African American Review articles from December 1999

African American Review archives from December 1999

Guess Who's Coming to Dinner: Folklore, Folkloristics, and African American Literary Criticism.
December 22, 1999... The importance of folklore to black literature is widely acknowledged and documented. Trudier Harris states, in fact, that "African-American folklore is arguably the basis for most African-American literature" (2). While critics have often...

Sally's Rape: Robbie McCauley's Survival Art.
December 22, 1999... In the climactic scene of Sally's Rape, African-American performance artist Robbie McCauley stands naked on an auction block, encouraging spectators to bid on her body, while she describes the sale and repeated sexual abuse of her...

Speaking in Tongues: An Interview with Science Fiction Writer Nalo Hopkinson.(Interview)
December 22, 1999... In 1998, Nalo Hopkinson joined the ranks of Black science fiction writers like Samuel R. Delany, Octavia Butler, and Steven Barnes, among others. The Jamaican-born Hopkinson is the daughter of the late Slade Hopkinson, the Guyanese actor, poet,...

From 'Midnight Robber'.(Excerpt)
December 22, 1999... Quashee and lone? Antonio felt jealousy turning like a worm in his belly. He didn't like the weight of the cuckold's horns settling on his brow. His mind was so worked up, he barely remembered to pay Beata. He got down from the cab and would...

The Scissors Lady and the Green Man.(Short Story)
December 22, 1999... The Scissors Lady is here to get me. Something is cracking and popping on the stove in that big brown pot. It smells good like chicken and I try to see if the chicken is brown not black but Dani yanks my arm and I scream at her and cry...

Interview with Clifton Anderson.
December 22, 1999... I met trombonist Clifton Anderson initially in Cambridge, Massachusetts; he was part of the Sonny Rollins band. I asked him if he would be open to meeting and chatting about jazz and culture, and we agreed to do this in New York City. The...

The Blues Aesthetic in Toni Morrison's The Bluest Eye.
December 22, 1999... The blues aesthetic is an ethos of blues people that manifests itself in everything done, not just in the music. (ya Salaam 2) Readers of Toni Morrison's first novel, The Bluest Eye, are often so overwhelmed by the narrative's emotional...

The Power of Blackness: Richard Wright Re-Writes Moby-Dick.
December 22, 1999... In his autobiography Black Boy (1945), Richard Wright describes the desperate hunger for books which characterized his boyhood and the diverse subterfuges he devised in order to satisfy it. A century earlier, Frederick Douglass, as if...

Racial Violence and Representation: Performance Strategies in Lynching Dramas of the 1920s.
December 22, 1999... Plays representing the history of lynching in the United States are only beginning to be understood as a distinctly American theatrical genre, a type of drama that began to appear at least as early as 1905 and continues to evolve on the...

Reggie.(Poem)
December 22, 1999... (Yankee Stadium -- July, 1978) two 4s on his back Wendell W. Ottley, III, was born and raised in Queens, New York. He is a student at Shaw University in Raleigh, North Carolina, and has been a member of the Carolina African-American...

A Mother's Voice.(Poem)
December 22, 1999... The pressing comb a mother's voice its hot breath. The scorching guilt of having a daughter that nothing will straighten. But she tries, a mother always tries, taking her daughter's life in her teeth, applying...

Jazz Dreams.(Poem)
December 22, 1999... I Two A.M., strolling barefooted on soft wet grass by the Charles' smokey river bank, blue flocculent light blemishing snake-path to pedestrian bridge. Cassandra dressed in long-white-cotton gown stood at its center....

East Texas Blues.(Poem)
December 22, 1999... Some say the voices here meander down silent alleys, filter through screen doors with hot evening breezes, settle in parlors on front stoops, travel on the thin veil of air that whispers from paper fans to find...

Elizabeth Catlett: Grace against Gravity.(Poem)
December 22, 1999... It comes of clay, wood and stone, carried, refined, molded somehow into one great moment that never stops talking; everything has its own language, mahogany a sure cousin, bronzed clays fired into busts; But the...

namesake.(Poem)
December 22, 1999... names do give humans power over what they name. walter ong Anjail Rashida Ahmad is currently a fellow in the doctoral program in English and Creative Writing at the University of Missouri-Columbia. Her areas of interest include African...

Scenes of Subjection: Terror, Slavery, and Self-Making in Nineteenth-Century America.(Review)
December 22, 1999... Saidiya V. Hartman. Scenes of Subjection: Terror, Slavery, and Self-Making in Nineteenth-Century America. New York: Oxford UP, 1997. 275 pp. $50.00 cloth/$19.95 paper. Saidiya Hartman's Scenes of Subjection is a prodigiously researched,...

The Slumbering Volcano: American Slave Ship Revolts and the Production of Rebellious Masculinity.(Review)
December 22, 1999... Maggie Montesinos Sale. The Slumbering Volcano: American Slave Ship Revolts and the Production of Rebellious Masculinity. Durham: Duke UP, 1997. 256 pp. $49.95 cloth/$1 6.95 paper. One of the great paradoxes of American history is the fact...

The Slave Trade: The Story of the Atlantic Slave Trade.(Review)(Brief Article)
December 22, 1999... Hugh Thomas. The Slave Trade: The Story of the Atlantic Slave Trade, 1440-1870. New York: Simon, 1997. 909 pp. $37.50. If this book had been published as a Hollywood movie, it would have been called a "blockbuster." It is a sweeping and...

Female Subjects in Black and White: Race, Psychoanalysis, and Feminism.(Review)
December 22, 1999... Elizabeth Abel, Barbara Christian, and Helen Moglen, eds. Female Subjects in Black and White: Race, Psychoanalysis, and Feminism. Berkeley: U of California P, 1997. 373 pp. $48.00 cloth/$17.95 paper. Female Subjects in Black and White:...

Psychoanalysis and Black Novels: Desire and the Protocols of Race.(Review)
December 22, 1999... Claudia Tate, Psychoanalysis and Black Novels: Desire and the Protocols of Race. New York: Oxford UP, 1998. 238 pp. $45.00 cloth/$1 9.95 paper. Claudia Tate's new book signals a welcome coming-of-age of African American literary criticism....

Race and Gender in the Making of an African American Literary Tradition.(Review)
December 22, 1999... Aimable Twagilimana. Race and Gender in the Making of an African American Literary Tradition. New York: Garland, 1997. 206 pp. $46.00. Billed as an examination of the ways that race and gender have shaped and informed African American...

Juneteenth Texas: Essays in African-American Folklore.(Review)
December 22, 1999... Francis Abernethy, Patrick Mullen, and Alan Govenar, eds. Juneteenth Texas: Essays in African-American Folklore. Denton: U of North Texas P, 1996. 364 pp. $29.95. Juneteenth Texas is the latest in a long and sometimes distinguished line of...

Act Like You Know: African-American Autobiography and White Identity.(Review)
December 22, 1999... Crispin Sartwell. Act Like You Know: African-American Autobiography and White Identity. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1998. 212 pp. $43.00 cloth/$17.00 paper. Crispin Sartwell's Act Like You Know is as exasperating a book as one is likely to...

The Harlem Renaissance, 1920-1940, vol. 3, Black Writers Interpret the Harlem Renaissance.(Review)
December 22, 1999... Cary 0. Wintz, ed. The Harlem Renaissance, 1920-1940. Vol. 3--Black Writers Interpret the Harlem Renaissance. New York: Garland, 1996. 488 pp. $35.00. Any reader who is interested in the creative efforts of black writers during the Harlem...

African American Nationalist Literature of the 1960s: Pens of Fire.(Review)
December 22, 1999... Sandra Hollin Flowers. African American Nationalist Literature of the 1960s: Pens of Fire. New York: Garland, 1996. 200 pp. $70.00. At this time, a major study of African American nationalist literature of the 1960s (the Black Arts...

The Black Bard of North Carolina: George Moses Horton and His Poetry.(Review)
December 22, 1999... Joan Sherman, ed. The Black Bard of North Carolina: George Moses Horton and His Poetry. Chapel Hill: U of North Carolina P, 1997. 158 pp. $29.95 cloth/$12.95 paper. Joan Sherman's The Black Bard of North Carolina joins the sorely limited...

W. E. B. Du Bois on Race and Culture.(Review)
December 22, 1999... Bernard W. Bell, Emily R. Groshoz, and James B. Stewart, eds. W. E. B. Du Bois on Race and Culture. New York: Routledge, 1997. 305 PP. $59.95 cloth/$18.95 paper. It is generally agreed among African Americanists that W. E. B. Du Bois...

Mandy Oxendine.(Review)
December 22, 1999... Charles W. Chesnutt. Mandy Oxendine. Ed. with an intro, by Charles Hackenberry. Urbana: U of Illinois P, 1997. 1l2 pp. $10.95 paper. As we approach the turn of the century, the fiction of Charles Chesnutt (1858-1932), published at the dawn...

C. L. R. James: A Critical Introduction.(Review)
December 22, 1999... Aldon Lynn Nielsen. C. L. R. James: A Critical introduction. Jackson: UP of Mississippi, 1997. 224 pp. $18.00. The aged C.L.R. James (1901-1989) was, during his last two decades, very much a living legend. Palsied, thin, and frail-looking,...

Conversations with Derek Walcott.(Review)
December 22, 1999... William Baer, ed. Conversations with Derek Walcott. Jackson: UP of Mississippi, 1996. 211 pp. $16.95. Including recent volumes on Ishmael Reed and Chester Himes, Mississippi's highly regarded Literary Conversations series is a decidedly...

Lorraine Hansberry: A Research and Production Sourcebook.(Review)
December 22, 1999... Richard M. Leeson. Lorraine Hansberry: A Research and Production Sourcebook. Westport: Greenwood P, 1997. 175 pp. $65.00. Lorraine Hansberry entered the annals of American theater history in 1959 during the Civil Rights Movement, when her...

The Dramatic Vision of August Wilson.(Review)
December 22, 1999... Sandra Shannon. The Dramatic Vision of August Wilson. Washington: Howard UP, 1995. 254 pp. $27.95 cloth/$1 9.95 paper. August Wilson creates portraits of people who stand on the rarely acknowledged darker side of our history. A dynasty...

August Wilson: A Research and Production Sourcebook.(Review)
December 22, 1999... Yvonne Shafer. August Wilson: A Research and Production Sourcebook Westport: Greenwood P, 1998. 133 pp. $65.00. While both national and international theater communities wait for the curtains to rise on Act III of August Wilson's ongoing...

Anything We Love Can Be Saved.(Review)(Brief Article)
December 22, 1999... Alice Walker. Anything We Love Can Be Saved. New York: Random, 1997. 225 pp. $23.00. Anything We Love reveals several truths about Alice Walker. For example, she reveres the earth as God and regards nature as its spirit. Her mistrust of...

Leaving Pipe Shop: Memories of Kin.(Review)
December 22, 1999... Deborah McDowell. Leaving Pipe Shop: Memories of Kin. New York: Scribner, 1997. 285 pp. $23.00. Thomas Wolfe said, "You can't go home again." In her memoir Leaving Pipe Shop: Memories of Kin, Deborah McDowell, one of the country's leading...

Paradise.(Review)
December 22, 1999... Toni Morrison. Paradise. New York: Knopf, 1998. 318 pp. $25.00. In the lyrical prose that has become her trademark, Toni Morrison weaves her latest novel on the loom of a single question: Why do we base our conception of "paradise" on...

By the Light of My Father's Smile.(Review)
December 22, 1999... Alice Walker. By the Light of My Father's Smile. New York: Random, 1998. 219 pp. $22.95. Alice Walker's By the Light of My Father's Smile opens significantly with a chapter entitled "Angels," which is also the title of the first of three...

Solibo Magnificent.(Review)
December 22, 1999... Patrick Chamoiseau. Solibo Magnificent. New York: Pantheon, 1998. 190 pp. $23.00. Solibo Magnificent, first published in French and Martinican Creole in 1988, is the second of Patrick Chamoiseau's novels to be available in an English...

Flickering Shadows.(Review)
December 22, 1999... Kwadwo Agymah Kamau. Flickering Shadows. Minneapolis: Coffee House P, 1996. 298 pp. $21.95 cloth/$13.00 paper. If I could, I would gather my race in my arms and fly away with them," wrote Ida B. Wells after learning of the lynching of three...

In Every Seam.(Review)(Brief Article)
December 22, 1999... Allison Joseph. In Every Seam. Pittsburgh: U of Pittsburgh P, 1997. 89 pp. $12.95 paper. Readers know no loyalty. Accustomed to the bite and sass of Allison Joseph's Soul Train (1997), I rushed through In Every Seam searching for her...