Black Arts, Black Muslims

There is a rhythm to the Black Arts Movement that scholarship has too often missed. Black Arts, Black Muslims hears it in Islam—in spoken word and script; in sound, symbol, and gesture; in the ethical demands carried by art itself. With archival depth and critical grace, Ellen McLarney shows how Black writers and artists drew on Islamic traditions to contest racial violence, recover obscured pasts, and imagine otherwise futures. Attuned to inheritance as much as innovation, this book stands as a defining work on Black art, American Islam, and the long freedom struggle. -- Zain Abdullah, author of <i>Black Mecca: The African Muslims of Harlem</i> In Black Arts, Black Muslims, Ellen McLarney uniquely and adeptly places multiple versions and interpretations of Islam, and self-identified Muslims, at the core of the Black Arts Movement and related movements. All future scholarship on not just the Black Arts Movement, but also on Black Studies and Black Power, will have to contend with Black Arts, Black Muslims. -- Michael O. West, coeditor of <i>From Toussaint to Tupac: The Black International Since the Age of Revolution</i> Black Arts, Black Muslims offers enlightening analyses of Islamic influences on Black Arts Movement activists and aesthetics, metaphysics and epistemologies. This book is indispensable for students, teachers, practitioners, and interested parties meeting at the crossroads of Africana and Islamic Studies, Black Arts and Esotericism. -- Solayman Idris, author of <i>The Sunrise in the West: On Amer-African Statecraft</i>