Black Creativity: on the Cutting Edge

By HENRY LOUIS GATES JR. Henry Louis Gates Jr. is chairman of the department of Afro-American Studies at Harvard University and author of Colored People: A Memoir.

Here's the difference this time around. It's not that there are black artists and intellectuals who matter; it's that so many of the artists and intellectuals who matter are black. It's not that the cultural cutting edge has been influenced by black creativity; it's that black creativity, it so often seems today, is the cultural cutting edge. But be advised: the idea of a black American renaissance has a long and curious history, having been declared at least three times before in this century.

Writing in 1901, the distinguished black critic and poet William Stanley Braithwaite argued, "We are at the commencement of a 'negroid' renaissance," one that "will have as much importance in literary history as the much- spoken-of and much-praised Celtic and Canadian renaissance." Others came to share his optimism. Just three years later, a critic declared the birth of the "New Negro Literary Movement." At the time, after all, the poet Paul Laurence Dunbar, the novelists Pauline Hopkins and Charles Chesnutt, and the essayists W.E.B. DuBois and Anna Julia Cooper were at the height of their creative powers. So this was no reckless appraisal.

A couple of decades later, it was the "Harlem Renaissance" that would lay the best-publicized claim to the word. This highly self-conscious movement was born largely through the midwifery of Alain Locke, the first black Rhodes scholar. Writers such as Langston Hughes, Jean Toomer, Countee Cullen, Jessie Fauset and Zora Neale Hurston -- the fundaments of the black literary canon today -- came of age at this time, leading the New York Herald Tribune to announce in 1925 that America was "on the edge, if not already in the midst, of what might not improperly be called a Negro renaissance."

For Locke and his fellow authors, the point of a cultural renaissance was inherently political; it was thought that the production of great art by sufficient numbers of blacks would lead to the Negro's "re-evaluation by white and black alike." This re-evaluation would, in turn, facilitate the Negro's demand for civil rights and for social and economic equality. But the Harlem Renaissance was heavily dependent upon white patronage; after the stock market crash of 1929, it never regained its footing. Besides, the writers of the movement were really a tiny group, numbering perhaps 50, who, in Locke's view, represented "the Negro's cultural adolescence." Not only were their dreams of political advancement to remain unfulfilled, but in terms of formal literary achievement, they mostly failed to raise their art to its adulthood.

The third renaissance was the Black Arts Movement, which extended from the mid-'60s to the early '70s. Defining itself against the Harlem Renaissance and deeply rooted in black cultural nationalism, the Black Arts writers imagined themselves as the artistic wing of the Black Power movement. Amiri Baraka, Larry Neal and Sonia Sanchez viewed black art as a matter less of aesthetics than of protest; its function was to serve the political liberation of black people from white racism. Erected on a shifting foundation of revolutionary politics, this "renaissance" was the most short-lived of all. By 1975, with the Black Arts Movement dead, black culture seemed to be undergoing a profound identity crisis.

Almost two decades later, black writers and artists, musicians, dancers and actors find themselves in an era of creativity unrivaled in American history. The current efflorescence may have begun with the literature and criticism by black women published in the early '80s, especially the works of Ntozake Shange, Michele Wallace, Alice Walker and Toni Morrison. These women, and those who came later, were able to reach both the traditional large readership, which is middle class, white and female, and a new black female audience that had been largely untapped and unaddressed.

Assigning a single starting date for an upsurge in creativity is an exercise in arbitrariness: the year 1987 will do as well as any. That was when August Wilson's Fences premiered on Broadway and Toni Morrison published her masterpiece, Beloved. Both would receive Pulitzer Prizes. In that same year, PBS aired Henry Hampton's Eyes on the Prize, the six-part documentary on the civil rights era, and Cornell scholar Martin Bernal published Black Athena, a highly controversial account of African sources of classical Greek civilization. Meanwhile, Spike Lee and Wynton Marsalis were establishing themselves as masters of film and jazz.

The new energy among black artists is related to economic developments. First of all, the rise of a black middle class has provided for black art a market that is independent of whites. Then there are the institutional factors. Blacks now have a significant presence as agents, editors and reviewers. Blacks run and own record companies. They produce films, back concerts. The old "black talent -- white management" pattern has finally started to break down.

But economic circumstances have done more than just alter the roles of blacks as consumers and producers of art. They have also influenced the very nature of the new black art. For African Americans, it is the best of times and the worst of times: America has the largest black middle class and the largest black underclass in its history. The current achievements in black culture are unfolding against this conflicting socioeconomic backdrop. Despite remarkable gains, a sense of precariousness haunts the new black middle class and the art it creates and takes to heart. The economic advancement remains newfound and insecure. Hence the new black art displays a peculiar love-hate relation to the defiant culture of the inner city: an anxious amalgam of intimacy and enmity. Beneath it all is the black bourgeoisie's deep-seated fear that they're only a couple of paychecks away from the fate of the underclass.

In some ways it is a fissure that runs through much black art of this century. One school of representation has focused on man as the subject of large, impersonal forces -- racism, sexism, poverty. The other has dwelt on a transcendent self in which fulfillment is achieved despite these forces. Black art today represents an uncanny convergence of the two schools, and so replicates the class tensions within a black America that sees itself as both an object of a baneful history and the author of its own history. The buppie and the B-boy represent two salient cultural styles that are, in the end, less at odds than many assume.

Today's black arts scene is characterized by an awareness of previous black traditions that the new artists self-consciously echo, imitate, parody and revise in acts of "riffing" or "signifying" or even "sampling." It's a movement that has come to define itself by its openness -- a cultural glasnost. Hence a zest for parodies and an impatience with sacred cows, as with George Wolfe's play The Colored Museum, or Rusty Cundieff's movie Fear of a Black Hat, a satire of hip-hop posturing.

This is an art that thrives on uncertainty, like much work of our Postmodernist times, but it also displays confidence in the legitimacy of black experiences as artistic material. Black artists seem to have become more conscious of their cultural traditions even as they have met with unprecedented mainstream success. Discarding the anxieties of a bygone era, these artists presume the universality of the black experience.

They also know, however, that the facts of race don't exhaust anybody's human complexity. And that seems to be the enviable privilege of the new black artists -- today's Post-Mod Squad. In its openness, its variety, its playfulness with forms, its refusal to follow preordained ideological line, its sustained engagements with the black artistic past, today's artistic upwelling is nourished by the black cultural milieu, but isn't confined to it.

If the mission of these black artists succeeds, the very need to declare a "renaissance" -- an always anxious act of avowal -- may be unnecessary. , Which means that today's may truly be the renaissance to end all renaissances.