A Black Vision in a White America?: The Beat Poetry, Art and Illustration of Ted Joans
Abstract
Studies of the culture of the Beat Generation have emphasized two specific facets of this movement. First, that the Beats placed emphasis on the literary in order to promote their particular vision of the post-1945 world which ran counter to the dominant discourse of the time. Second, as A. Robert Lee has explained, that despite the role which African Americans played in providing the cultural material for the Beat vision, “the Beat phenomenon rarely seemed to speak other than from, or to, white America” Lee 305 . That is, African Americans’ only position within this culture was to offer up their space and identity in order to allow the Beats to create work based on African American culture for white consumption, in a sense, to sell their cultural capital to whites who desired it. Lee and most commentators on Beat writing and culture argue that within this discourse there could be no place for African Americans as Beat writers or artists; I will argue that this was not always the case.
References
- Damon, Maria. “Triangulated Desire and Tactical Silences in the Beat Hipscape: Bob Kaufman and Others.” College Literature 27.1 (Winter 2000): 139-157.
- DuBois, W. E. B. The Souls of Black Folk. Charlottesville: University of Virginia, 1903, 1999. February 12, 2007 .
- Foreman, Joel, ed. The Other Fifties: Interrogating Midcentury American Icons. Urbana: U of Illinois P, 1997.
- Fox, Richard Elliot. “Ted Joans and the (B)reaching of the African American Literary Canon.” MELUS 29.3-4 (Fall 2004): 41-58.
- Gilroy, Paul. The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness. London: Verso, 1993.
- Jones, LeRoi. Blues People: Negro Music in White America. New York: William Morrow and Company, 1963.
- Joans, Ted. Jazz Poems. New York: Rhino Review, 1959.
- ---. The Ronnie Manhattan Mau Mau Return from Mexico 1959. In Phillips, Lisa, ed. Beat Culture and the New America, 1950-1965. New York: Whitney Museum of American Art, 1995. 159.
- ---. All of Ted Joans and No More. New York: Excelsior Press Publishers, 1961.
- ---. The Hipsters. New York: Corinth Books, 1961.