Keorapetse Kgositsile and the Black Arts Movement : Poetics of Possibility

Key study on South African writer and activist Kgositsile that presents a new approach to studying the radicalism of Africa and its diaspora through intellectual histories; a major contribution to the histories of Black lives, gender studies, politics and creativity. The cultural configurations of the Black Atlantic and, more broadly, the Black diaspora, cannot be fully understood without recognising the presence and extensive influence of writers and artists from the African continent itself, among these the celebrated South African poet and political activist Keorapetse Kgositsile. Yet, until now, there has been no full study of his work. Uhuru Phalafala's wide-ranging book illuminates a southern African modernity that was strongly gendered, producing an inflection of radicalism from the South deployed in anti-imperialist, anti-colonial, anti-apartheid, and civil rights struggles. She unveils the importance of the oral/aural traditions, indigenous knowledge systems, and cosmologies that Kgositsile carried with him into and after exile - including the foundational influence of his mother and grandmother. Using the original concept of an 'elsewhere', the author maps the sources of Kgositsile's transformative poetics on the human, temporalities, literacies, gender, black geography, and mythologies. These generated 'poetics of possibility' for his contemporaries in the Black Arts and Black Power Movements and beyond - among them Maya Angelou, Larry Neal, Gwendolyn Brooks, members of The Last Poets, Otabenga Jones & Associates, and rapper Earl Sweatshirt - who looked to his work to model their identities, cultural movements, and radical traditions.

• | Author: Uhuru Portia Phalafala
• | Publisher: James Currey
• | Publication Date: Feb 27, 2024
• | Number of Pages: NA pages
• | Language: English
• | Binding: Hardcover
• | ISBN-10: 1847012779
• | ISBN-13: 9781847012777