A post by Nicholas Whittaker

There is something important in the oxymoronism implicit in the phrase “the black avant-garde.” A well-meaning reader (or one clutching tightly to their purported “antiracism”) will chafe at the suggestion that “blackness” and “avant-garde” become paradoxical when conjoined. The easiest way to resist it is to generate examples. Take, say, Julius Eastman, or Adrian Piper; M. Nourbese Phillip, Amiri Baraka; Alice Coltrane, Bill Gunn; Ben Patterson, Nathaniel Mackey; Cecil Taylor, Julie Dash. Such luminaries seem to uncontroversially occupy the place in art history generally reserved for the likes of Marcel Duchamp and John Cage, David Lynch and Gertrude Stein. If the black avant-garde is an incoherent concept, why can we list so many examples with such ease?