A History of American Literature

524 The American Century: Literature since 1945

later 1960s that the seeds of discontent and dissension sowed by this conspicuous

contrast between haves and have-nots began to be harvested.

In the meantime, in the early 1960s, optimism and the promise of adventure were

in the air. Responding to the sense of new frontiers to be conquered, many artists of

the period, of every kind, were notable for their willingness to experiment, to

confront and even challenge cultural and social norms. A decade is an artificial

measure and, in this respect as in most others, “the Sixties” had really begun in the

middle to late 1950s: when the popular arts were revivified by a new sense of energy

and power, and a lively avant-garde embarked on challenging conventional norms

and forms. Happenings, festivals, multimedia performances became commonplace

events. Readings of poetry and prose, often to jazz accompaniment, attracted

dedicated audiences. There was a sense of risk, of venturing beyond the formalism,

the preoccupation with craftsmanship of earlier decades. Writing became more

open, rawer, alert to the possibility of change and the inclusion of random factors.

There was a renewed emphasis on chance, difference, impermanency, a new

willingness to see the new artistic object as shifting, discontinuous, part of the flux

and variety of things. Modernism was, in effect, shading into postmodernism, with

its resistance to finality or closure, to distinctions between “high” and “low” culture,

to grand explanations and master narratives – and to the belief that there is one,

major or monolithic truth to be apprehended in art. With its preference for

suspended judgments, its disbelief in hierarchies, mistrust of solutions, denouements

and completions, the postmodernist impulse was a characteristic product of these

times. It encouraged forms of writing that thrived on the edge, that denied the

authoritative in favor of the arbitrary and posited a random, unstructured world as

well as an equally random, unstructured art. This was a different kind of new

frontier, perhaps, from the one Kennedy anticipated. But it tapped a similar

excitement: “this country might have / been a pio / neer land, once,” declared the

black poet Sonia Sanchez, “and it still is.”

If one growing tendency of American writing of the 1960s and later was toward

postmodernism, another was toward the political. Nowhere was this more notable

than among African-American writers like Sanchez. The Black Arts movement, in

particular, reacted to calls for “black power” and a new feeling of racial pride

captured in the slogan “black is beautiful.” Its attempt to define a “black aesthetic,”

what it meant to be a specifically black writer, encouraged analogous developments

among other ethnic minorities and among women of all races. In conferences and

workshops like the Second Black Writers’ Conference at Fisk University in 1967,

critics and writers worked with the issues of how literature might properly express

and promote political causes. “The Black Arts and the Black Power concept,” Larry

Neal (1937–1981) wrote at the beginning of his essay “The Black Arts Movement”

(1968), “both relate broadly to the African-American’s desire for self-determination

and nationhood. Both concepts are nationalistic.” And, just as African-American

writers became intent on explaining and expressing their solidarity with their black

brothers and sisters – the urban poor and dispossessed, the people of the newly

independent African nations – so women writers, many of them, expressed a

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