6 - The Trey Ellis 1980s and the Discovery of an Artistic School

Summary

Trey Ellis’s novel Platitudes, published within a year of his landmark essay “The New Black Aesthetic,” is the essay come to fictional life: a novel about a struggling experimental Black male novelist who “collaborates” with a Black feminist novelist to tell the competing-narrative story oftwo Black teen characters who maintain their personas throughout the novel, even though they exist in different historical eras. Ellis’s publication of “The New Black Aesthetic” alongside Platitudes allows students of 1980s Black cultural production to view Ellis’s manifesto and his novel as symbiotic texts that are companion pieces that comment on a nascent, post-Civil Rights Movement school of Black art that has come to be known as post-Blackness. These two texts not only grapple with Black feminism but also push back at a mid-twentieth-century prose style that was not limited to Black female writers, and Platitudes ultimately represents the unstable, fluid nature of Blackness itself. An examination of the way Ellis’s works present a coherent case for post-Blackness acknowledges Ellis’s late-twentieth-century position as a key transitional figure in African American literary history.