Kelley, “Musical Imagery: Sound of Silence Activates Auditory Cortex,” Nature 434 (March 10, 2005), 158. James Smethurst, The Black Arts Movement: Literary Nationalism in the 1960s and 1970s (Durham: University of North Carolina Press, 2005), 370.ĭavid Kraemer, C. Tkweme, “Blues in Stereo: The Texts of Langston Hughes in Jazz Music,” African American Review 42, nos. Melba Boyd, Wrestling with the Muse, Dudley Randall and the Broadside Press (New York: Columbia University Press, 2004), 126. Van Deburg, New Day in Babylon (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992), 215. James Stewart, “Message in the Music: Political Commentary in Black Popular Music from Rhythm and Blues to Early Hip Hop,” in Journal of African American History 90, no. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.īrian Ward, Just My Soul Responding, Rhythm and Blues, Black Consciousness, and Race Relations (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998), 5–6. These keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. The systemic disruption of cultural production as a means of neutering the BPM set in motion a continuing pattern of compromised cultural production that continues to constrain contemporary efforts to develop and implement mass-based resistance to racial oppression. The propagation of this imagery complemented direct physical assaults and disinformation campaigns waged by governmental officials against BPM organizations and their leaders. This particular mode of cultural counterattack involved systematic imposition of invisibility on the BPM and/or the misrepresentation of the BPM as dysfunctional, disorganized, opportunistic, and impotent. The analysis focuses special attention on the role of blaxploitation films in diluting the potential of important cultural symbols to facilitate political mobilization and collective action. The principal thesis of this investigation is that external manipulation and co-optation of important cultural symbols effectively neutralized the potential of organized community-based cultural production to promote BPM objectives. The Black Arts Movement (BAM) was, in many respects, a concrete manifestation of the type of organized cultural production that Du Bois advocated, and the relationship between the BAM and the Black Power Movement (BPM) roughly paralleled the type of synergism envisioned by Du Bois. Du Bois’s quotation imagines a self-contained community in which organized cultural production continually affirms and reinforces connections among individuals and institutions.