Black Arts, Black Muslims

Islam in the Black Freedom Struggle

Ellen McLarney (Autor)

Buch | Softcover

360 Seiten

2026
Columbia University Press (Verlag)
978-0-231-21942-6 (ISBN)

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In the late 1960s and early 1970s, prominent figures in the Black Arts Movement (BAM) converted to Islam and took new names. Poets such as Amiri Baraka, Sonia Sanchez, Askia Muhammad Touré, and Marvin X incorporated Islamic words and expressions, references to the Qur’an, and Arabic script, as well as symbols like the crescent star and depictions of Islamic architecture and clothing. They connected places like Harlem, Chicago, Newark, and Oakland to locales in the Muslim world such as Timbuktu, Songhai, and Mecca. These artists also played a pivotal role in developing Black studies and creating alternatives to the Eurocentrism of the American educational system.

Ellen McLarney explores how BAM writers identified with Islam as integral to the African American cultural, spiritual, and intellectual heritage. Examining poetry, visual art, music, drama, and mixed-media collaborations, she traces the emergence of a new kind of Islamic art rooted in the African American experience. Their works protested scientific racism, police brutality, colonial domination, and economic oppression while resurrecting a suppressed Islamic past and sharing spiritual visions of a new kind of future. Based on interviews, fieldwork, archival research, and close analysis of key works, this book reveals how BAM redefined Black art, Islamic poetics, and Black Muslim aesthetics in the struggle for racial justice.

Ellen McLarney is associate professor of Middle East, Arabic, and African and African American studies at Duke University. She led a project on Muslim American poets and musicians of African descent with the Doris Duke Foundation for Islamic Art as well as an initiative on Islam and racial justice in the American South. She has also published in Souls, The Black Scholar, and Black Perspectives.

Acknowledgments
The Opening
Prelude. الاطلال (al-Atlal): Poetic Traces of the Past
1. “Constant Conscious Striving”: Jihad of the Pen and the Black Arts Movement
Part I: Anticipating the BAM
2. Nation in a Nation in a Nation: The Islamic Counterpublic and the Black Arts
3. Science’s Fictions: Yakub and the Black Arts
Part II: Malcolm X and Black Art
4. Music in the Message: Malcolm X’s Gospel Truth
5. “Flame Feeding Flame”: The Literary Malcolm X
Part III: Black Study and Black Life
6. “Fly to Allah”: Marvin X’s Fugitive Life and Black Study
7. The Barakas in New Ark: The Homeplace of Black Art
8. “blk/visions for blk/lives”: Sonia Sanchez’s Rebirth in Islam
Coda. 360° of Islamic Audiovisualities: Revolution and Evolution
Notes
Bibliography
Index

Erscheint lt. Verlag	31.3.2026
Reihe/Serie	Black Lives in the Diaspora: Past / Present / Future
Zusatzinfo	13 b&w halftones
Verlagsort	New York
Sprache	englisch
Maße	156 x 235 mm
Themenwelt	Literatur ► Lyrik / Dramatik ► Lyrik / Gedichte
	Geisteswissenschaften ► Religion / Theologie ► Islam
	Geisteswissenschaften ► Sprach- / Literaturwissenschaft ► Anglistik / Amerikanistik
	Geisteswissenschaften ► Sprach- / Literaturwissenschaft ► Literaturwissenschaft
ISBN-10	0-231-21942-3 / 0231219423
ISBN-13	978-0-231-21942-6 / 9780231219426
Zustand	Neuware