African American Review articles from December 2003

African American Review archives from December 2003

Dead letter office: conspiracy, trauma, and Song of Solomon's posthumous communication.(Critical Essay)
December 22, 2003... 3 P.M. Song of Solomon picks up where Mumbo Jumbo leaves off. That is, in repeating with a difference certain details and motifs of Ishmael Reed's 1972 novel, Toni Morrison signifies upon what Henry Louis Gates, Jr., has called one of "the...

Something other than a family quarrel: the beautiful boys in Morrison's Sula.
December 22, 2003... Toni Morrison's second novel, praised for its celebration of girls' friendships, is dedicated to boys. The writer inscribes Sula to her young sons, whom she "miss[es] although they have not left [her]." By deliberately creating a vacuum with,...

"He made us laugh some": Frederick Douglass's humor.
December 22, 2003... Among Frederick Douglass's formidable skills critic of slavery and racial prejudice, he was widely remembered during the nineteenth century for being able to make his audiences laugh. Toward the end of Douglass's final autobiography, The Life...

"I will gladly share with them my richer heritage": schoolteachers in Frances E. W. Harper's Iola Leroy and Charles Chesnutt's Mandy Oxendine.(Critical Essay)
December 22, 2003... Through the figure of the black schoolteacher, Frances E. W. Harper's Iola Leroy, published in 1892, and Charles Chesnutt's novel Mandy Oxendine, unpublished during his life-time but believed to have been written between 1893 and 1896, (1) both...

Rumors of Grace: white masculinity in Pauline Hopkins's contending forces.(Critical Essay)
December 22, 2003... Through the simple expedient of demonizing and reifying the range of colors on a palette, American Africanism makes it possible to say and not say, to inscribe and erase, to escape and engage, to act out and act on, to historicize and render...

Black Thunder's call for a conjure response to American Negro Slavery.(Critical Essay)
December 22, 2003... In American classrooms in the first half of the twentieth century, students using the popular history textbook Growth of the American Republic were taught that slaves "suffered less than any other class in the South from its 'peculiar...

In a different chord: interpreting the relations among black female sexuality, agency, and the blues.(Critical Essay)
December 22, 2003... Sometimes the lyrics mock and signify even as they pretend to weep. (Albert Murray, Stomping the Blues) Black feminism is not a monolithic enterprise. But it starts to look that way in critical treatment of the intercourse among the blues,...

From seeking one's voice to uttering the scream: the pioneering journey of African American women playwrights through the 1960s and 1970s.
December 22, 2003... No Black woman even like nowadays tells you things you're familiar with, like Black women have problems. In a family situation, I'm talking about a classic, if you understand what I'm saying, a classic Black woman figure. Showing her not just...

Tropical fish.(Short Story)
December 22, 2003... Peter always plopped down heavily on top of me after he came, breathing short and fast, as if he had just swum across Lake Victoria. My worry that he was dying was quickly dispelled by his deep snores, moments after he rolled off me. I was left...

Mourning the Familiar: an Epilogue.(Brief Article)(Poem)
December 22, 2003... Mourning the Familiar: An Epilogue (for Melvin Dixon) This morning I discovered a dead angel in my path, its wings crumpled like some quelled rebellion, the sparse feathers fingered roughly by the cavalier wind, that glorious...

Cornelius Eady at the Painted Bride Arts Center.(Brief Article)(Poem)
December 22, 2003... CORNELIUS EADY AT THE PAINTED BRIDE ARTS CENTER your head rocks with every word that leaps from your mouth each hank of hair is a mystery, a message like this cold city night like this steady ticking of time...

The Letters.(Brief Article)(Poem)
December 22, 2003... THE LETTERS O Father, the letters that you sent to Mama have faded like the moon. Did you tell her about the casing that sent shrapnel scattering like sand? Did you mention the planes that dropped bomb...

Thunder.(Brief Article)(Poem)
December 22, 2003... THUNDER When I hear the thunder crack like limbs breaking in the backyard, I imagine the ghost of a whip snapping across the back of a slave. This is a night muggy as the swamp, no stars piercing the booming dark...

For Afefe.(Brief Article)(Poem)
December 22, 2003... FOR AFEFE It was she, Afefe who waltzed words like a dancing couple lost into themselves, on a conjure-night. It was she, Afefe whose wavering voice called us to communion gathering-time where ...

Stellar places.(Brief Article)(Poem)
December 22, 2003... stellar places --for robert hayden junkweed blossom jughead rhyme bad weather branches wide-band horizon sagging like a laundry line a settling soak traveling music to my ears for water brought us...

Hard to Listen (Slight Return).(Brief Article)(Poem)
December 22, 2003... Hard to Listen (Slight Return) Up pillows edge to edge open book flock of sperm spread over my sheets I scroll tobacco in high registers cross cotton eyes wide as tambourines Framed ...

Jazz Haiku's Medley.(Brief Article)(Poem)
December 22, 2003... Jazz Haiku's Medley One Shorter, give me your golden tenor to bellow Lady Day's sorrow. Two The rhythm section is nitroglycerine_Tchyak Doom, exploding sounds. Three My head is a...

Criminal Family.(Brief Article)(Poem)
December 22, 2003... Criminal Family It's summer outside, but in here you need a sweater. I always forget that when we're rushing to get in before the book closes, we all must put down our names, street addresses, and the inmate ...

At the Well.(Brief Article)(Poem)
December 22, 2003... At the Well You got me Lord, on the back row with the late-comers. I know you keep a watch on the sparrow Lord. And this wretch felt you on the way in, in the stiff pine pew, in the hallelujah faces of old...

Each Other's Eshu.(Brief Article)(Poem)
December 22, 2003... Each Other's Eshu complexities of context give us each other marcasite around the curve of the heart that is not on any sleeve maybe I am a little expanded a little convex around you stumbling where outside...

Michael K. Johnson. Black Masculinity and the Frontier Myth in American Literature.(Book Review)
December 22, 2003... Norman: U of Oklahoma P, 2002. 293 pp. $34.95. Among American cultural products only jazz has equaled the story of the frontier for durability. Before its classical formulation in the famous essay by Frederick Jackson Turner on "The...

The Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, ed. Jubilee: The Emergence of African-American Culture.(Book Review)
December 22, 2003... Washington, DC: National Geographic, 2002. 224 pp. $35.00 Jubilee: The Emergence of African-American Culture is a fully illustrated book accompanied by important essays. The book is based on an exhibition entitled "Lest We Forget: The...

Vincent Carretta and Philip Gould, eds. Genius in Bondage: Literature of the Early Black Atlantic.(Book Review)
December 22, 2003... Lexington: UP of Kentucky, 2001. 280 pp. $34.95. Alluding to Ignatius Sancho's identification of Phillis Wheatley as a "Genius in bondage" in their title and to Paul Gilroy's pathbreaking The Black Atlantic, Vincent Carretta and Philip...

Samuel C. Hyde, Jr., ed. Sunbelt Revolution: The Historical Progression of the Civil Rights Struggle in the Gulf South, 1866-2000.(Book Review)
December 22, 2003... Gainesville: UP of Florida, 2003. 88 pp. $55.00 Samuel Hyde has compiled an interesting collection of original essays that help bring to light the influence of the Gulf Coast in the Civil Rights Movement. Sunbelt Revolution examines some...

Sharon L. Jones. Rereading the Harlem Renaissance: Race, Class, and Gender in the Fiction of Jessie Fauset, Zora Neale Hurston, and Dorothy West.(Book Review)
December 22, 2003... Westport: Greenwood P, 2002. 176 pp. $62.95. According to Sharon L. Jones, African American women writers of the Harlem Renaissance such as Jessie Fauset, Zora Neale Hurston, and Dorothy West must be read in terms of a "triangular...

T. Denean Sharpley-Whiting. Negritude Women.(Book Review)
December 22, 2003... Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 2002. 168 pp. $17.95 T. Denean Sharpley-Whiting's Negritude Women proffers an enlightening, revisionary analysis of the Negritude movement. Negritude, the term coined by the Martinican poet Aime Cesaire in the...

Christy Rishoi. Girl to Woman: American Women's Coming-of-Age Narratives.(Book Review)
December 22, 2003... Christy Rishoi's brief book From Girl to Woman: American Women' s Coming-of-Age Narratives examines selected autobiographical works by Annie Dillard, Mary McCarthy, Zora Neale Hurston, Anne Moody, Kate Simon, and Maxine Hong Kingston. Chapter...

Paul Hendrickson. Sons of Mississippi: a Story of Race and Its Legacy.(Book Review)
December 22, 2003... Mississippi holds a peculiar place in the history of race relations in the United States. Paul Hendrickson has given us a book, Sons of Mississippi: A Story of Race and Its Legacy, that explores some of this history in a remarkably personal...

Kenneth Robert Janken. White: the Biography of Walter White, Mr. NAACP.(Book Review)
December 22, 2003... New York: New P, 2003. 477 pp. $29.95. Kenneth Janken's Walter White was more than just the dominant force behind the growth of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), he was also a Harlem Renaissance...