“Lift Every Voice And Sing” was birthed in the emerging culture of black formalism. “ (B)lack formalism doesn’t follow the schema of what critics in the West conventionally describe as high- or low-status identities, nor does it adhere to the traditional Western rules of high and low culture, where rarified and exclusive tastes are deemed ‘high culture’ and popular and relatively simplistic tastes are part of ‘low culture.’ The formalism in black formalism came from the structure of the rituals and the regard for their seriousness….” (p. The theoretical constructs of “high” and “low” culture, and the linking of them (respectively) to the tastes and practices of the upper and lower classes collapse when confronted with “Lift Every Voice And Sing”. The African-American experience has always been orthogonal to the dominant European and European-American understandings of class and culture. Rather it was a ritual engagement in performative, musical, literary, institutional, and social culture with practiced seriousness.” For African-Americans in the Jim Crow South and the segregated North it was “ a means of articulating who they were and aspired to become.” (p. 12)īlack formalism “ was not an exercise in asserting cultural superiority or hierarchies, like so much formal culture of the West. 8) The singing of “Lift Every Voice And Sing” was and remains “ one of the most fundamental elements” of black formalism. It was engaged in across class lines rather than being rooted in a belief in white and middle-class superiority and pushed from the middle class top down to the poor….” (p. Not to be confused the the politics of respectability, black formalism, in Perry’s definition, “ describes practices that were primarily internal to the black community, rather than those based upon a white gaze or an aspiration for white acceptance.
( One in a series of posts on Imani Perry’s 2018 book, May We Forever Stand: A History Of The Black National Anthem.)Īmong other things, May We Forever Stand is a sustained and persuasive argument for the existence, distinctiveness, and centrality of black formalism as it arose in the late 19th century and continues to the present.
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