African American Review articles from December 1994

African American Review archives from December 1994

"Yours very truly": Ellen Craft - the fugitive as text and artifact.
December 22, 1994... Hide the outcast. Bury not him that wandereth. Let mine outcasts dwell with thee. Be thou a covert to them from the face of the spoiler. - Isaiah 16:3-4 (qtd. in Running a Thousand Miles for Freedom; or, the Escape of William and Ellen Craft from...

Mediating "race" and "nation:" the cultural politics of 'The Messenger.' (magazine)
December 22, 1994... Studies of the Harlem Renaissance have so far paid insufficient attention to American cultural nationalism as an important locus of transracial ideological contestation during the 1920s. Since Nathan Huggins's rather surprising conclusion that...

Nigger fate. (short story)
December 22, 1994... Almost a year ago, just before my dad died, when his bladder cancer had already spread through his body, he insisted that we go to the Metropolitan Museum. He wouldn't explain why. He flew up from North Carolina without my mother. At the museum,...

Angry arts: silence, speech, and song in Gayl Jones's 'Corregidora.'
December 22, 1994... Gayl Jones's Corregidora (1975) painfully, often brutally, explores rigid definitional boundaries of the self. Dealing with four generations of black Brazilian-American women who are strictly defined initially by a slaveholder/procurer and then...

Missing peace in Toni Morrison's 'Sula' and 'Beloved.' (female Afro-American fiction writer)
December 22, 1994... From her earliest fictional work The Bluest Eye (1970) to her latest, Jazz (1992), Toni Morrison cultivates an aesthetic of ambiguity. Placing Morrison in a "postmodernist" context, Robert Grant, for instance, describes both the "labor" of...

The baseball boys of 1964. (poem)
December 22, 1994... Bobby Jo loved my sister Sarah deep in the woods behind our house and I pretended not to notice he was whiter than most of the other boys. With red hair he was flaming. It's a wonder they didn't set the woods afire. But that's another story....

Our town was any town, but Motown was heaven. (poem)
December 22, 1994... The True Story of Jesse James is still playing downtown; up on Market at the Manor, The Guns of Navarone. It's funny how every town has a Market Street corner full of tomato-red headrags tied back fresh around the colored faces of summertime...

Simon and Naomi. (poem)
December 22, 1994... God writes long letters and mails them postage due to come early one morning in the May of my childhood. We didn't have a box buried with our name in black letters embellishing the roadsides of this one-stop Greyhound town of mostly white folks...

For Etheridge Knight (1933 - March 10, 1991). (poem)
December 22, 1994... Break - heart, in your madness - rejoice in nothing that is - tomorrow's the day Etheridge goes down deeper than sleep - he's gone out today like thin air - his life-force breath and spirit freed from the poor tortured body in disease will never...

The driven who ride anyway. (poem)
December 22, 1994... It is the endless nightmare of the mind in continuous waking with no forest of green sleep but massed rancid ragheaps, the logs written like live graffiti sprawled across mass transit seats spelling chronicles of an ending like plague-words made...

Zoning (for MMB). (poem)
December 22, 1994... In the wild zone, we wait and watch and pray. A small, golden voice, delicate as a fairy flower, Some lady's slipper shaft of rain-forest sunlight Speaks up to me, "We are African-American people." "Yes, we are," I answer; "yes, we are." In a...

Dizzy (for the late jazz trumpeter Dizzy Gillespie). (poem)
December 22, 1994... They called him Dizzy but the man had plenty sense. Pumping that trumpet like he had full moons in his jaws. A whole solar system of soul rhythms coming at ya through a brass rocket. They called him Dizzy for clowning and frowning on stage and...

"Never cross the divide": reconstructing Langston Hughes's 'Not Without Laughter.' (African-American poet and novelist)
December 22, 1994... In their discussions of the period in Langston Hughes's life during which he composed Not Without Laughter, Faith Berry and Arnold Rampersad detail the author's relationship with Mrs. Charlotte Mason - the wealthy white patron whom he called...

Limited options: strategic maneuverings in Hime's Harlem. (American author Chester Himes; Harlem, New York, New York)
December 22, 1994... Chester Himes, an American author who in his lifetime never found a "place" in the American literary scene, set his novels written during French expatriation in the nostalgic milieu of a Harlem he half-created in his imagination. In fiction he...

Smoke. (short story)
December 22, 1994... When I remember that house, I see it through a cloud of smoke. Our house was just an overgrown shotgun shack, set back from the street in the middle of a dusty red yard. I don't remember anyone ever painting it, but chips of white paint always...

Airshafts, loudspeakers, and the hip hop sample: contexts and African American musical aesthetics.
December 22, 1994... The art of digital sampling in (primarily) African American hip hop is intricately connected to an African American/African diasporic aesthetic which carefully selects available media, texts, and contexts for performative use. Thomas Porcello...

The Ira Aldridge Troupe: early Black minstrelsy in Philadelphia.
December 22, 1994... Minstrelsy before 1865 was a largely white-owned and white-performed phenomenon. There were, before 1865, few companies that had Black performers and that were Black-controlled. Robert Toll, in Blacking Up, lists only six such groups, none of...

Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination.
December 22, 1994... In "Blueprint for Black Studies and Multiculturalism," Manning Marable declares that "African American Studies is at the edge of a second Renaissance, a new level of growth, institutionalization and theoretical advancement" (30). We find it...

Alice Walker.
December 22, 1994... Donna Haisty Wincholl. Alice Walker. New York: Twayne, 1992. 152 pp. $21-95. Jacqueline de Weever. Mythmaking and Metaphor in Black Women's Fiction. New York: St. Martin's, 1991. 194 pp. &35.00 cloth/$l5.95 paper. Although neither...

Mythmaking and Metaphor in Black Women's Fiction.
December 22, 1994... Although neither Jacqueline de Weever's Mythmaking and Metaphor in Black Women's Fiction nor Donna Haisty Winchell's Alice Walker deliberately creates controversy, both do focus many of the areas of debate which have surrounded African American...

Neon Vernacular: New and Selected Poems.
December 22, 1994... What engages one right off is the quality of the language of Komunyakaa's poetry, a freshness marked by a delightful figurativeness and a wit that never cloys and which may be attributed in great part to the richness of the material from which it...

Poetic Penguins.
December 22, 1994... It is by now a commonplace to note the wide variety -- the depth and breadth -- of voice and perspectives present in contemporary African American poetry. Despite the attempts of mid-twentieth-century literary historians to demonstrate...

Lodestar and Other Night Lights.
December 22, 1994... It is by now a commonplace to note the wide variety - the depth and breadth - of voice and perspectives present in contemporary African American poetry. Despite the attempts of mid-twentieth-century literary historians to demonstrate otherwise,...

Poetry Reading.
December 22, 1994... In 1991 Lenard D. Moore won the Third Black Writers Competition and as part of his prize gave a reading sponsored by the North Carolina Writers' Network at North Carolina Central University, in Durham. Though not yet forty, Moore is a...

Black Authors and Illustrators of Children's Books: A Biographical Dictionary.
December 22, 1994... Nearly thirty years have passed since Nancy Larrick's article "The All-White World of Children's Books" appeared in the Saturday Review. Larrick had conducted a three-year study of over 5,000 juvenile books which revealed that less than one...

Books by African-American Authors and Illustrators.
December 22, 1994... Nearly thirty years have passed since Nancy Larrick's article "The All-White World of Children's Books" appeared in the Saturday Review. Larrick had conducted a three-year study of over 5,000 juvenile books which revealed that less than one...

Multicultural Literature for Children and Young Adults.
December 22, 1994... Nearly thirty years have passed since Nancy Larrick's article "The All-White World of Children's Books" appeared in the Saturday Review. Larrick had conducted a three-year study of over 5,000 juvenile books which revealed that less than one...