African American Review articles from December 1995

African American Review archives from December 1995

Jimmy on the east 15th street. (African writer James Baldwin)
December 22, 1995... When, in early December of 1987, the news came of Jimmy s death in France at the age of 63, I went down to the basement with a handful of keys and on the third or fourth try opened a footlocker and dug out a musty black report binder labeled, in...

The roots of the body in Toni Morrison: A Mater of "Ancient Properties". (woman author)
December 22, 1995... "No matter what you did," muses the unhappy Jadine in Tar Baby, "the diaspora mothers with pumping breasts would impugn your character" (288). The "diaspora mothers" are everywhere. They are the night women who visit Jadine in a dream, the...

"Why don't he like my hair?": constructing African-American Standards of Beauty in Toni Morrison's 'Song of Solomon' and Zora Neale Hurston's 'Their Eyes Were Watching God.'
December 22, 1995... "How can he not love your hair? . . . It's his hair too. He got to love it." "He don't love it at all. He hates it." (Song 315) This last declaration, uttered by a feverish, distraught, dangerously mentally ill Hagar Dead to her mother Reba...

An interview with Jewell Parker Rhodes. (interview with African American writer)(Interview)
December 22, 1995... On March 31, 1995, Jewell Parker Rhodes arrived in Warrensburg, Missouri, for a speaking engagement at Central Missouri State University. Her topic was Voodoo Dreams, published by St. Martin's Press in 1993, and now available in paperback from...

Towards a poetization of the "Field of Manners".
December 22, 1995... In awarding the 1993 Nobel Prize for literature to African American novelist Toni Morrison, the Swedish Academy called Morrison "a literary artist of the first rank" whose work is "unusually finely wrought and cohesive, yet at the same time rich...

Liberty censored: black living newspapers of the Federal Theatre Project.
December 22, 1995... The living newspaper, a favorite genre of Hallie Flanagan, the Director of the Federal Theatre Project, was one of America's most ambitious theatrical efforts in the period between the world wars. Descended from the Soviet Red Army's Zhivaya...

Enemies. (poem)
December 22, 1995... At night the loading dock doors are open to the truckyard. The church sits in the middle, defiant and mostly empty. They would rather worship once a month in silence than sell to the company so the trucks can swing around without cursing church...

The Southpaw. (poem)
December 22, 1995... The fist is a hand that has made decisions. It has sat on a rock holding its thoughts over the edge of a lake, weighing this, weighing that. It has paced through woods in autumn, kicking leaves over matters philosophical and literary. It has...

Wrath of a daydream (the funeral of James Baldwin). (poem)
December 22, 1995... i sit at home day in hand gray cat turned around my feet knowing headlights pavement the stopping of clocks carnival of African Drums dislocates the church hymnals as bodies shake and stutter in unison the pulse of rhythm beats hearts into...

For Malcolm, with gratitude. (poem)
December 22, 1995... for all the lost years of imprisonment & That Beam of Light which came into the cell of Your skull. for the Revolution in You for eschewing all wickedness, vanity & self-hatred, for loving the African You for becoming an agent of Truth of...

Charles Johnson's quest for black freedom in 'Oxherding Tale.'
December 22, 1995... Charles Johnson's main emphasis in Oxherding Tale (1982) is on black written textuality. Oxherding Tale tries to achieve freedom from the hegemony of what Johnson sees as a narrow, limiting tradition of written black texts. This tradition,...

Interrogating identity: appropriation and transformation in 'Middle Passage.'
December 22, 1995... "My final prayer: O my body, make of me always a man who questions!" (Frantz Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks) Staging an inquiry into the nature of origin, experience, and meaning, Charles Johnson's Middle Passage scrutinizes the structures of...

The African sacrificial kingship ritual and Johnson's 'Middle Passage.'
December 22, 1995... In a recent article, Ashraf Rushdy laments that the Allmuseri tribe and its god in Johnson's Middle Passage do not exist in this world, but rather "exist only as a fictional product of Charles Johnson's fertile imagination" (373). He reads the...

Black Noise: Rap Music and Black Culture in Contemporary America.
December 22, 1995... Reviewed by Houston A. Baker, Jr. University of Pennsylvania One of the most bizarre black events of 1994 was the spectacle of Reverend Calvin Butts - pastor of Harlem's Abyssinian Baptist Church and one of America's most prestigious grown men...

Witness for Freedom: African American Voices on Race, Slavery, and Emancipation.
December 22, 1995... Reviewed by Merton L. Dillon Ohio State University Readers of a certain age will recognize that this splendid book probably would not have been published a generation ago, nor is it much more likely that anyone then would have thought of...

William Johnson's Natchez: The Ante-Bellum Diary of a Free Negro.
December 22, 1995... Reviewed by Nick Salvatore Comell University When Alexis de Tocqueville visited the United States in 1831, his travels brought him through the populous cities of the Northeast, into the recently settled states of the old Northwest Territory,...

Gabriel's Rebellion: The Virginia Slave Conspiracies of 1800 and 1802.
December 22, 1995... Reviewed by Mary Kemp Davis Meredith College In walking slowly along one of the cross streets just now, I heard a parcel of negroes talking, and hearing Norfolk, cowards, &c., I passed them, and then walked easily back to hear the subject of...

The Sleeper Wakes: Harlem Renaissance Stories by Women.
December 22, 1995... Reviewed by Arlene Elder University of Cincinnati Marcy Knopf's The Sleeper Wakes adds another welcome voice to the chorus of rediscovery of early African-American women writers whose multiple perspectives and interests demonstrate the...

Richard Wright: Critical Perspectives Past and Present.
December 22, 1995... Reviewed by Yoshinobu Hakutani Kent State University Since 1970, Wright criticism has prompted over half a dozen collections, three of them on Native Son alone. At least four more are well under way. Amidst this flourishing writing and...

Sorrow Is the Only Faithful One: The Life of Owen Dodson.
December 22, 1995... Reviewed by Barbara Lewis New York University "Owen's career walked the very edge of theater history," James Hatch writes in the final chapter of his provocative and sensitively detailed biography of Owen Dodson. Hatch's assessment that...

Wild Women Don't Wear No Blues.
December 22, 1995... Reviewed by Lynda M. Hill Temple University In this collection, Marita Golden and fourteen black women poets, novelists, and journalists articulate in various styles their vastly different experiences with their own sexuality. As editor, Golden...

Signifying as a Scaffold for Literary Interpretation: The Pedagogical Implications of an African American Discourse Genre.
December 22, 1995... Reviewed by R. Baird Shuman University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign Carol Lee's aim in this study, which was the subject of her doctoral dissertation at the University of Chicago, is to extend earlier research, notably that of Geneva...

Jumping Ship and Other Stories.
December 22, 1995... Reviewed by Heather Hathaway Marquette University Kelvin Christopher James's first collection of short fiction, Jumping Ship and Other Stories, is a powerful, unsettling, and dramatic work which signals the arrival of a new figure among an...

Djbot Baghostus's Run.
December 22, 1995... Reviewed by Karla F. C. Holloway Duke University As the second volume of a promised trilogy with its own enigmatic title (From a Broken Bottle Traces of Perfume Still Emanate), Djbot Baghostus's Run continues the epistolary run of the Bedouin...

The Time: Portrait of a Journey Home.
December 22, 1995... Reviewed by Lorenzo Thomas University of Houston-Downtown Poetry is, first of all, song; it is a use of the voice that transcends everyday speech. In the context of the written word, poetry means construction of a text that challenges ordinary...