The A-Line Debuts Special Issue Devoted to Poetry and the Arts

The A-Line: A Journal of Progressive Thought has just published a special issue devoted to the arts, contents of which include an essay on James Baldwin by Fred Moten; and work by Claudia Rankine, Charles Bernstein, Patricia Spears Jones, Raquel Salas-Rivera, Tiana Reed, and others. "While the center of gravity of this inaugural arts issue is situated in poetry and the visual and performing arts, we anticipate enhancing the repertoire in the future by way of reference to music, architecture, dance, and photography," writes editor Hortense J. Spillers in her introduction to the issue. More:

...The participation of African American practitioners in these fields of artistic endeavor has critically increased over the last four decades. In that regard, the arts issue fits the role of both witness and register. In a broader sense, it will perhaps remark the evermore vivid trend line of what appears to be an interartistic merger in the unfolding among aspects of the arts, as in poetry as visual performance, for example, orchestrated in Claudia Rankine’s White Card. In its inimitable dynamism, the arts scene continues to turn up new ground, and if that is so, then “tradition” makes itself anew from one time to the next.

In the enumeration of the arts, the reader might well recognize an allusion to the important number “seven,” which lends its name to one of the early twentieth century’s “little magazines,” The Seven Arts, published in the United States from November 1916 to October 1917. Taking its cue from the traditional subdivision of the arts—architecture, sculpture, painting, literature, music, performance, and film– the magazine was embedded in the context of a rapidly industrializing, Fordist-led United States, as well as notable demographic shifts in a national population veering toward urban expanse and experience. One of the most stunning developments on this new scene of altered labor relations, redoubled capitalist depredation, and unprecedented migratory provenance was promulgated in considerable black movement northward that would eventuate, for instance, in renascent artistic production in the urban centers, especially Manhattan, by way of Harlem, and Chicago. The accompanying burst of artistic efflorescence would impel attention to a revised cultural consciousness released among the generation of post-Reconstruction and progressivism. These rendezvous with destiny run concurrent with international events, foremost among them, successful revolutionary transformation in Russia and Mexico and the fraught, compromised tenure of socialist rule in Germany with the advent of the Weimar Republic. Shortly after the accession of the Weimar government, Frankfurt will play host for a brief time to what is perhaps the first School of critical theory by way of the Frankfurt movement. Yet, from our current vantage, we imagine that we hear the already-coming poltergeist, rapping steadily in the long distance, that would fully reveal itself a decade and a half later in the fateful instauration of the National Socialist German Workers’ Party and its tortuous global ramifications.

Read so much more at the A-Line.