A Critical Afrocentric Reading of the Artist's Responsibility in the Creative Process

Abstract

This study explores creative expression as a form and function of activism, self-determination, self-actualization, community transformation, and cultural resilience/survival. Initiating this probe into the vast topic, the study begins with the following set of research questions: What is the highest responsibility of African artists? Is it to the work of art itself—to pursue an object perceived as an island of form and symbol with little or no reference to other life experiences that lends itself to urgent, relevant social interpretation; is it to identify and promote one’s self as an individual seeking self-glorification and or commendation, to prove humanity and/or worthiness to others, or to intensify the advancement toward the total liberation of all African people? This decidedly theoretical endeavor primarily concerns itself with African creative expressions (literary creations, cultural performance, visual and musical expressions) within the constructed boundaries of the United States of America that included not only a historical overview of the earliest extant Black cultural creations, but also an evaluation of the socio-historical and political context in which African artists—with distinctive attention on musicians and visual artists—flourished within the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, including those contemporary artists who continue to thrive in the twenty-first century. Among other issues, this treatise specifically ponders relative to the moral and ethical obligation of African artists’ is the challenge African creatives face in making political and creative expressions synonymous.