"After Mecca"

Women Poets and the Black Arts Movement

by Cheryl Clarke

Published by: Rutgers University Press

Subjects:Women's Studies, Literary Studies, African American Studies

224 Pages

Paperback
9780813534060
Published: November 24, 2004

$40.95 S

BUY

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The politics and music of the sixties and early seventies have been the subject of scholarship for many years, but it is only very recently that attention has turned to the cultural production of African American poets.

In "After Mecca," Cheryl Clarke explores the relationship between the Black Arts Movement and black women writers of the period. Poems by Gwendolyn Brooks, Ntozake Shange, Audre Lorde, Nikki Giovanni, Sonia Sanchez, Jayne Cortez, Alice Walker, and others chart the emergence of a new and distinct black poetry and its relationship to the black community's struggle for rights and liberation. Clarke also traces the contributions of these poets to the development of feminism and lesbian-feminism, and the legacy they left for others to build on.

She argues that whether black women poets of the time were writing from within the movement or writing against it, virtually all were responding to it. Using the trope of "Mecca," she explores the ways in which these writers were turning away from white, western society to create a new literacy of blackness.

Provocatively written, this book is an important contribution to the fields of African American literary studies and feminist theory.

'Missed love': Black power and Black poetry
The loss of lyric space in Gwendolyn Brooks' "In the Mecca"
Queen Sistuh : Black women poets and the circle(s) of Blackness
Black feminist communalism : Ntozake Shange's for colored girls who have considered suicide/when the rainbow is enuf
Transferences and confluences : Black arts and Black lesbian-feminism in Audre Lorde's The Black Unicorn

Cheryl Clarke is the author of four books of poetry: Narratives: Poems in the Tradition of Black Women, Living as a Lesbian, Humid Pitch, and Experimental Love. In addition,

This is the only book-length treatment of Black women poets of the Black Arts Movement, their contributions to the development of feminism and lesbian-feminism, and their impact on the poets who succeeded them. Clarke has the advantage of being an "insider" who witnessed part of the era she's analyzing.
~Beverly Guy-Sheftall, Spelman College, co-author of Gender Talk

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Women Poets and the Black Arts Movement

"After Mecca"

Women Poets and the Black Arts Movement

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