History in the Making

All politics aside, I find the Occupy movement fascinating.  How can historians in the future not look back on these events as an age of shifting twenty-first-century cultural paradigms?  In addition to the Tea Party movement and the Arab Spring, it's been awesome to witness the role of social media networks in contemporary political and social grassroots revolutions.

This article by Michele Elam provides some insightful commentary on the relationship between art and Occupy Wall Street specifically.  Below is the Occupy Wall Street invitation Elam discusses--the image was designed by Shepard Fairey, the same artist who gave us the infamous "Hope" poster for Obama's 2008 presidential campaign--and some highlights from the op-ed.

• "Occupy art might just be the movement's most politically potent tool in its dramatic reframing of the racial dynamics of a populist uprising frequently characterized as largely white and 'hippie.'"
• "The poster's retro look recalls a militant past, almost startling in our new millennial moment, and surely is meant as a challenge to the idea that as a society we are anywhere near 'post-race' enlightenment."
• "Imagine its even more revolutionary effect as a poster carried by people of all backgrounds and social position, symbolically calling for a pan-ethnic alliance."
• "But 'You Are Invited' is powerful precisely because it invites identification with this long history of marginalized people striving for social and economic equity, however imperfect and unfinished those efforts."
• "Let the Occupy movement's camps and protests and marches continue generating such art -- art that inspires interracial unity where it may not yet exist, art that reminds us of the voices unheard, art that galvanizes practical social change when nothing seems to give, art that, in Du Bois' words, tries to make the world both beautiful and right."

If you find this interesting, you may also enjoy this earlier post about the Black Power and Black Arts movements.

Black Power and the Arts, Yesterday and Today

This summer I took an African Amerian Lit course, and I was particularly fascinated by the Black Arts Movement.  The movement, as the Norton puts it, aimed "to create works that would be--in the words of Maulana Karenga--'functional, collective, and committing.'  Hence, the Black Arts of the 1960s proposed to create politically engaged expression as a corollary to the new black spirit of the decade."

Amiri Baraka is one of the most recognized Black Arts writers, and his poem "Black Art" gets at the heart of the period, I think.  Here are a few excerpts:

Poems are bullshit unless they are
teeth or trees or lemons piled
on a step.  Or black ladies dying
of men leaving nickel hearts
beating them down.
...
Assassin poems, Poems that shoot
guns.  Poems that wrestle cops into alleys
and take their weapons leaving them dead
with tongues pulled out and sent to Ireland.
...
Let there be no love poems written
until love can exist freely and
cleanly.  Let Black People understand
that they are the lovers and the sons
of lovers and warriors and sons
of warriors Are poems & poets &
all the loveliness here in the world


We want a black poem.  And a 
Black World.
Let the world be a Black Poem
And Let All Black People Speak This Poem
Silently
or LOUD

Baraka's poem resonates with the same violent anger that propelled Black Power during the sixties and seventies.  Today marks the official release of Göran Olsson's documentary The Black Power Mixtape: 1967-1975; you can read the NPR review here.  It looks pretty interesting--it's a take on the movement from Sweden, which apparently was pretty anti-US at the time.  Check out the trailer below: