“Don’t Say Goodbye to the Pork Pie Hat”:
Re-Evaluating Larry Neal’s Creative and Critical Vision of the Black Aesthetic

October 19-20 - Brooklyn College
October 21 - Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture

Hosted by:

George C. Cunningham

and

The Department of Africana Studies

Brooklyn College (CUNY)

Organized by:

                                   Mae G. Henderson                     Carter A. Mathes

                                   Department of English                Department of English

                                   and Comparative Literature         Rutgers University

                                   University of North Carolina

                                   at Chapel Hill

Summary: “Don’t Say Goodby to the Pork Pie Hat” is a conference, designed to restore to the cultural repository the record of and critical responses to Larry Neal (1937-1981), a poet, playwright, and essayist whose moral vision, intellectual independence, and scholarly integrity remain a model and inspiration for future achievement. Scheduled for October 19th and 20th at Brooklyn College, with a concluding session at the Schomburg Library on the 21st the conference has drawn scholars from throughout the nation and Kimberly W. Benston, the Kenan Professor of English as Haverford College, will give the keynote speech. The presentations will bridge a substantial gap in the current scholarship on the Black Arts Movement of the 1960s by documenting the centrality of Neal who is arguably the founding theorist of black American cultural studies. Not only does Larry Neal's work provide an early model of critical interdisciplinarity, attesting to the interrelated nature of music, drama, literature, and folklore, but his legacy is also one of collaboration with other writers/thinkers -- Baraka (Black Fire, 1969), A.B. Spellman (Cricket 1968-69).

The conference organizers who themselves represent a collaboration of several institutions, and the presenters include emerging and senior scholars, those who studied with and were friends of Neal and those who have studied and were inspired by his contribution. With the recent availability of the Larry Neal Papers at the Schomburg Center for research in Black Culture, it is time for his creative and critical vision to be re-assessed not only to accurately historicize the Black Arts era, but also to enable those engaged in the current project of black cultural studies to more fully understand the methodological foundation of their work.

Background: Lawrence Paul “Larry” Neal produced, before his untimely death in 1981, two volumes of poetry (Black Boogaloo and Hoodoo Hollerin Bebop Ghosts), two plays (The Glorious Monster in the Bell of the Horn and In an Upstate Motel), as well as several short stories and numerous critical and theoretical essays. As artist, theorist, and activist, Neal became for the Black Arts Movement -- which he memorably described as the “aesthetic and spiritual sister of the Black Power concept” – what author and critic Kimberly Benston describes as an exemplar of the “aesthetic and political credo of the movement.”

Demonstrating his vast talent within multiple genres of African American literary and cultural expression including music, poetry, fiction, and theatre, Neal combined his liberating artistic praxis with a critique of the stranglehold of western cultural aesthetics, a critical approach embedded within the formation and cultural production of the Black Arts Movement. As co-founder of the journal of black musical expression, Cricket, editor of the politically influential Liberator, and contributor to other important journals and magazines, including Soulbook, The Journal of Black Poetry, and Black Theater, Neal theorized and politicized notions of the “black aesthetic,” through an expansive series of writings asserting the various theoretical and political layers comprising black cultural production and performance. Across these various fields of inquiry, and through positions such as education director of the Black Panther Party, member of the Revolutionary Action Movement, co-director of the Black Arts Repertory Theatre School in Harlem, university professor, and later as D.C. Commissioner of the Arts, Neal remained actively committed to promoting the ethos of the black aesthetic.  As a co-editor (with Amiri Baraka) of the seminal Black Arts volume, Black Fire (1968), and author of a massive volume of published and unpublished criticism and essays spanning the years of the movement until his death (1965-1981), Neal remains one of the key architects of the Black Aesthetic and among the chief practitioners of the Black Arts Movement.

Since the mid-nineties, the Black Arts Movement and its significance has become an area of considerable interest among young and emergent scholars. Yet, despite the increasing number of books, articles, and dissertations that focus on the period and movement, there remains much to be said regarding the formative role of Larry Neal in the founding and shaping of the Black Arts Movement. There still exists no work that singularly assesses the contributions of this important theorist and practitioner who dedicated his intellectual career to constantly re-visioning the black aesthetic.  The examination of Neal’s work, then, is crucial to reconstructing the period of the nineteen sixties and seventies, a period that in many ways represents a watershed or flashpoint for contemporary black cultural studies.