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We have 1 items in our Catalogue that match your search for
9780822346678.
Black Arts West
(
Subtitle:
Culture and Struggle in Postwar Los Angeles)
by
Daniel Widener
( Hardback)
ISBN:
9780822346678
Publisher:
Duke University Press
Price:
£72.00
Published in UK:
01/04/2010
Please Note:
This book is imported to special order and will take approx 3 weeks to come into stock.
From postwar efforts to end discrimination in the motion-picture industry, recording studios, and musicians’ unions, through the development of community-based arts organizations, to the creation of searing films critiquing conditions in the black working-class neighbourhoods of a city touting its multiculturalism—
Black Arts West
documents the social and political significance of African American arts activity in Los Angeles between the Second World War and the 1992 riots. Focusing on the lives and work of black writers, visual artists, musicians, and filmmakers, Daniel Widener tells how black cultural politics changed over time, and how altered political realities generated new forms of artistic and cultural expression. His narrative is filled with figures invested in the politics of black art and culture in postwar Los Angeles, including not only African American artists but also black nationalists, affluent liberal whites, elected officials, and federal bureaucrats. Along with the politicization of black culture, Widener explores the rise of a distinctive regional Black Arts Movement. Originating in the efforts of wartime cultural activists, the movement was rooted in the black working-class and characterized by struggles for artistic autonomy and improved living and working conditions for local black artists. As new ideas concerning art, racial identity, and the institutional position of African American artists emerged, dozens of new collectives appeared, from the Watts Writers Workshop, to the Inner City Cultural Center, to the New Art Jazz Ensemble. Spread across generations of artists, the Black Arts Movement in southern California was more than the artistic affiliate of the local civil-rights or black-power efforts: it was a social movement itself. Illuminating the fundamental connections between expressive culture and political struggle,
Black Arts West
is a major contribution to the histories of Los Angeles, black radicalism, and avant-garde art.
Review Quote:
“Daniel Widener’s study provides a much needed, basic analysis of the complex and turbulent black arts and culture scene in Los Angeles during the 1960s and 1970s, and the dynamic mix of politics that fueled it.”—Amiri Baraka
“
Black Arts West
knocked my socks off. Daniel Widener’s exciting account of the ‘Watts Renaissance’ fundamentally revises our picture of contemporary L.A. art and literary scenes, and adds a crucial new chapter to the history of Black cultural radicalism during the 1960s and 1970s.”—Mike Davis, author of
City of Quartz: Excavating the Future in Los Angeles
