Keorapetse Kgositsile & the Black Arts Movement

Poetics of Possibility

Dr Uhuru Portia Phalafala, C (D)

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English

James Currey
27 February 2024

Literary studies: post-colonial literature; Cultural studies

Series: African Articulations

Key study on writer and activist Kgositsile that presents a new approach to studying the radicalism of Africa and its diaspora and makes a major contribution to the histories of Black lives, gender studies, jazz studies, politics, and creativity. The cultural configurations of the Black Atlantic cannot be fully understood without recognising the significant presence of writers and artists from the African continent itself. Among the most influential was South African poet laureate Keorapetse Kgositsile, or 'Bra Willie', as he was affectionately known. Yet, until now, there has been no full-length study of his work.

Uhuru Phalafala's wide-ranging book reveals the foundational influence of Kgositsile's mother and grandmother on his craft and unveils the importance of the oral/aural traditions, indigenous knowledge systems, and cosmologies he carried with him into and after exile.

It illuminates a southern African modernity that was strongly gendered and deployed in anti-imperialist, anti-colonial, anti-apartheid, and civil rights struggles. Using the original concept of 'elsewhere', the author maps the sources of Kgositsile's transformative verse, which in turn generated 'poetics of possibility' for his contemporaries in the Black Arts and Black Power Movements and beyond - among them Maya Angelou, Larry Neal, Gwendolyn Brooks, Tom Dent, members of The Last Poets, Otabenga Jones & Associates, and rapper Earl Sweatshirt - who all looked to his work to model their identities, cultural movements and radical traditions.

By: Dr Uhuru Portia Phalafala C (D)
Imprint: James Currey
Country of Publication: United Kingdom
Dimensions: Height: 234mm, Width: 156mm, Spine: 15mm
Weight: 1g
ISBN: 9781847012777
ISBN 10: 1847012779
Series: African Articulations
Pages: 224
Publication Date: 27 February 2024
Audience: Professional and scholarly , College/higher education , Professional and scholarly , Undergraduate , Primary
Format: Hardback
Publisher's Status: Active

1. Introduction: Elsewhere 2. A Writing Life - A Riting Life - A Rioting Life 3. Names: Mother What is my Name? 4. Songs: Native Sons Dancing Like Crazy 5. Spaces: 21st-century Suns/Sons Must Rise Again 6. Places: Black Conscious Ecologies of Futurity 7. Coda: Elsewhere-Space is the Here-Place

UHURU PORTIA PHALAFALA is a Senior Lecturer at Stellenbosch University, South Africa, author of the poetry collection Mine Mine Mine (2023), and co-editor of Keorapetse Kgositsile: Collected Poems 1969-2018 (2023).