Behold the Land
The Black Arts Movement in the South
By James Smethurst
244 pp., 6.125 x 9.25, 7 halftones
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Paperback ISBN: 978-1-4696-6304-3
Published: June 2021 -
Hardcover ISBN: 978-1-4696-6303-6
Published: June 2021 -
eBook ISBN: 978-1-4696-6305-0
Published: April 2021
John Hope Franklin Series in African American History and Culture
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Though recognition of its influence has waned, the Black Arts movement's legacy in the South endures through many of its initiatives and constituencies. Ultimately, Smethurst argues that the movement's southern strain was perhaps the most consequential, successfully reaching the grassroots and leaving a tangible, local legacy unmatched anywhere else in the United States.
About the Author
James Smethurst is professor of Afro-American Studies at the University of Massachusetts Amherst and author of The Black Arts Movement: Literary Nationalism in the 1960s and 1970s.
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Reviews
βAn in-depth account of the cultural and political life of Black artists and activists in the South from the 1960s to the β80s . . . Scholars of African American literature and history will relish the granular look this influential yet often overlooked artistic movement.ββPublishers Weekly
βIn Behold the Land, Smethurst demonstrates that decades of organizing and institution building, from the Garveyite years and the Popular Front to the civil rights movement, helped preserve a Black radicalism in the South that eventually became central to the Black Arts Movement in the region...Smethurst joins scholars like GerShun Avilez and Carter Mathes in revising the canonical understanding of the Black Arts Movement.ββThe Nation
βStriking . . . meticulous research . . . Smethurst [shows] how the Black Arts became integrated into the institutional structures of Southern cities and evolved into organizations and events that, if less overtly radical than their earlier iterations, had more staying power.ββSociety for US Intellectual History
"This book is vital and visionary. James Smethurst's exemplary study accomplishes the task of presenting the extensive work of a diverse group of African American artists across the South."--Howard Rambsy II, author of The Black Arts Enterprise and the Production of African American Poetry
"Meticulously researched and beautifully written, Behold the Land is bound to become the definitive study of the Black Arts movement in the South"--Margo Natalie Crawford, author of Black Post-Blackness: The Black Arts Movement and Twenty-First-Century Aesthetics