Black Feelings: Race and Affect in the Long Sixties

Honorable Mention Recipient of the 2021 Marie Hochmuth Nichols Award for Outstanding Scholarship in Public Address by the National Communication Association

In the 1969 issue of Negro Digest, a young Black Arts Movement poet then-named Ameer (Amiri) Baraka published “We Are Our Feeling: The Black Aesthetic.” Baraka’s emphasis on the importance of feelings in Black selfhood expressed a touchstone for how the Black liberation movement grappled with emotions in response to the politics and raci...