African American Review articles from December 2006

African American Review archives from December 2006

Foreword.(publication of the 19th-Century novel The Curse of Caste; or The Slave Bride by Julia C. Collins)
December 22, 2006... The recent publication of The Curse of Caste; or The Slave Bride in book form for the first time challenges all who are interested in 19th-century African American literary history to take a fresh look at the story of black women's writing that...

Of print and primogeniture, or, the curse of firsts.(Julia C. Collins's rediscovered novel The Curse of Caste; or The Slave Bride)(Critical essay)
December 22, 2006... When asked if I would share few thoughts on Julia C. Collins's The Curse of Caste, both about the novel itself and the recent spate of commentary on said book, I agreed without much hesitation. As a scholar of 19th-century black literature, I...

Introduction: reclaiming Julia C. Collins, forgotten 19th-century African American author.(Critical essay)
December 22, 2006... In April 1864, Julia C. Collins emerged out of anonymity in the small town of Williamsport, Pennsylvania, into the literary spotlight. Collins presented herself to readers nationwide, captured them with several didactic essays and a domestic...

How do you solve a problem like Theresa?(Theresa: A Haytien Tale, short fiction)(authorship and publication of African American fiction in the 19th-Century)(Critical essay)
December 22, 2006... Freedom's Journal is well known as the "first newspaper published by African Americans." Words written in the first issue are often quoted and generally used to define its scope and purpose: "We wish to plead our own cause. Too long have others...

Eulogy for Julia C. Collins: speculations on her thoughts in Oswego, New York at Lake Ontario circa January 1865.(Fictional work)
December 22, 2006... Icy winds slash the waves of Lake Ontario, dash open the wings of my winter cape and rustle the furrows of my woolen skirt. I invite this assault, inhale deeply to force the frigid air into the recesses of my chest. Under grey skies of...

Interrogating the silences: Julia C. Collins, 19th-Century black readers and writers, and the Christian Recorder.(Collins's novel The Curse of Caste; or The Slave Bride)(Critical essay)
December 22, 2006... In the 1970s, when Tillie Olsen published Silences, her rumination on literary exclusions, she dedicated her book in part to "our silenced people, century after century of their beings consumed in the hard, everyday essential work of...

What the Dickens?: intertextual influence and the inheritance of virtue in Julia C. Collins's The Curse of Caste; or The Slave Bride.(novel)(Critical essay)
December 22, 2006... Curses echo through the halls of ancestral homes, their sound amplified by the memory of an avenging spirit. Characters draped in darkness and shadow live secluded from the truth about their family history, their only evidence of ancestry...

"Neither is memory always thus avenging": longing for kinship in Julia C. Collins's The Curse of Caste and the Christian Recorder.(novel The Curse of Caste; or The Slave Bride)(Critical essay)
December 22, 2006... "It is a serial story which we are all reading, and which grows in vital interest with each successive installment."--Charles W. Chesnutt, The Marrow of Tradition (1901) Black American writers invested the story of slavery with a deep...

The Christian Recorder, broken families, and educated nations in Julia C. Collins's Civil War novel The Curse of Caste.(The Curse of Caste; or The Slave Bride)(Critical essay)
December 22, 2006... "We know that there are many well-educated, strong and powerful minds among us, that have need only to be discovered... ."--The Christian Recorder (1852) "Family metaphors abound in Civil War literature."--Catherine Clinton In April,...

The sentiment of the Christian serial novel: The Curse of Caste; or The Slave Bride and the AME Christian Recorder.(novel by Julia C. Collins)(Critical essay)
December 22, 2006... By the time the first installment of Julia C. Collins's The Curse of Caste; or The Slave Bride was printed in the Christian Recorder, a 19th-century African American church-affiliated newspaper, Collins had become a household name among its...

Information wanted: The Curse of Caste, Minnie's Sacrifice, and the Christian Recorder.(Julia C. Collins's novel The Curse of Caste; or The Slave Bride)(Critical essay)
December 22, 2006... I the "Dedicatory Lines" he wrote for the Christian Recorder's inaugural 1852 issue, editor Reverend Daniel Payne apostrophized: Whate'er thine eyes behold, note down-- The beautiful in nature, or the grand, The curious or...

A tale of disunion: the racial politics of unclaimed kindred in Julia C. Collins's The Curse of Caste; or The Slave Bride.(novel)(Critical essay)
December 22, 2006... A reader familiar with 19th-century African American fiction might turn the last page of Julia C. Collins's The Curse of Caste; or The Slave Bride in disappointment because the novel does not satisfy expectations that initiated readers bring to...

Biracial promise and the new South in Minnie's Sacrifice: a protocol for reading The Curse of Caste; or The Slave Bride.(novel)(Critical essay)
December 22, 2006... Frances E. W. Harper, like Julia C. Collins, serialized a novel in the late 1860s in the Christian Recorder, the newspaper published by the African Methodist Episcopal Church. Besides its publishing history, Harper's Minnie's Sacrifice has a...

"'Ruse it well": reading, power, and the seduction plot in The Curse of Caste.(The Curse of Caste; or The Slave Bride, novel)(Critical essay)
December 22, 2006... Readers of fiction in the United States during the 1860s immediately would have recognized the narrative conventions that Julia C. Collins uses to unfold the "dark mystery" (14) of her novel--the story of the ultimately tragic courtship and...

Face value: ambivalent citizenship in Iola Leroy.(novel)(Critical essay)
December 22, 2006... From the moment of its initial publication in 1892, Frances E. W. Harper's Iola Leroy, or Shadows Uplifted has experienced a decidedly ambiguous critical reception. In William Still's introduction to the second edition of the novel, for...

Childhood, the body, and race performance: early 20th-century etiquette books for black children.
December 22, 2006... When the activist, educator, and clubwoman Mary Church Terrell discussed The Modern Woman in a 1916 lecture in Charleston, her decorous physical persona impressed her audience as much as did her ideas about the role of women to racial service....

African American women's poetry in the Christian Recorder, 1855-1865: a bio-bibliography with sample poems.
December 22, 2006... While the work of several early African American women poets who published book-length collections has been recovered by literary historians (Joan Sherman pre-eminent among them), many pre-20th-century Black women who published occasional...

William L. Andrews and Mitch Kachun, eds. The Curse of Caste, or, The Slave Bride: A Rediscovered African American Novel by Julia C. Collins.(Book review)
December 22, 2006... William L. Andrews and Mitch Kachun, eds. The Curse of Caste; or The Slave Bride: A Rediscovered African American Novel by Julia C. Collins. New York: Oxford UP, 2006. 208 pp. $11.95. In 2002, Harvard University Professor Henry Louis Gates,...

Harriet A. Jacobs. Peripecias en la vida de una joven esclava escritas por ella misma. Junto con "Un relato verdadero de esclavitud" de John S. Jacobs. [Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, Written by Herself together with "A True Tale of Slavery" by John S. Jacobs].(L'anima de les negres. Poesia de dones afroamericanes dels segles XVIII i XIX)(Book review)
December 22, 2006... Harriet A. Jacobs. Peripecias en al vida de una joven esclava escritas por ella misma. Junto con "Un relato verdadero de esclavitud" de John S. Jacobs. [Incidents in the life of a Slave Girl, Written by Herself together with "A True Tale of...

Jenny Sharpe. Ghosts of Slavery: A Literary Archaeology of Black Women's Lives.(Book review)
December 22, 2006... Jenny Sharpe. Ghosts of Slavery: A Literary Archaeology of Black Women's Lives. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 2003. 213 pp. $20.00. For reasons having to do with academic centers of gravity as much as with other forms of hegemony, the...