A Black Vision in a White America?: The Beat Poetry, Art and Illustration of Ted Joans

Year 2007, Issue: 25, 5 - 16, 01.04.2007

Gordon J. Marshall

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.

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