itics to the blues. In their ignorance they denigrated what they were both intellectually and emotionally unequipped to understand.Montage gave us defining metaphors of the black experience--"the dream deferred" and "raisins in the sun." Only Dunbar's "caged bird" mataphor comes close, in terms of popular acceptance, as a cultural image of African American life. As important and innovative as Montage is, most of us are not fully aware of this book-length accomplishment because we have bought into the establishment assessment that Hughes had a limited poetic technique. In a similar way, the establishment assessment assessed Thelonious Monk as having a limited piano techinique. But just as few pianists are able to play like Monk and no musicians have to able to match his compositional authority; similarity, emphasis on Eurocentric poetic devices notwithstanding few poets have been able to write from inside the black experience like Hughes, and no one has achieved as impressive a body of compositions, that is "textual peoms."Lanston Hughes was absolutely clear about the focus of his work and the danger inherent in articulating the history and vision, the realities and aspirations, of the sufferers.An emphasis on dual responsibilites, social literacy, is in itself a particular feature of a black aesthetic. This is not new, or novel, but it does continue to be controversial precisely because it contextualizes art within the world as the world actually is , beset by dominant and dominating forces who enforce (sometimes under the rubric of "free enterprise") all manners of economic exploitation.There is necessarily an opposition to "commercialism" inherent in the black aesthetic precisely because, from an African American perspective, the birth of the black experience, as archetypically illustrated by the Congo Suare experience, was simultaneously the site of both black art as ritual and black art as entertainment, with the entertainmen...
