- Amiri Baraka
- Audre Lorde
- Haki R. Madhubuti
- Sonia Sanchez
- Dudley Randall
- Etheridge Knight
- Gwendolyn Brooks
- Ishmael Reed
- Jay Wright
- Maya Angelou
- Nikki Giovanni
About Black Arts Movement
The Black Arts Movement (1960 - 1970), abbreviated BAM, was founded in the United States in 1960 by poet and writer Amiri Baraka. It initially included among his members Maya Angelou, Gwendolyn Brooks, Hoyt W. Fuller, Nikki Giovanni, Rosa Guy, Audre Lorde, Larry Neal, Haki R. Madhubuti, Dudley Randall, Ishmael Reed and Sonia Sanchez. The Black arts movement is seen as an extension of the Harlem Renaissance of the 1920s-1930s. This movement was an artistic, musical and literary, theatrical cultural ideology, aimed at developing an African-American identity freed from Western, white concepts. This movement emerged at the same time as the Afro-American Civil Rights Movement and Black Power. He led, through Black Pride, black separatism in the arts, especially among painters. Initially, they paint murals. They were colorful and used symbols aimed at black people. They often represented members of the black community, jazz musicians or politicians. Poets and authors such as William Melvin Kelley, Ishmael Reed and Amiri Baraka have reinvented the common African-American memory by flatly destroying the facts established by Euro-Americans in literature. Legend and legendification, heroization and empathy for oppressed characters are among the processes used by the poets and authors of the BAM. The subversion of stereotypes through the transformation of memory, the use of diasporic folklore as well as the transfer of African topoï to the American continent are all practices favoring the reconstruction of the identity of the African American literary heritage.
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