Recent social dilemmas and political policies relating to voting access, police brutality, and civil rights in the USA have renewed interest in the historical significance of the 1960s. There is a genuine desire to understand the legacies of activism and to mine those legacies for solutions for the present. Margo Natalie Crawford's pioneering book Black Post-blackness: The Black Arts Movement and Twenty-First-Century Aesthetics offers a compelling link between artistic responses to the black arts movement (1965–75) and those of the current moment to make visible the contact points between the recent past and today. Exhaustive in its coverage, Crawford's book analyzes plays, poems, novels, visual art, sculpture, performances, music, and personal letters. Crawford presents this mix of texts in thematic chapters on anticipation, abstraction, counterliteracy, southern consciousness, satire, public art, and popular culture, forwarding an innovative theory of African American expressive culture.

Crawford argues that during the black arts movement (BAM), “artists’ search for the specificity of black art led to a wide horizon of shaping and unshaping of blackness that [she calls] ‘black post-blackness’” (2). She continues in insisting that this period is characterized by a “simultaneous investment in ‘blackness’ and a type of freedom that broke the boundaries of blackness” (4). Black post-blackness is her way of describing this dual investment in articulating a coherent black identity and aesthetic while also resisting limiting notions of either. This divergent aesthetic also describes twenty-first-century cultural approaches to black racial identity. An embracing of blackness paired with a questioning of that exact category unites the past and the present.

In proffering this argument, Crawford intervenes in discussions of the contemporary moment being “post-black,” or beyond race, epitomized in Touré's Who's Afraid of Post-blackness? What It Means to Be Black Now (2011), but rejects the use of post-blackness to describe the present moment as being exhausted with restrictive notions of identity. She insists that the questioning of a blind allegiance to racial community is a BAM legacy as opposed to a dismissal of the period. This clever assessment moves beyond Kenneth Warren's What Was African American Literature? (2011) and Darby English's How to See a Work of Art in Total Darkness (2007), which connect the 1960s moment with limiting notions of blackness. Instead of disavowing a constricting past to clear space for an open-ended present, Crawford makes clear how the BAM is the foundation for contemporary artistic fluidity.

The book's primary contribution lies in its construction of literary history. In connecting the BAM to later art, Crawford moves away from a strictly linear sense of aesthetic progression, one that depends on decisive breaks between periods. She proposes a recursive way of thinking about artistic history. Crawford tracks a constant shuttling between the concreteness of racial identity and a desire for abstraction and distance from racial identity in the BAM and the twenty-first century. Crawford challenges the reader to think of the BAM alongside the contemporary rather than as a historical impediment that must be sidestepped or overcome to get to current projects. Demonstrating the skillful construction of her prose, her argument's structure reflects this recursiveness. She discusses Amiri Baraka's In Our Terribleness (1970) across the chapters, repeatedly turning back to this text, adding new threads to the analysis as she advances the argument. Through this model of repetition with a difference, Crawford consciously builds on two influential works: Amiri Baraka's essay “Changing Same” (1966) and Henry Louis Gates Jr.'s The Signifying Monkey (1988).

In drawing these connections across time, Crawford relies on an innovative method she calls artistic interplay, which is both intertextual and intervisual. She looks for resonances across written texts and also locates them across visual texts, offering the reader strategies for assessing the relationship between the written and the visual. Though valuable, this movement back and forth across forms and time periods also presents a challenging component of the argument. The emphasis on interplay and recursiveness makes it difficult to appreciate the shifting historical contexts of artistic production. For example, are there particular factors that encourage the self-consciousness in BAM that makes it “unshape” blackness and anticipate later critiques? One may leave the book wondering if it is possible to historicize such shifts more explicitly. That being said, one can understand this feature as less a weakness of the project than a purposeful methodological choice that emphasizes a synchronous theory of literary history. The question of change over time becomes less pressing than the highlighting of recurring patterns in aesthetic ways of reading the black body in the social world.