Black aesthetics provides the possibility of establishing an independent and coherent discourse of black literary criticism, which attempts to explore the roots, themes, structures, terms and symbols of black American culture. Amiri amiri baraka believes that the ideal of nationalism is the key to restore the African culture once lost during the European colonial period. He put forward the slogan "black is beauty" and called on black writers to express this aesthetic principle through literature and art, so as to re-evaluate the significance of black literature from the social and political value. They gave spiritual and cultural guidance to blacks through magazines such as Liberator, Black Poetry Monthly and Black Digest (1970 was renamed Black World), and made them realize the hegemonic tendency of European aesthetic values in the field of cultural knowledge and its negative influence on American black culture.
A remarkable feature of black literary criticism in this period lies in the diversity of critical theories and methods: from early Jones' phenomenological theory to Neil's mythological criticism, from Fuller's social criticism to Henderson's historical aesthetic practice, from Gail's moral criticism to late Jones' cultural criticism, and so on. 1967, Clarence Major published Black Label. Since then, black aesthetics has become a remarkable thing through the efforts of many black critics, such as Hoyt W Fuller, Larry Neil, Stephen Henderson and Addison Gayle Jr. From 65438 to 0968, Fuller published Towards Black Aesthetics, which clearly linked black aesthetics with the black rights movement. In order to gain unity and strength within the black society, blacks must find and respect their unique cultural roots and need a "mysterious black nature" that is not affected by white racist cultural values. From 65438 to 0968, Neil published his famous paper "Black Literature Movement", commenting on the attempts of black artists to break away from the mainstream artistic model of white people and develop a creative model based on African cultural traditions, trying to incorporate the emerging black aesthetics into a ritualized artistic theory. In his view, the real source of black art is community music and oral folk stories, and new art must turn to these sources in order to become an inseparable part of contemporary black life (Note: Cheng Xilin's A New Rise of Theoretical Criticism: American Black Aesthetics, Foreign Literature, No.6, 1993. )。
Henderson and Gail are two masters of black aesthetics. Henderson does not believe that "beauty" has a universal form, and all forms of beauty are in culture.