This work offers an interpretation of black cultural expression since the Black Arts Movement of the 1960s. Exploring drama, music, poetry, sermons, and criticism, Benston establishes the complexity and vitality of the performance ethos as it defines the quest for a distinctively black mode of modernist identity. Beginning with an account of several competing frameworks for understanding African-American performance, the text proceeds to read closely major works in order to locate the crossroads of commonality and difference by which African-American modernism produces an identifiable, if potentially unstable, synthesis. The book locates a network of thematic, conceptual, and visionary imperatives that, taken together, compose the texture of African-American modernist inquiry. Artists covered include: Ntozake Shange; Ed Bullins; John Coltrane; Amiri Baraka; Adrienne Kennedy; and Michael Harper.