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Theorizing the Post-Soul Aesthetic: an Introduction Bertram D University of Richmond UR Scholarship Repository English Faculty Publications English 2007 Theorizing the Post-Soul Aesthetic: An Introduction Bertram D. Ashe Follow this and additional works at: http://scholarship.richmond.edu/english-faculty-publications Part of the African American Studies Commons, and the Race and Ethnicity Commons Recommended Citation Ashe, Bertram D. "Theorizing the Post-Soul Aesthetic: An Introduction."African American Review 41, no. 4 (2007): 602-23. This Article is brought to you for free and open access by the English at UR Scholarship Repository. It has been accepted for inclusion in English Faculty Publications by an authorized administrator of UR Scholarship Repository. For more information, please contact [email protected]. Theorizing the Post-Soul Aesthetic: An Introduction one. The End of theBeginning of thePost-Soul Aesthetic Bertram D. Ashe is Associate Professor of Englishand American Studies at theUniversity of time. Clearly, it's time. As I begin this introduction, in the Richmond.He has published of landmark anniversaries in on me from FromWithin the Frame: It's spring 2006, press inAfrican every side: 20 years ago, Greg T?te wrote "Cult-Nats Meet Storytelling AmericanFiction (Routledge), Freaky-Deke: the Return of the Black Aesthetic" for the Village as well as essays on black Voice in the fall of 1986. And Spike Lee's She's Gotta Have If?that hair, jazz, and post-civil rights totemic anthem?was released in the summer of 1986, post-soul movementblack culture(the as well. More I first Ellis's "The personally, taught Trey essay post soul aesthetic) in New Black Aesthetic" in and I 1991,15 years ago, inaugurated my Signifyin(g),Sanctifyin'and post-soul aesthetic course in the Spring semester of 1996?exactly Slam Dunking:A Reader in course 10 years ago. Over the of those 20 years, I have obsessively African American Expressive on a Riff: observed this peculiar, post-Civil Rights movement aesthetic: Culture,Thriving as Jazz and Blues Influences in inhaled and analyzed its various manifestos they appeared in African American Literature the early years, watched it on screens in darkened movie theaters, and Film, and journals such listened to it out ofmy attended and spon pounding speakers, as Race, Gender and Class, sored its various concerts, lectures, and readings, symposia, Columbia, and African on it in and museums gazed galleries and turned its pages from American Review. He is at books?all thewhile debating its very existence with friends, stu work on a memoir titled dents, and colleagues. Twenty years. And now it's time for Twisted: theDreadlock African Americanists toweigh in, en masse. Chronicles, as well as a book seems on the aesthetic. Twenty years, it tome, is the proper scholarly distance post-soul can fromwhich scholars and should begin in earnest to critique, explore, and seek to understand this aesthetic. It's time for African Americanists to construct?or, at least, begin the process more or of constructing?a less coherent critical conversation era. about the art of this "post" Editing this special issue is the lat a est in series of steps I have taken toward attempting to establish a critical framework for the study of post-Civil Rights movement art in general and the post-soul aesthetic in particular.1 After all, at consensus this point, there is little on anything regarding the on fledgling scholarship the era: names, for instance, range from "The New Black Aesthetic" to "postliberated" to "post-soul" to to "post-black" "NewBlack"?and beyond.2 There is disagree ment over whether the era should be restricted, as I believe it should be, to artists and writers who were born or came of age after the Civil Rights movement, and there is disagreement on when the era and or it begins whether not has ended (regrettably, some see scholars already sub-generational breaks such as the post-post-soul, for instance).3 The primary reason I sought to par in on ticipate this special issue the post-soul aesthetic (which is, own obviously, my preferred term) was in the hope that some of these issues might begin to be addressed, implicitly ifnot explicit African American Rew'ew, Volume 41, Number 4 ? 2007Bertram D. Ashe 609 us ly. If this special number issue moves closer to critical understanding, if it clears some critical space within which we can argue about the post-soul aesthet are more ic (PSA) inways that clearly defined than they have been up to now, I will consider the effort a success. Obviously, though, with all this scholarly disagreement, when I say "It's as we a time," it is not if are beginning from standing start. Commentary on the as PSA began, I suggest above, with Tate's stage-whisper of an article in the Voice, and then emerged with Ellis's full-throated essay, "The New Black Aesthetic." Ellis has referred to his essay as "much maligned," and Iwould say he is not too far off in that description (Senna and Wazow 21). But the essay is a also extremely valuable in that itprovides jumping-off point for discussion of the aesthetic. The term "seminal" often precedes references to "The New Black an as Aesthetic," and that is appropriate description well. Along with "Cult-Nats Meet Freaky-Deke," "The New Black Aesthetic" signaled the emergence of the aesthetic, identifying and loosely organizing it for interested parties, myself included. The essay is, however, at the same time confusing, diffuse, contradic tory?and partisan. Both Ellis and T?te were eagerly trumpeting the arrival of new were this aesthetic, and they followed, chiefly, by Nelson George with his 1992 Buppies, B-boys, Baps and Bohos: Notes on Post-Soul Black Culture(the book an more that coined the term and that features introduction less eager and skep tical than Tate's and Ellis's essays). Along theway, David Nicholson wrote "Painting It Black: African American Artists, In Search of a New Aesthetic," in a the book section of theWashington Post in 1989; Terry McMillan wrote of "new we breed, free towrite as please, in part because of our predecessors, and because of theway life has changed" (xx) in her introduction to Breaking Ice: An Anthology ofContemporary African-American Fiction (1990); Paul Beatty wrote the hilarious "What set you from, fool?" inNext (1992); and Lisa Jones contributed Bulletproof Diva: Tales ofRace, Sex and Hair in 1994. Each of these articulations, in one way or another, announce the discovery of an artistic "break," of post-Civil as Rights movement artistic difference. More recent statements such Kevin Powell's introduction to Step into aWorld (2000) and Thelma Golden's "post black" introduction to the Freestyle catalogue to the 2001 Studio Museum in Harlem exhibition are interesting and provocative, but they essentially do the same work as earlier statements: they introduce this "new" aesthetic that, in the latter cases, had been revealed some years before. more are My sense is thatwith this 20-years-later moment, when PSA texts among us than ever before,4 we have reached the end of the beginning of this post soul aesthetic, if forno other reason than the "introductions" seem to have assessment does allow for some stopped. And yet, while this 20-years-in per or does the spective, by no means does itmark any sort of sub-break -shift?nor movement black artists arrival of a succeeding generation of post-Civil Rights "new black artists" Ellis (particularly since the "under thirty only" [234], Trey describes in his "New Black Aesthetic" essay are currently staring 50 years old in to the face). There has been no fundamental, sociocultural paradigm shift akin the Civil Rights movement to alter the post-soul aesthetic focus. The post-inte artists endure as mature gration experiences today's twentysomething PSA they and com into adulthood?as they negotiate contemporary America's confused at all different from the of plicated racial terrain?are not inaugural generation art reflects that PSA artists' experiences, and the resultant of the present day Land and similarity. The themes discussed in Tour?'s The Portable Promised (2002) Darius or Paul Soul City (2004) are not that far from James's Negrophobia (1992) The Beatty's The White Boy Shuffle (1996); Emily Raboteau's Professor's Daughter (2005) is not radically different from Danzy Senna's Caucasia (1998). Surely, will fade over time these explicit critiques of the Black Arts Movement likely (as AFRICANAMERICAN REVIEW newer-generation artists' connection to the BAM is through grandparents rather core than parents or older siblings), but the issues that PSA artists address?the peculiar pains, pleasures, and problems of race in the post-Civil Rights move ment United States; the use of nontraditionally black cultural influences in their work; and the resultant exploration of the boundaries of blackness?these issues will remain as long as there are discrete cultural categories such as "black" and as are "white" and as long there Americans who live their lives believing sepa rate and distinct cultural practices can be assigned to each. For there, in the unstable, wobbly interstices of those two categories, iswhere the post-soul aes thetic lives. two. Blaxploration,Free-Style: Towards an IdentifiablePost-Soul Aesthetic role, then, as interested scholars of African American cultures, is to Our examine, explore, and explain these PSA artists and texts. To accomplish a that goal I have, over the years, developed critical apparatus for reading post a as soul aesthetic art. But first, definition: the term "post-soul," I understand it, generally refers to art produced by African Americans who were either born or came of age after the Civil Rights movement.
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