African American Review articles from December 1996

African American Review archives from December 1996

Introduction. (author Charles Johnson)
December 22, 1996... The opportunity we have had to serve as guest editors of this special issue devoted to the work of Charles Johnson has been a cause for celebration. Both of us count ourselves as huge fans of Charles's work, but we also felt the need to move...

The gift of the Osuo. (short story)
December 22, 1996... (With apologies to Herman Hesse's "The Indian Life") Guest Editors' Note: When we first proposed to include a work of fiction in this issue, Charles Johnson was more than willing to provide us with some previously unpublished work. However, we...

'Sorcery is dialectical:' Plato and Jean Toomer in Charles Johnson's 'The Sorcerer's Apprentice.' (philosopher; authors)
December 22, 1996... "The Sorcerer's Apprentice" Johnson's collection of "tales and conjurations" ends uncannily in a conjuration with an uncertain outcome. With all the good intentions in the world Allan Jackson has finished his apprenticeship to the Allmuseri...

The artist as universal mind: Berkeley's influence on Charles Johnson. (Irish bishop-philosopher-writer's influence on another author)
December 22, 1996... Charles Johnson's volume of short stories The Sorcerer's Apprentice opposes the artist's imaginative world to a naive realism that reduces all objects to their sheer materialistic value. In general terms, the "negative" characters of Johnson's...

'Oxherding Tale' and 'Siddhartha:' philosophy, fiction, and the emergence of a hidden tradition. (novel by Charles Johnson; novel by German author Herman Hesse)
December 22, 1996... Charles Johnson has written a searching introduction to the Plume edition of Oxherding Tale, originally published in 1982, in which he carefully sets forth the genesis and publishing history of his second novel. This edition of Oxherding Tale is...

An interview with Charles Johnson. (author)(Interview)
December 22, 1996... When approached to participate in this interview, Charles Johnson responded with his usual enthusiasm: "Send me questions! I'll try to provide everything on my end." So I sat down and produced questions dealing with three general areas - artist,...

John Gardner as mentor. (author)
December 22, 1996... On a rainy evening in September, 1972, when I was 24 years old and a master's degree philosophy student at Southern Illinois University, I drifted quite by accident, and with no knowledge of how radically my life would be changed, into the orbit...

Passages from the middle: coloniality and postcoloniality in Charles Johnson's 'Middle Passage.'
December 22, 1996... I know that if I want to smoke, I shall have to reach out my right arm and take the pack of cigarettes lying at the other end of the table. The matches, however, are in the drawer on the left, and I shall have to lean back slightly. And all these...

Reading rigor mortis: offstage violence and excluded middles 'in' Johnson's 'Middle Passage' and Morrison's 'Beloved.' (authors Charles Johnson and Toni Morrison)
December 22, 1996... In recent interviews and in Being & Race: Black Writing since 1970, Charles Johnson often stresses one of the goals of his fiction: the "decalcification of perception," especially perception that leads to binary thinking, fixed identities, and...

Isadora at sea: misogyny as comic capital in Charles Johnson's 'Middle Passage.' (fictional character Isadora Bailey)
December 22, 1996... When Rutherford Calhoun goes, Ishmael-like, to the waterfront early in Charles Johnson's Middle Passage, he ponders the "heavy, liquescent air" and finds in it some promise of purification from the vanities of urban culture - "self-interest,"...

A selected checklist of works by and about Charles Johnson. (tabular data only)
December 22, 1996... Books by Johnson Black Humor [cartoons]. Chicago: Johnson publishing, 1970. Half-Past Nation-Time [cartoons]. California: Aware P, 1972. Faith and the Good Thing [novel]. New York: Viking, 1974. Oxherding Tale [novel]. Bloomington:...

Writing Between the Lines: Race and Intertextuality.
December 22, 1996... Building upon Derrida's notions of the text as a refusal of boundaries and of writing as excess, or overflow, Aldon Nielsen advances the thesis that American writing - aesthetically, politically, and socially intextual - overflows its...

Playing the Changes: From Afro-Modernism to the Jazz Impulse.
December 22, 1996... In 1922 James Weldon Johnson warned in his Book of American Negro Poetry that "the final measure of the greatness of all peoples is the amount and standard of the literature and art they have produced. The world does not know that a people is...

The Black Columbiad: Defining Moments in African American Literature and Culture.
December 22, 1996... This collection of previously unpublished essays unites thirty-five contributors from the United States (thirteen), Europe (twenty-one), and Africa (one). The editors' aim is to rewrite the European Columbiad, the master narrative of discovery,...

Bordering on the Body: The Racial Matrix of Modern Fiction and Culture.
December 22, 1996... Laura Doyle's book is a valuable addition to a recent movement in cultural studies. As in studies by Eric Sundquist and Toni Morrison, Doyle argues that various canonical "white" texts cannot be fully understood without attention to issues of...

The Cambridge Guide to African and Caribbean Theatre.
December 22, 1996... The 1988 Cambridge Guide to Theatre, write the editors of the book under review, "was concerned to redress the bias towards Western theatre evident in many works of reference, and to offer a truly international view of theatre - traditional and...