SOURCE: "Alice Childress's Rainbow Jordan: The Black Aesthetic Returns Dressed in Adolescent Fiction," Children's Literature Association Quarterly, Vol. 13, No. 2, Summer, 1988, pp. 70-4.

In the following review, Govan explores the role of the Black Aesthetic in Childress's novel Rainbow Jordan.

In 1988, twenty years beyond the period and in an age enamored of political voyeurism as opposed to political participation, it is decidedly unfashionable to speak favorably of the Black Aesthetic. As critical literary theory the Black Aesthetic was, after all, an overtly political doctrine, an artistic manifesto of the militant "revolutionary" 1960s. Nowadays, art from this period which adhered to a Black Aesthetic is shunned for its stridency or militancy; the aesthetic credo itself is now largely ignored or discredited. Yet curiously, I find that in order to discuss Alice Childress's Rainbow Jordan, I must also discuss the Black Aesthetic because for me, the one most decidedly evokes the...