Abstract

Black Chant traces the embrace and transformation of black modernisms and postmodernisms by African-American poets in the decades after the Second World War. Centering on groups of avant-garde poets, the study particularly attends to those poets whose radical forms of new writing formed the basis for much of what followed in the Black Arts period. Exploring the farthest reaches of black creative experimentation in words and music, Black Chant yields an invaluable reassessment of African-American cultural history as it has been shaped throughout the era we now call postmodern.