African American Review articles from December 1993

African American Review archives from December 1993

Noir by noirs: towards a new realism in Black cinema.
December 22, 1993... Le film noir est noir pour nous, c'est-a-dire pour le public occidental et americain des annees 50. (Borde and Chaumeton 5) Looking eastward from the towers of Riverside Church perched among the university buildings on the high banks of the...

Blues, history and dramaturgy: an interview with August Wilson. (Interview)
December 22, 1993... August Wilson granted me the following interview while he was in Washington, DC, for the November 1991 premiere of Two Trains Running at the Kennedy Center. Extremely personable and undeniably committed to his art, Wilson carefully outlined his...

Blues, history and the dramaturgy of August Wilson.
December 22, 1993... August Wilson's dramatic project is comprised of a cycle of plays that explore some of the historical choices that have confronted African Americans during the twentieth century. Wilson contends that the black community currently is floundering...

In the window/monk. (poem) (Lower East Side Retrospective)
December 22, 1993... we thought it would always be whoever woulda dreamed it wouldnt huh? whoever woulda thought a pizza/ hotdog/ souvlaki place would usurp our house of dreams & visions on the comer of 3rd avenue & 8th street major threshold to an exalted state of...

Introduction to Lower East Side Retrospective. (Lower East Side Retrospective)
December 22, 1993... For many people, the Lower East Side of New York City has been a place of of historic interest and nostalgia. Groups often visit the area, particularly the decaying buildings that were sites of immigrant culture at the beginning of the century....

Alea's children: the avant-garde on the Lower East Side, 1960-1970. (Lower East Side Retrospective)
December 22, 1993... A century ago the area known as New York's Lower East Aside was among the most depressed neighborhoods in the city. As Milton Meltzer has noted, it had the distinction of being "the most crowded slum district in the city, and probably in the...

Umbra: a personal recounting. (a Lower East Side cultural group of the 1960's) (Lower East Side Retrospective)
December 22, 1993... Physically, as a cohesive, functioning group, Umbra existed for only couple of years. But in terms of its impact on my work and my life, the two years of Umbra's physical existence constituted a lifetime; its influence on my writing and its...

Slightly autobiographical: the 1960s on the Lower East Side. (Lower East Side Retrospective)
December 22, 1993... The Lower East Side of New York has little relation to the mid-upper (but not too far) East Side. In the early '60s, when I was living there, it had a distinct "otherness" from the West Side. Most people refused to think in terms of geographic...

The Lower East Side: a rebirth of world vision. (Lower East Side Retrospective)
December 22, 1993... The air on that mid-September night was filled with a heavy and sullen wetness. Light rain had been falling intermittently for hours. But nothing would deter the young and somewhat past-young writers of the Harlem Writers Guild from assembling...

Lower East Side Coda. (the impact of the Lower East Side, New York, experience) (Lower East Side Retrospective)
December 22, 1993... When Norma Rogers first mentioned the idea of a reunion of sixties Lower East Side artists and former Umbra Writers Workshop members, I responded enthusiastically, although I never thought she would be able to pull it off. After thirty years we...

Nella Larsen's 'Quicksand': untangling the webs of exoticism. (portrayal of Black women in Larsen's 'Quicksand' and Gertrude Stein's 'Three Lives')
December 22, 1993... In 1925, when Josephine Baker went to Paris to perform in the Revenue Negre, she drew attention for her comic faces and the ways in which she could move her body. Baker's biographer Phyllis Rose writes, "Every part of her seemed to go in a...

'Sula' and 'Beloved': images of Cain in the novels of Toni Morrison.
December 22, 1993... In The Mark of Cain, Ruth Mellinkoff rejects the single modern image of Cain she examines, Hesse's Demien, as an "intentionally distorted" treatment of the myth. In Hesse's novel, she claims, the interpreter has designed his interpretation...

Rendezvous in Bilad-as-Sudan. (poem)
December 22, 1993... that delirious summer in africa we met in dakar senegal o black pearl of africa lonely wayfarers we were parched & thirsty for togetherness as i sat hypnotized in a street cafe & watched the slow procession like stately giraffes...

That boy from Georgia is coming through here. (poem)
December 22, 1993... they changed curtains waxed floors aired out the front company room sent for camphor to lay throughout the house they cooked all night boiled bath water all day cornbread, okra, turnip salad, stewed chicken, fried chicken, dressing, killed the...

The lyrics of despair. (poem)
December 22, 1993... You stand in white light. The rhinestones dripping like a million tears from your dress. A lavender gardenia in your jetblack hair. Your eyes like so many wet grapes. You open the red gash in your face to bleed . . . the lyrics of your despair...

Reunion: August '89. (poem)
December 22, 1993... I can feel it sometimes inside the harmonies of a dozen sister cousins aunts & womenfamily sittin in the august sun fannin themselves. Busy gossipin bout we "mens" & our "trampy" womenfriends & stuff. My ears are held hostage to hearin .... ..

Fifth avenue uptown: James Baldwin, 1924-1987. (poem)
December 22, 1993... 1 Jimmy is dead; his body asleep; his mind at rest. So, too, the bright, snow-laden streets of Harlem, where cabdrivers doze inside mustard-colored taxis, where pedestrians walk beside the snarl of midday traffic, where the amazed-balloon...

The Jazz Poetry Anthology.
December 22, 1993... Sascha Feinstein and Yusef Kommunyakaa, eds. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1991. 256 pp; $39.95 doth; $14.95 paper. Feinstein and Komunyakaa's The Jazz Poetry Anthology and Charles O. Hartman's Jazz Text provide such different pleasures that...

Jazz Text: Voice and Improvisation in Poetry, Jazz, and Song.
December 22, 1993... Charles O. Hartman. Princeton: Princeton UP, 1991. 2D8 pp. $29.95. Feinstein and Komunyakaa's The Jazz Poetry Anthology and Charles O. Hartman's Jazz Text provide such different pleasures that they defy comparison. The former is hefty,...

Redefining American Literary History.
December 22, 1993... A. LaVonne Brown Ruoff and Jerry W. Ward, Jr., eds. New York: MLA, 1990. 410 pp. $45 hardcover; $19.50 paperback. In their introduction to Redefining American Literary History, A. LaVonne Brown Ruoff and Jerry W. Ward oppose conventional...

Black Empire.
December 22, 1993... Ed. Robert A. Hill and R. Kent Rasmussen. Boston: Northeastern UP, 1991. 348 pp. $24.95 hardcover; $14.95 paperback. I knew it was hokum. I knew Binks had rigged up this robot and I knew approximately just how it worked, and yet for the...

Native Son.
December 22, 1993... Ed. Arnold Rampersand. New York: Library of America, 1991. 925 pp. $35.00. Richard Wright's fictional works as published recently in the Library of America edition do, as the editor, Arnold Rampersad, hoped, promote new lines of inquiry,...

Infants of the Spring.
December 22, 1993... Wallace Thurman. Intro. by Amritjit Singh. Boston: Northeastern UP, 1992. 314 pp. $12.95 In 1923 Wallace Thurman briefly attended the School of Journalism (not Medicine, as Singh's introduction suggests) at USC, where his most important...

The "unguarded expressions of the feelings of the negroes": gender, slave resistance, and William Wells Brown's Revisions of 'Clotel.'
December 22, 1993... In his three book-form editions of Clotel (1853, 1864, and 1867), William Wells Brown divided and differently partitioned his attention between two competing plots. The first revolves around individual all-but-white female figures whose very...

Dominant and submerged discourses in 'The Life of Olaudah Equiano' (or Gustavus Vassa)?
December 22, 1993... 'Twas mercy brought me from my Pagan land, Taught my benighted soul to understand That there's a God, that there's a Savior too: Once I redemption neither sought nor knew. Some view our sable race with scornful eye, "There...