African American Review articles from December 2004

African American Review archives from December 2004

Codex: Frostbite.(Brief Article)(Poem)
December 22, 2004... CODEX: FROSTBITE the cold took the life out of him left him stumbling into spring the cold took the life he might have had left and left his hands like base- ball mitts feet toeless inside the...

John Marrant and the narrative construction of an early black Methodist evangelical.
December 22, 2004... On the cold winter morning of January 27, 1788, John Marrant boarded a ship headed for Boston and departed from the Halifax, Nova Scotia, port for the final time. For almost three years he had preached to a dedicated and growing congregation of...

Cosmopolitanism in Georgia Douglas Johnson's anti-lynching literature.
December 22, 2004... In December 1874, the African Methodist Episcopal Church changed the design on the front page of its major publication, the Christian Recorder. The new banner featured an image of the continent of Africa, apparently emphasizing the American...

The rhetoric of mobility, the politics of consciousness: Julia Mood Peterkin and the case of a white black writer.
December 22, 2004... The negroes have no books, they cannot read and they know nothing of how to write. Yet by word of mouth they have handed down through generations strange and beautiful myths. They sit over their fires and talk about them, tell them to their...

"This plague of their own locusts": space, property, and identity in Dorothy West's The Living is Easy.
December 22, 2004... The August 2000 issue of Vanity Fair revived the concept of the "it girl," citing Gwyneth Paltrow as the embodiment of "it" for the twenty-first century amongst a retrospective parade of former "it girls." The "it girl" became a part of...

The "maw of western culture": James Baldwin and the anxieties of influence.
December 22, 2004... In No Name in the Street, his 1972 autobiography, James Baldwin reports a curious memory. A "young white man, beautiful, Jewish, American," Baldwin recalls, "ate his wife's afterbirth, frying it in a frying pan": He did this...

A critical divination: reading Sula as ogbanje-abiku.
December 22, 2004... Isn't it just possible that we are all abikus?... [W]hy should there be some and not others? Why should the universe be distributed that way? (Ben Okri, Interview with Jane Wilkinson) Egbe here, Ugo here.... May the Hawk perch, [and] may...

The named and the nameless: Morrison's 124 and Naylor's "the other place" as semiotic chorae.
December 22, 2004... Everybody knew what she was called, but nobody anywhere knew her name. --Toni Morrison, Beloved (274) All Willow Springs knows that this woman was nobody's slave. But what was her name?--Gloria Naylor, Mama Day (280) Naming is an act...

The ontogeny and phylogeny of Mackey's song of the Andoumboulou (1).
December 22, 2004... "The thought of Being guards the word and fulfills its functions in such guardianship, namely care for the use of language. Out of long guarded speechlessness and the careful clarification of the field thus cleared, comes the utterance of tire...

"My characters are teaching me to be strong": an interview with Tananarive Due.(Interview)
December 22, 2004... Tananarive Due, is originally from Tallahassee, Florida, and now resides in Southern California. She earned a BS in journalism from Northwestern University and an MA in English with an emphasis on Nigerian literature from the University of...

American Idyll.(Short Story)
December 22, 2004... Jasmine Ambrosia Marguerite Walker wants to be a star, and she knows just the way to do it. Next week, Jasmine plans on ing her virginity over the Internet to one of three lucky bachelors who have already been pre-selected by the more than 15...

Harriet E. Wilson. Our Nig; or, Sketches from the Life of a Free Black.(Book Review)
December 22, 2004... Harriet E. Wilson. Our Nig; or, Sketches from the Life of a Free Black. Edited with an Introduction and notes by P. Gabrielle Foreman and Reginald H. Pitts. New York: Penguin Classics, 2005. 156 pp. $12.00. One of my mentors always...

Philip Gould. Barbaric Traffic: Commerce and Antislavery in the Eighteenth-Century Atlantic World.(Book Review)
December 22, 2004... Philip Gould. Barbaric Traffic: Commerce and Antislavery in the Eighteenth-Century Atlantic World. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2003. 258 pp. $45.00. Philip Gould's title articulates three of the principal assumptions that underlie this very...

Mar Gallego. Passing Novels in the Harlem Renaissance: Identity, Politics and Textual Strategies.(Book Review)
December 22, 2004... Mar Gallego. Passing Novels in the Harlem Renaissance: Identity, Politics and Textual Strategies. Hamburg: Lit Verlag Munster, 2003. 214 pp. $22.95. Until very recently, novels of passing that appeared during the Harlem Renaissance had...

Susan Duffy, ed. The Political Plays of Langston Hughes.(Book Review)
December 22, 2004... Susan Duffy, ed. The Political Plays of Langston Hughes. Carbondale: Southern Illinois UP, 2000. 221 pp. $19.95; Christopher C. De Santis, ed. Langston Hughes and the Chicago Defender: Essays on Race, Politics, and Culture, 1942-62. Urbana: U...

Works for Children and Young Adults.(Book Review)
December 22, 2004... Works for Children and Young Adults. Vol. 11. The Collected Works of Langston Hughes. Edited with an introduction by Dianne Johnson. Columbia: U of Missouri P, 2003. 392 pp. $44.95. In the 1990s, Arnold Rampersad and David Roessel...

Martha Gilman Bower. "Color Struck" under the Gaze: Ethnicity and the Pathology of Being in the Plays of Johnson, Hurston, Childress, Hansberry, and Kennedy.(Book Review)
December 22, 2004... Martha Gilman Bower. "Color Struck" under the Gaze: Ethnicity and the Pathology of Being in the Plays of Johnson, Hurston, Childress, Hansberry, and Kennedy. Contributions to Afro-American Studies #208. Westport, CT: Praeger, 2003. 170 pp....

David Chalmers. Backfire: How the Ku Klux Klan Helped the Civil Rights Movement.(Book Review)
December 22, 2004... David Chalmers. Backfire: How the Ku Klux Klan Helped the Civil Rights Movement. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2003. 215 pp. $24.95. David Chalmers is the author of Hooded Americanism: The History of the Ku Klux Klan, the third edition...

Jeff Abernathy. To Hell and Back: Race and Betrayal in the Southern Novel.(Book Review)
December 22, 2004... Jeff Abernathy. To Hell and Back: Race and Betrayal in the Southern Novel. Athens: U of Georgia P, 2003. 225 pp. $18.95. In one of the most famous bids for damnation in American literature, Huck Finn resolves," All right, then, I'll go to...

Donna Bailey Nurse. What's a Black Critic to Do?: Interviews, Profiles and Reviews of Black Writers.(Book Review)
December 22, 2004... Donna Bailey Nurse. What's a Black Critic to Do?: Interviews, Profiles and Reviews of Black Writers. Toronto: Insomniac P, 2003. 208 pp. $16.95. The answers Donna Bailey Nurse offers to the ambitious title question of her collection What's...

W. Lawrence Hogue. The African American Male, Writing, and Difference: A Polycentric Approach to African American Literature, Criticism, and History.(Book Review)
December 22, 2004... W. Lawrence Hogue. The African American Male, Writing, and Difference: A Polycentric Approach to African American Literature, Criticism, and History. Albany: SUNY P, 2003.291 pp. $29.95. In the 11 chapters that comprise The African American...

Biko Agozino. Counter-Colonial Criminology: A Critique of Imperialist Reason.(Book Review)
December 22, 2004... Biko Agozino. Counter-Colonial Criminology: A Critique of Imperialist Reason. Foreword by Stephen Pfohl. London: Pluto P, 2003. 295 pp. $75.00. Now too many people are being killed in the world, especially in Iraq and the Middle East. Who...

Athletic iconography in Spike Lee's early feature films.
December 22, 2004... By virtually any standard, Spike Lee is a dedicated follower of professional sports. In winter, he can often be seen courtside at New York Knicks games, jawing at opposing players; in interviews, he has claimed that he grew up wanting to be a...