The Territorial Imagination:
Black Arts and the Sonnet
Black Arts and the Sonnet
Building on my recent book The African American Sonnet: A Literary History (2018), the paper discusses the intriguing role of the sonnet in the Black Arts movement of the 1960s and 1970s. The sonnet figures prominently in Black Arts discourse, but usually as an example of “white” art that needs to be excluded from the black nation. This stance contrasts sharply with the wide use of the form in African American literature of the preceding decades, and indeed, black poets continued to write sonnets throughout the 1960s and 1970s. These poets had to negotiate the territorial boundaries of the black nation on both the material and the discursive planes. To get published in a Black Arts context, they had to address the new demand for oral, authentic, collective poetry, which led them to dismantle the traditional sonnet structure and adapt the form to black nationalist demands. Referencing sonnets by Conrad Kent Rivers, Margaret Walker, June Jordan, and Joe Mitchell, my paper traces three main strategies these poets devised: formal camouflage, which attempts to make the sonnet indistinguishable from orthodox Black Arts poetry by changing its traditional form and introducing blackness markers like music, the spoken word, and vernacular expressions; thematic camouflage, which attempts to sneak the sonnet into black nationalist discourse by focusing on topics whose racial and political relevance outweigh the association of the form with whiteness; and the use of the sonnet to mark off enclaves from the communal project of the black nation and express the sorts of intimacy and individuality for which the nation had no official use. In providing evidence that the Black Arts movement exerted both a confining and a creative influence on poets of the time, these transformations of the sonnet confirm the ambivalent view of the movement that has emerged in recent scholarly discussion.
Timo Müller is Professor of American Studies at the University of Konstanz, Germany. He has published on modernist, environmental, and African American literature in journals such as American Literature, Arizona Quarterly, and Twentieth-Century Literature. His book The African American Sonnet: A Literary History is now available in paperback from the University Press of Mississippi.