African American Review articles from December 2000

African American Review archives from December 2000

"Looking at One's Self Through the Eyes of Others": W. E. B. Du Bois's Photographs for the 1900 Paris Exposition.
December 22, 2000... In The Souls of Black Folk, W. E. B. Du Bois describes." Double-consciousness" as the "sense of always looking at one's self through the eyes of others" (8), and thereby situates a visual model of subjectivity at the center of what he calls...

"Some cord of kinship stronger and deeper than blood": An Interview with John F. Callahan, Editor of Ralph Ellison's Juneteenth.(Interview)
December 22, 2000... Over the decades since the publication of Invisible Man in 1952, anticipation in the literary community about Ralph Waldo Ellison's second novel was fervent and continuous. Ellison dropped hints of its near completion in various interviews,...

"Ambivalent Man": Ellison's Rejection of Communism.
December 22, 2000... "I too have become acquainted with ambivalence," I said. "That's why I'm here." Ambivalence. No term--in a novel written immediately after World War II by an African American with a history of involvement in left-wing causes--could be more...

Waste and Whiteness: Zora Neale Hurston and the Politics of Eugenics.
December 22, 2000... Readings of Zora Neale Hurston's Seraph on the Suwanee (1948) have often focused on the text's racial and gender problems, either critiquing the text's failure to measure up to the racial consciousness and feminism evident in Their Eyes Were...

"The Singing Man Who Must be Reckoned With": Private Desire and Public Responsibility in the Poetry of Countee Cullen.
December 22, 2000... His lyric gift was incontestable and, indeed, exceptional. But his poetry has none of McKay's fiery virility, and the treasures it encloses are, rather, those of a soul that at times indulged in an excess of sensibility and preferred to express...

Discipline and Craft: An Interview with Sonia Sanchez.(Interview)
December 22, 2000... Best known as a poet and playwright, Sonia Sanchez has also written short stories, children's books, critical essays, and columns for various periodicals. Sanchez was born Wilsonia Benita Driver in Birmingham, Alabama, in September 1934, the...

The Romance of Bark.(Poem)
December 22, 2000... During the second week of May I stroke a tree in The Brooklyn Botanical Gardens. It is years since I've allowed myself this intimacy. Why floats away casual and unanswered. There are within the texture of some bark tears....

For Henry Dumas (1934-1968).(Poem)
December 22, 2000... a la maniere de Cheney-Coker Ever since a white cop's bullet labeled you the usual, dangerous nigger- I mean, a poet- and snuffed you out blasphemously on that Gotham City subway stage, your brain blood falling from...

The Assistant.(Poem)
December 22, 2000... Never seen directly, talked over and around, first-named by everyone while titles tinkle their way through the hallways. You move in tandem with those you work for, the dance of hands that touch but seldom entwine, ...

Mardi Gras 1999: A Hiatus in the Festivities.(Poem)
December 22, 2000... A soft note, not quite blue, yet still effective drips tears through air. It moves through the steam of coffee cups at various tables of a room smoked gray. Her stare invades the grease in my hair, parts it in places...

MT in Solitary.(Poem)
December 22, 2000... Life is ruled by Spaces, even I learned that much: In a square of light 20 feet around they want an animal. Outside the ropes battles point to incarceration, a cell, alone, walked off at 6 by 9. It don't matter....

Work Song.(Poem)
December 22, 2000... For Mama with a wrench you removed a dripping faucet that kept time through the night like a clock, you swept the street and raked the leaves, laid a coat of black asphalt across the driveway, where the concrete was...

As the United States House of Representatives Prepares for an Historic Impeachment Vote, The 42nd President of the United States, William Jefferson Clinton, Weighs His Final Options.(Poem)
December 22, 2000... I. Find a real villain, not a misunderstood one. A real-live, baby-rapin', lyin'-cheatin', (dark-skinned) Cretin-Mother-Of-All-Villains--to bomb back to The Stone Age--or, II. Find Elvis. Alive. Fighting weight--(complete with 40-Long,...

Harryette Mullen, "The Queen of Hip Hyperbole": An Interview.(Interview)
December 22, 2000... On September 20-24, 1999, the poet, essayist, and short story writer Harryette Mullen was Writer-in-Residence at Morehouse College in Atlanta, Georgia, along with novelists John Edgar Wideman and Percival Everett. The program which brought the...

Spiritual Interrogations: Culture, Gender, and Community in Early African American Women's Writing.(Review)
December 22, 2000... Katherine Clay Bassard. Spiritual Interrogations: Culture, Gender, and Community in Early African American Women's Writing. Princeton: Princeton UP, 1999. 183 pp. $42.50 cloth/$16.95 paper. The field of early African American literary...

Imagining Grace: Liberating Theologies in the Slave Narrative Tradition.(Review)
December 22, 2000... Kimberly Rae Connor. Imagining Grace: Liberating Theologies in the Slave Narrative Tradition. Urbana: U ot Illinois P, 2000. 311 pp. $32.95. Imagining Grace uses a self-referential approach which combines elements of Marxist and Black...

The Birth of Bebop: A Social and Musical History.(Review)
December 22, 2000... Scott DeVeaux. The Birth of Bebop: A Social and Musical History Berkeley: U of California P, 1997. 572 pp. $35.00. The Birth of Bebop is a masterful work, combining material on the musicians and the revolutionary music with musical analysis...

A Change Is Gonna Come: Music, Race and the Soul of America.(Review)
December 22, 2000... Craig Werner. A Change Is Gonna Come: Music, Race and the Soul of America. New York: Plume, 1999. 430 pp. $19.95. Craig Werner sets himself a compelling and daunting task in A Change Is Gonna Come: What's attempted is nothing less than a...

The Cry Was Unity: Communists and African Americans, 1917-1936.(Review)
December 22, 2000... Mark Solomon. The Cry Was Unity: Communists and African Americans, 1917-1936. Jackson: UP of Mississippi, 1998. 441 pp. $20.00 paper. From the early 1920s until the late 1950s, the U.S. Communist movement was a significant pole of...

Making Men: Gender, Literary Authority, and Women's Writing in Caribbean Narrative.(Review)
December 22, 2000... Belinda Edmondson. Making Men: Gender, Literary Authority, and Women's Writing in Caribbean Narrative. Durham: Duke UP, 1999. 229 pp. $17.95 paper. Once upon a time, Walter Benjamin insisted, storytellers were of two types: those who, like...

Blacks and Jews in Literary Conversation.(Review)
December 22, 2000... Emily Miller Budick. Blacks and Jews in Literary Conversation. New York: Cambridge UP, 1999. 263 pp. $59.95 cloth/$17.95 paper. The complex relationship expressed in the phrase Black/Jewish relations is the subject of Emily Budick's Blacks...

Contemporaty African American Fiction: The Open Journey.(Review)
December 22, 2000... Robert Butler. Contemporaty African American Fiction: The Open Journey. Teaneck: Fairleigh Dickinson UP, 1998. 163 pp. $32.50. The subject of this study rather than being described as "contemporary" fiction might better be termed...

Prophets of Recognition: Ideology and the Individual in Novels by Ralph Ellison, Toni Morrison, Saul Bellow, and Eudora Welty.(Review)
December 22, 2000... Julia Eichelberger. Prophets of Recognition: Ideology and the Individual in Novels by Ralph Ellison, Toni Morrison, Saul Bellow, and Eudora Welty. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State UP, 1999. 192 pp. $49.95 cloth/$24.95 paper. The subtitle of...

Dark Matter: A Century of Speculative Fiction from the African Diaspora.(Review)
December 22, 2000... Sheree R. Thomas, ed. Dark Matter: A Century of Speculative Fiction from the African Diaspora. New York: Warner-Aspect, 2000. 427 pp. $24.95. In his 1999 essay "Black to the Future," which is reprinted in Sheree Thomas's groundbreaking new...

Approaches to Teaching Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass.(Review)
December 22, 2000... James C. Hall, ed. Approaches to Teaching Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass. New York: MLA, 1999. 174 pp. $37.50 cloth/ $18.00 paper. This is a useful volume. Few books from nineteenth-century American literature are more taught,...

Critical Essays: Zora Neale Hurston.(Review)
December 22, 2000... Gloria L. Cronin. Critical Essays: Zora Neale Hurston. New York: G. K. Hall, 1998. 271 pp. $49.00. Critical Essays on Zora Neale Hurston is one volume in the Critical Essays on American Literature Series published by G. K. Hall, with James...

Toni Morrison's Beloved: A Casebook.(Review)
December 22, 2000... William L. Andrews and Nellie Y. McKay, eds. Toni Morrison's Beloved: A Casebook, New York: Oxford UP, 1999. 223 pp. $35.00. Andrews and McKay offer in this volume scholarship on BeloVed by some of the most respected and prominent critics...

Picnic On The Moon.(Review)
December 22, 2000... Charles Coe. Picnic On The Moon. Wellfleet, MA: Leapfrog P, 1999. 79 pp. $12.95. On June 15, 1999, the Congressional Gold Medal was awarded to Civil Rights activist Rosa Parks. This recognition, while perhaps long overdue, is in keeping...

European Folktale Variant.(Short Story)
December 22, 2000... (For the Archives of Toni Cade Bambara) The way the story goes, a trespassing towheaded pre-teen barged into the rustic country cottage of a nuclear family of anthropomorphic bruins. Her motivation? Who can be sure? Some say the youthful...

Fancy Cortex.(Poem)
December 22, 2000... (Reading Jayne Cortez) I'm using my plain brain to imagine her fancy cortex. As if my lowly mollusk could wear so exalted a mantle as her pontifex pallium. As if the knots and tangles of my twisted psyche could mesh with her intricate...

The Square Ring.(Poem)
December 22, 2000... to Joan Ryan "You get them in trouble," A man told Sugar Ray. "It's my business to get them in trouble," Sugar Ray told the man. Hot lights, crowd chanting his name, adrenalin shoots through his fear. At the...

Just a White God.(Poem)
December 22, 2000... When winter's dry mouth licks the deep rich earth, rich folks rub the sleep from their eyes, brush the lint from their clothing, bend down and actually touch the untouchables. This amazing event only occurs when nature is...

[0] A Change Is Gonna Come: Music, Race and the Soul of America.(Review)
December 22, 2000... Craig Werner. A Change Is Gonna Come: Music, Race and the Soul of America. New York: Plume, 1999. 430 pp. $19.95. A narrow fixation on the examination of the individual musical celebrity as cultural icon and economic commodity has dominated...