Black abstraction: The Umbra Workshop and an African American avantgarde.

Abstract

This dissertation considers the historical formation and aesthetic production of the Umbra Workshop, a group of predominantly African-American writers, artists, and musicians that conducted weekly writing workshops on New York's Lower East Side from 1962--1963. While the group is frequently cited in discussions of individual members---Steve Cannon, Tom Dent, Tom Feelings, David Henderson, Calvin Hernton, Joe Johnson, Joe Overstreet, Lorenzo Thomas, Ishmael Reed, and others---there has been little sustained effort to locate Umbra in larger historical or artistic contexts. Through a broadly interdisciplinary methodology, this dissertation argues that Umbra substantially revised and extended debates within the cultures of the African diaspora, Black Marxism, anticolonialism, and nationalism at the same time that it served as an avantgarde example of what critic Aldon Nielsen has described as African-American postmodernism; Umbra most directly and self-consciously preceded the Black Arts Movement while also (in certain key respects) retaining a distinction between politics and art. This project is undertaken through four case studies. The first examines a significant predecessor to <italic>Umbra</italic>, Wallace Thurman's one-issue 1926 magazine, <italic>Fire!!</italic>, and its relation to leftwing, cultural-front activism from the 30s to the 50s. The second case study articulates a politics of prose developed by members of the Harlem Writers Guild---John Oliver Killens, Sarah E. Wright, and Rosa Guy---as they responded to the crisis of Cold War decolonization that led up to and followed Patrice Lumumba's assassination. The third case study focuses on Umbra member Lorenzo Thomas's poetic response to the U.N. protest, which appeared in the first issue of <italic> Umbra</italic>, as indicative of an aesthetic link between contemporary global politics and the history of slavery, particularly representations of the Middle Passage. The fourth case study follows Umbra member Tom Dent in his return to his hometown of New Orleans, focusing on Dent's involvement with the activist Free Southern Theater and its literary journal <italic>Nkombo</italic>, the BLKARTSOUTH writing workshop that grew out of the FST, and Dent's own literary production up to the point of his death in 1998.