SPEECH/ACTS is an artist’s book published on the occasion of a group exhibition at Institute of Contemporary Art, University of Pennsylvania in 2017. The exhibition explores experimental black poetry and how the social and cultural constructs of language have shaped black American experiences. The book features poetry and text-based art works by a generation of artists born in the 80s: Jibade-Khalil Huffman, Steffani Jemison, Tony Lewis, Tiona Nekkia McClodden, Kameelah Janan Rasheed, and Martine Syms, alongside essays and newly commissioned poetry by their poetic forerunners such as Harryette Mullen, Simone White, Fred Moten, and Morgan Parker.
Artists in SPEECH/ACTS employ Black Experimental Poetry as a tool to disrupt the homogeneity of African American culture depicted in the Black Arts Movement in the 60s. There is shared frustration among artists coming from different background and generations: to have the complexities and nuances of each individual’s blackness striped away and to be reduced to a monolithic identity, which continues to this day. Words like crack, gap, fragment, and split repeatedly show up when these artists try to describe their experiences relating themselves to the boarder singular “blackness.” In a way, SPEECH/ACTS could be seen as a project of experiment itself. If the role language plays in appropriating culture and exerting power is being questioned in the first place, how do the black communities expect to use it to define themselves where they have never been properly recognized.
Nonetheless, Black Experimental Poetry approaches the intricacy of the political, racial, and cultural connotations of blackness from a place of personal immediacy, where the quotidian, queerness, class, proximity to whiteness, religion and various sociopolitical aspects all come to play. Refusing to be judged by the arbitrariness of circumstances, Black Experimental Poetry allows instability and expansion in the definition of blackness on its own terms. Like Harryette Mullen points out in her essay, blackness is a social construction, it may encompass more than race, but shared experience, cultural fluency, and political solidarity.
There is multiplicity of blackness here. Blackness that is jet, ashy, grey, kinda, and white. Blackness that is I don’t know, a stout truth, a romance of, Oprah, and going
going
going
Works Cited
Onli, Meg, et al. SPEECH/ACTS. Futurepoem, 2017.
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