UCSB Center for Black Studies Research & the UC Consortium for Black Studies in California Present
Kim McMillon, UC Merced PhD Candidate
and
Margo Natalie Crawford, Cornell University professor and author of the forthcoming Black Post-Blackness:
The Black Arts Movement and 21st Century Aesthetics
on
“Rethinking Black Feminism and the Women of the Black Arts Movement”
Friday, December 2nd, 2016
10:00am
McCune Conference Room, 6020 HSSB
Professor Crawford and Ms. McMillon are uniquely positioned to offer new scholarship on the women of the Black Arts Movement. Ms. McMillon organized two major Black Arts Movement conferences including the Dillard University-Harvard’s Hutchins Center Black Arts Movement conference held in September 2016. McMillon applies a black feminist approach to the study of the Black Arts Movement. She argues that the silencing and invisibility of black women has its origins in fear, fear contained in the ideology of the need to suppress that which is ultimately power unrealized. Black women are cloaked in gendered as well as racial invisibility, and it is through ancestralness that this invisibility is removed, and the women of the Black Arts Movement find liberation. In her paper, Professor Crawford examines these same issues, arguing that during the Black Arts Movement, certain black women artists developed an aesthetic of detours as they saw the prohibited, male-dominated zones and swerved. Crawford analyzes the swerves of Carolyn Rodgers, Nikki Giovanni, Alice Childress, and the “Where We At?” visual art collective. Crawford asserts that black women artists, during the Black Arts Movement, sometimes look “elsewhere” (past the signs that the male leaders of the movement are holding) and dislodge the dominant frames of the 1960s and 70s black male nationalism.
