The Humanities Review

Issue date: 1/16/08 Section: Fall 2007

IN "THE NEW BLACK AESTHETIC," published in Callaloo in 1989, Trey Ellis identifies a rupture between the black aesthetics of previous generations, and the "new" aesthetics of black artists who came of age in a post-integration era. These younger artists, unfettered by concerns over racial authenticity or, more pertinently, black cultural traditions, borrow as easily from white culture as from black, and are therefore what Ellis refers to as "cultural mulattoes." He writes, "Just as a genetic mulatto is a black person of mixed parents who can often get along fine with his white grandparents, a cultural mulatto, educated by a multi-racial mix of cultures, can also navigate easily in the white world" (235). This easy navigation between black and white worlds is the key distinction between a "new" black aesthetic-which, according to Ellis, encompasses such varied forms as the comedy of Eddie Murphy and Chris Rock, the films of Spike Lee, the jazz of Wynton Marsalis-and older black aesthetic movements, most notably the Black Arts Movement, which often focused on delineating an essential blackness through art and meaning. Ellis proposes that the young black artists who came of age after integration form a black arts movement that constantly challenges what blackness "is."

Ellis argues that the older problems of the color line need not daunt a younger generation of black culture makers. In order to make this claim, he creates a number of elisions in his overall depiction of who these black artists might be or what they might want. It is the nature of these elisions that informs some critical responses to the essay. In his introduction to a 2003 edition of Ellis's first novel Platitudes (1988) that also includes "The New Black Aesthetic," Bertram Ashe refers to the decidedly cool reception that followed publication of the 1989 essay. Early responses by Tera Hunter and Eric Lott, for instance, critique Ellis's overly masculinist stance and silence with regard to a class analysis, respectively. William Banks, like Hunter, points to the lack of aesthetic unity among the artists Ellis identifies. Conversely, Mark Anthony Neal points out that Ellis does not draw the possible lines of unity between the second generation, middle class artists he focuses so closely on and the hip-hop artists who also "borrow across" racial and class cultures in similar ways. But Ashe emphasizes that these responses temper their cynicism over the New Black Aesthetic with recognition of its potential. He writes, "like any other exploratory formulation, 'The New Black Aesthetic' was bound to ­­have its critics, some of whom raise insightful and legitimate points. But these same critics almost invariably acknowledge, sometimes grudgingly, that Ellis was holding a novel and engaging lens through which to view late twentieth-century black cultural production" (xiv).

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