African American Review articles from December 2005

African American Review archives from December 2005

The short fiction of George Wylie Henderson.(Thy Name is Woman)(Excerpt)(Column)
December 22, 2005... FORGOTTEN MANUSCRIPTS Editor's Note: AAR is pleased to present a new feature column, "Forgotten Manuscripts." Because so much of African American literary, print, and cultural production remains unknown and/or ignored, and so much...

Metaphorical conceptions in hip-hop music.
December 22, 2005... "On my block, it's like the world don't exist. We stay confined to this small little section with dividends," proclaims hip-hop artist Scarface in his composition "On My Block." From the perspective of the artist, then, his neighborhood,...

Freak shows, spectacles, and carnivals: reading Jonathan Demme's beloved.
December 22, 2005... My memory is this: I buy a ticket, walk into a dimly-lit theater on the opening night of Jonathan Demme's much-anticipated cinematic adaptation of Toni Morrison's Beloved, the story of Sethe, an escaped slave haunted by the specter of her...

"As if word magic had anything to do with the courage it took to be a man": black masculinity in Toni Morrison's Paradise.
December 22, 2005... Toni Morrison's novel Paradise combines an innovative intervention in debates over the representation of black men with a critique of traditional Western notions of masculinity. In representing the struggles of African American men to...

"The soul has bandaged moments": reading the African American gothic in Wright's "big boy leaves home," Morrison's beloved, and Gomez's Gilda.
December 22, 2005... When you go out to hunt monsters, take care that you do not become one. And when you look into the abyss, remember that the abyss looks back at you. --Friedrich Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil The Soul has Bandaged moments-When too appalled...

The Loeb and Leopold Case: a neglected source for Richard Wright's native son.
December 22, 2005... But we have had many, many such cases to come before the courts of Illinois. The Loeb and Leopold case, for example.... Shall we deny this boy, because he is poor and black, the same protection, the same chance to be heard and understood that...

New women and new negroes: archetypal womanhood in The Living Is Easy.
December 22, 2005... Cleo, walking carefully over the cobblestones that tortured her toes in her stylish shoes, was jealous of all the free-striding life around her. She had nothing with which to match it but her wits. Her despotic nature found Mr. Judson a rival....

Wild grape.(Short story)
December 22, 2005... Dothy? There was only one overriding instinct that she had obeyed on her way from school and that was to get home as fast as her feet could run to her father, because he would understand. Her teacher, the one with the footlong wooden ruler...

Lorenzo Thomas. Dancing on Main Street.(Book review)
December 22, 2005... Lorenzo Thomas. Dancing on Main Street. Minneapolis: Coffee House P, 2004. 144 pp. $15.00. Dancing on Main Street the late widely-published author and critic Lorenzo Thomas is a wonderful book that embodies form, sound, imagery, and...

Melba Joyce Boyd. Wrestling with the Muse: Dudley Randall and the Broadside Press.(Book review)
December 22, 2005... Melba Joyce Boyd. Wrestling with the Muse: Dudley Randall and the Broadside Press. New York: Columbia UP, 2003. 385 pp. $29.50. Wrestling with the Muse is meant to be a close examination of poet and publisher Dudley Randall, while...

Mwatabu S. Okantah. Reconnecting Memories: Dreams No Longer Deferred.(Book review)
December 22, 2005... Mwatabu S. Okantah. Reconnecting Memories: Dreams No Longer Deferred. Trenton: Africa World P, 2004.60 pp. $29.50. M'watabu Okantah's seventh book of poetry, Reconnecting Memories, establishes him as being a true Pan-African, Muntu-Kuntu...

Duriel E. Harris. Drag.(Book review)
December 22, 2005... Duriel E. Harris. Drag. Denver: Elixir P, 2003. 96 pp. $14.00. In "Of the Sorrow Songs," W. E. B. Du Bois discusses his use of the Spirituals and other Black musical forms as the connective thread in The Souls of Black Folk (1903). To open...

Luke Sutherland. Venus as a Boy.(Book review)
December 22, 2005... Luke Sutherland. Venus as a Boy. New York: Bloomsbury, 2004. 146 pp. $16.95. Black Scottish novelist and pan-European indie-pop-star Luke Sutherland may be new to the ears and eyes of an American or African American audience. This...

Jean Wyatt. Risking Difference: Identification, Race, and Community in Contemporary Fiction and Feminism.(Book review)
December 22, 2005... Jean Wyatt. Risking Difference: Identification, Race, and Community in Contemporary Fiction and Feminism. Albany: State U of New York P, 2004. 266 pp. $23.95. In Risking Difference: Identification, Race, and Community in Contemporary...

Lynn Moss Sanders. Howard W. Odum's Folklore Odyssey: Transformation to Tolerance through African American Folk Studies.(Book review)
December 22, 2005... Lynn Moss Sanders. Howard W. Odum's Folklore Odyssey: Transformation to Tolerance through African American Folk Studies. Athens: U of Georgia P, 2004. 184 pp. $29.95. The eminent sociologist Howard W. Odum (1884-1954) was well known as a...

Steven Hahn. A Nation under Our Feet: Black Political Struggles in the Rural South from Slavery to the Great Migration.(Book review)
December 22, 2005... Steven Hahn. A Nation Under Our Feet: Black Political Struggles in the Rural South from Slavery to the Great Migration. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 2003. 618 pp. $35.00 cloth/$12.95 paper. Steven Hahn begins A Nation Under Our Feet by insisting...

Leslie M. Harris. In the Shadow of Slavery: African Americans in New York City, 1626-1863.(Book review)
December 22, 2005... Leslie M. Harris. In the Shadow of Slavery: African Americans in New York City, 1626-1863. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 2003. 380 pp. $42.50 cloth/$25.00 paper. In the Shadow of Slavery is a compelling account of African Americans in New York...

Andrew Wiese. Places of Their Own: African American Suburbanization in the Twentieth Century.(Book review)
December 22, 2005... Andrew Wiese. Places of Their Own: African American Suburbanization in the Twentieth Century. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 2004. 411 pp. $37.50. After the Civil War (1861-1865), white southerners quickly sought to re-assert over blacks the...

Magali Roy-Fequiere. Women, Creole Identity, and Intellectual Life in Early Twentieth-Century Puerto Rico.(Book review)
December 22, 2005... Magali Roy-Fequiere. Women, Creole Identity, and Intellectual Life in Early Twentieth-Century Puerto Rico. Philadelphia: Temple UP, 2004. 336 pp. $72.50. To say "intellectual life in early 20th-century Puerto Rico" is to speak of those...