Spectacular Blackness

Exploring the interface between the cultural politics of theBlack Power and the Black Arts movements and the production of postwar AfricanAmerican popular culture, Amy Ongiri shows how the reliance of Black politics on anoppositional image of African Americans was the formative moment in the constructionof "authentic blackness" as a cultural identity. While other books have adoptedeither a literary approach to the language, poetry, and arts of these movements or ahistorical analysis of them, Ongiri's captures the cultural and politicalinterconnections of the postwar period by using an interdisciplinary methodologydrawn from cinema studies and music theory. She traces the emergence of this Blackaesthetic from its origin in the Black Power movement's emphasis on the creation ofvisual icons and the Black Arts movement's celebration of urban vernacularculture.

Amy Abugo Ongiri is Assistant Professor in the English Department and Film and Media Studies Program at the University Florida.