# Black cultural and literary studies and post-blackness  
The cultural and literary focus of black studies can largely be traced to the influence of the Black Arts movement on its ideological and political formation. According to Barbara Christian, the latter helped to shape the discipline into a space for the reclamation of black culture and history, and for the engagement of blackness as an embodied and experiential reality. Literature, art, and expressive culture became politicized as tools to challenge structures of domination - white supremacy and Eurocentrism in particular - through the integration of feeling and knowledge, and the centring of black being-in-the-world. In effect, cultural and literary studies and production became the method by which the discipline could recreate the world.  
Black literary and cultural criticism flourished as a means of understanding blackness through textuality. Harvard University scholars Houston A. Baker Jr, Henry Louis Gates Jr, and Kwame Anthony Appiah, along with black feminist critics such as Barbara Christian, Valarie Smith, and Barbara Smith, were paramount in the textual turn. A notorious debate in 1987 between Joyce A. Joyce, Gates, and Baker in New Literary History conveys the ascendance of textuality in black studies, on the one hand, and the ambivalence of alternatively oriented black studies practitioners, on the other hand. With respect to the intersection of representation and black cultural studies, the contributions of Manthia Diawara, Hortense Spillers, and Jacqueline BoBo were indispensable. Additionally, scholars including Harold Cruse, Angela Davis, Cedric J. Robinson,  
bell hooks, and Robin D. G. Kelley made up the leftist wing of black literary and cultural criticism.