Slavery to Hiroshima and beyond: African-American art and the apocalypse

被引:2
作者
Tribe, Tania Costa
机构
关键词
millennialism; ontology; aesthetics; HARLEM-RENAISSANCE;
D O I
10.1080/02666286.2013.822146
中图分类号
C [社会科学总论];
学科分类号
03 ; 0303 ;
摘要
In his book of poems God's Trombones (1927), James Weldon Johnson revealed his debt to Black preachers, whose powers of oratory and apocalyptic beliefs were conveyed in sermons that he remembered from childhood. Congregations had been moved to ecstasy' by visions of an anthropomorphic God and a belief in a millennial order that offered solace and strength in dealing with the abuses of the slave condition. Such values had also been put across in direct and unmediated visual language in two quilts by Harriet Powers expressing her visionary gaze and her belief that human beings are at the mercy of both cosmic circumstances and divine intervention. Clothed in consciously aesthetic overtones, the same faith in millennial redemption permeated Johnson's poems and Aaron Douglas's visual interpretation of them, providing a paradigm for Harlem Renaissance New Negro' aesthetics, as seen in the work of William H. Johnson and Archibald Motley, for instance. The conceptual world embodied in Harriet Powers's quilts remained a cornerstone of the African-American experience throughout the twentieth century. As the social circumstances of African-Americans began to change in the 1960s, the use of such biblical texts also changed, to endow a much wider range of human experiences with meaning. Particularly in his later work, Jacob Lawrence extended his apocalyptic concerns beyond immediate racial questions to concentrate on wider ethical issues, including environmental ones, making them relevant to humankind as a whole.
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页码:354 / 384
页数:31
相关论文
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