Autumn 1997
Volume 24, Number 1

All renaissances are acts of cultural construction, attempting to satisfy larger social and political needs. And the African American postmodern renaissance is no exception. In their openness, their variety, their playfulness with forms, their refusal to follow preordained ideological lines, their sustained engagements with the black artistic past, the artists of this renaissance seem as determined to define their work freely within a black tradition as they are to consolidate a black presence within America's corporate cultural institutions. "There are many neighborhoods in what we might think of as a larger cultural community," Anthony Davis muses. Given the sophistication of so much of this art, and given its demonstrated power to turn a profit, it is highly likely that the achievements of this renaissance will be the deepest, the longest-lasting, and the most appreciated by the larger American society. "Today the white people want to be colored," Jamaica Kincaid asserts. "There is no longer such a thing as an 'American' culture. It's all black culture."

Henry Louis Gates, Jr. is director of the W. E. B. Du Bois Institute and chair of Harvard University's Afro-American studies department. He is the author, most recently, of Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Black Man (1997), coeditor, with Kwame Anthony Appiah, of Identities (1995), and a staff writer for The New Yorker.