Black nationalist art prioritized racial affiliation over aesthetic unity.

Evidence

Following the experimentation in black aesthetics, the representation of black culture became, for this category of artists, a political claim characteristic of what was known, by the end of the 1960s, as the “Black Experience.” In the historical continuum, and contemporaneous with nationalist political stands, there was an implementation of black nationalism in the Black Arts Movement. This also concerned issues and differences theorized at the time between black art and black artists. There is, indeed, a distinction between black artists rallying politically in and through a cultural display, and the organization of a contemporary black art exhibition. In the latter case, the undertaking is aimed explicitly at creating an artistic unity, aesthetically meaningful, while in the first case, the racial affiliation is privileged above all. — David Theo Goldberg, John Solomos, A Companion to Racial and Ethnic Studies, 2884

Categorization

• XREF: connects to: Black writers in this period engaged global imperial debates only from a nationalist standpoint — Aijaz Ahmad, In Theory: Classes, Nations, Literatures, 353