User:Un8chimu/Black Images: A Critical Quarterly of Black Arts and Culture (magazine), Toronto, Canada

Black Images

File:Black images.jpg
Editor	Terry Hirst, Hilary Ng'weno, Oscar Festus
Categories	Arts and Culture Magazine
Frequency	infrequently
Circulation	10,000-30,000
First issue	1972
Company	Private
Country	Canada
Language	English
Website	[1]

Black Images: A Critical Quarterly of Black Arts and Culture was seminal in the development of Black Canadian culture. Founded in 1972 by an elusive, visionary editor, Jamaican-born Rudolph "Rudy" Murray - and his literary alter ego, M. Lacovia. Murray.

Content and Themes

While early issues combined coverage of Toronto's Black arts scene with reactionary polemics and theoretical expositions on pan-African culture, the launch of the second volume in 1973 heralded a break with racial nationalism and an attempt to chart an often more scholarly and more diverse, pluralistic, and complex set of aesthetic and formal lineages of black literature. This shift was reflected in the publication's design which moved from conceptually bold experimentations towards more a standard and readable digest format.

Publishing

Through these changes at Black Images, Rudy Murray remained a constant, though perhaps paradoxically, anomalous, figure. For reasons unknown, Murray adopted the pen name R.M. Lacovia and in the brief period of Black Images existence, writing as Lacovia, produced a body of writing that is astonishing in its breadth and original in its approach, yet remains practically unknown today. Murray contributed to almost every issue of Black Images until its closure in 1975, at which time he apparently stopped writing altogether.

Despite its short life span and continued obscurity, Black Images remains the most audacious and smart Black journal to have emerged from the Americas.

References and External links

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