslims, at the core of the Black Arts Movement and related movements. All future scholarship on not just the Black Arts Movement, but also on Black Studies and Black Power, will have to contend with Black Arts, Black Muslims.--Michael O. West, coeditor of From Toussaint to Tupac: The Black International SInce the Age of Revolution

About the Author

Ellen McLarney is associate professor of Middle East, Arabic, and African and African American studies at Duke University. She led a project on Muslim American poets and musicians of African descent with the Doris Duke Foundation for Islamic Art as well as an initiative on Islam and racial justice in the American South. She has also published in Souls, The Black Scholar, and Black Perspectives.