Language, Literature and Culture 2021; 4(1): 1-6 http://www.aascit.org/journal/llc Art as Resistance: Black Aestheticism in Amiri Baraka’ and Maya Angelou’s Selected Poetry Hamza Rauf Awan Department of English, Forman Christian College University, Lahore, Pakistan Email address Citation Hamza Rauf Awan. Art as Resistance: Black Aestheticism in Amiri Baraka’ and Maya Angelou’s Selected Poetry. Language, Literature and Culture. Vol. 4, No. 1, 2021, pp. 1-6. Received: October 14, 2020; Accepted: December 9, 2020; Published: January 11, 2021 Abstract: The broad range of postcolonial literature deals with the issues of racism, anti-colonial rhetoric and rights acceptance, and it presents itself as resistance to common beliefs of universal euro-centrism. The present dissertation endeavors to highlight the socio-cultural and literary aspects of art which provides the external settings of the age it is being produced in and also unveils the overt ideology imbedded in literature. Moreover, it relies on two central questions: how African- Americans art becomes a voice of collective black consciousness and in what manners artistic compositions alter the conceptions and pre-perceptions of the natives under colonization. It contends that Angelou’ and Baraka’s poetry and its aesthetics not only pinpoint the black cultural stereotypes but also become a channel to disseminate the shared problems and consciousness of the color people. This research propounds to explore the black experience embedded in art and explores how art has always been a vessel for demonstration of collective experience of a community. By addressing the intricacies of black aesthetics in Afro-American art, this research props up new dimensions to study black experience and especially the concept of Eurocentrism in new folds in the contemporary age; this research paper, all in all, explores and analysis black experience along with black aesthetics in art. Keywords: Color People, Black Consciousness, Black Art and Resistance 1. Introduction Aesthetics, be it literary or socio-cultural, refers to the beautification of any phenomenon in accordance with certain norms, styles, and specifically, ethics. There is no denial of the fact that literary aesthetics catalyzes and provides an epitome of socio-cultural and historic settings; its roots can be traced in its history. The seed of literary standards sown by Greek philosophers nurtured with historic evaluation of external factors and trends in society. In other words, it is to say that classic literary ideas disseminated by Plato and Aristotle not only depict the candid picture of their respective age but also put forward their respective social understandings along with imbedded stressors to affect the receptors’ minds. For instance, the classics focus on the nature of art whereas romantics rely on its functions. With the same grain, the literary tendency towards aesthetics and its expression evolves with time. Likewise, the modern man and its taste for literary aesthetics have altered and prostituted remarkably. Artistically, after WWs and treacherous mechanizations of colonization, the modern man has to deal with repercussions of stringent trinity of capitalism, colonization and imperialism. Consequentially, art has becomes a channel or medium to act as resistance to such overt powers. ‘Storytellers are a threat. They threaten all champions of control; they frighten usurpers of the right-to-freedom of the human spirit’ [1]. Keeping in view the aforementioned argument, so art can be an impediment and it may give rise to literary movements with resistant agenda. Thus, it is pertinent to mention here that Black Arts Movement is also a product of art evolution, wherein art like poetry, novels, and other artistic productions unanimously provided support for Black rights. Surprisingly, the selected poet, Amiri Baraka, was the main activist of BAM and his literary oeuvre succinctly depicts this in particular. Additionally, it is not wrong to argue that art has become anti-colonial or anti-imperial discourse for Africans; a channel embodied with lingual, socio-cultural and psychological expression in the form of language or audio-visual expressions [10]. In addition to the role of art and its outburst in the form of BAM as resistance medium, Harlem Renaissance and Civil