Description

In the 1960s a diverse group of African-American artists and intellectuals forcefully asserted their vision of the limitations and restrictions of contemporary American life. Their concerns grew out of not only the fervor of the civil rights movement but also a sense that American culture was sterile, secular, and disturbingly immune to the tragic lessons of history. While most accounts of African-American culture in the sixties have focused on the vexing problem of race, this book suggests an even more expansive social responsiveness at the heart of sixties' black writing, music, and painting. Using an interdisciplinary approach, James C. Hall argues that African-American artistry in the sixties can be understood as one of the most vital and compelling homegrown interrogations of modernity. Hall finds that the legacy of slavery and the resistance to it have by necessity made African-Americans among the most incisive critics and celebrants of our Enlightenment inheritance.

Focusing on the work of six individuals--Robert Hayden, William Demby, Paule Marshall, John Coltrane, Romare Bearden, and W. E. B. Du Bois--Mercy, Mercy Me recovers an American tradition of evaluating the "dialectic of the Enlightenment." Hall argues that the cultural actors he describes reflect and embody the complex connections of race and nation. Cosmopolitan in outlook and critical of a culture of congratulation, they highlight the close relationship between slavery and the construction of American citizenship as they document the destructive influences wrought upon the self by consumer capitalism, technology, and ritualized violence. The course of this study reveals an essential concern at the core of African-American art in the sixties--that the longing to look backwards is always in danger of lapsing into nostalgia and so must constantly struggle with the horror of the very past it would champion. In its original account of black artistry and its recovery of overlooked works of the period, Mercy, Mercy Me marks a major contribution to our understanding of 1960s American culture.

Product Details

304 pages; 12 halftones & line illus; 6-1/8 x 9-1/4; ISBN13: 978-0-19-509609-5ISBN10: 0-19-509609-6

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