African American Review articles from December 2007

African American Review archives from December 2007

Foreword: preliminary postings from a neo-soul.(Editorial)
December 22, 2007... What are we to make of the palpable fact that this special issue of African American Review given over to considerations of "post-soul" phenomena (and having once ensconced this term in scare quotes, I will dispense with all such typographical...

Theorizing the post-soul aesthetic: an introduction.(Essay)
December 22, 2007... one. The End of the Beginning of the Post-Soul Aesthetic It's time. Clearly, it's time. As I begin this introduction, in the spring of 2006, landmark anniversaries press in on me from every side: 20 years ago, Greg Tate wrote "Cult-Nats...

Post-black, old black.(Essay)
December 22, 2007... In recent years, students of American and African American thought, politics, and culture have sought to understand what we used to call race relations as currently unfolding in the aftermath. In the aftermath of what depends on whom you ask....

Post-soul aesthetics in contemporary African American art.(Critical essay)
December 22, 2007... In 1926, W. E. B. Du Bois announced to a meeting of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) that all art must be propaganda to help improve the condition of the race (22). Du Bois's own foray into visual culture...

The Afro-Asiatic floating world: post-soul implications of the art of iona rozeal brown.
December 22, 2007... Geishas sporting afros and locs. Samurais with gold chains. Courtesans bearing headwraps that spiral to the sky. These are the citizens that populate the Afro-Asian landscape of paintings by African American artist iona rozeal brown. Many works...

Postmodernism, pop music, and blues practice in Nelson George's post-soul culture.(Critical essay)
December 22, 2007... [T]here is something missing in black America, and symptoms of the illness are in its music. (Nelson George, Death of Rhythm and Blues xii). We are no longer post-soul. We are something else. For now, I leave that new definition to you...

Afrofuturism and post-soul possibility in black popular music.(Critical essay)
December 22, 2007... When incense bums, smoke unfurls Analog girl in a digital world The rasta style flower child Za dip dip dow zip dip dow The gold tooth smile Split them vowels Bling bloom bling Melanated I'm bout ta give birth to church But everybody wanna Ask...

"The poet in the world, the world in the poet": Cyrus Cassells's and Elizabeth Alexander's versions of post-soul cosmopolitanism.(Critical essay)
December 22, 2007... The opening chronicle of Nelson George's Buppies, B-Boys, Baps, and Bohos: Notes on Post-Soul Black Culture (1992) includes a small but notable stream of literary and academic figures such as Ishmael Reed, bell hooks, Toni Morrison, and Cornel...

The dark room collective and post-soul poetics.(Critical essay)
December 22, 2007... Generation next does not labor under the burden of being brand new or even Brand Nubian.... [T]hey know how to bring the pain and the profanity but also the prophecy, the redemption, and the light. They bear witness to what Amiri Baraka once...

Passing in the post-race era: Danzy Senna, Philip Roth, and Colson Whitehead.(Critical essay)
December 22, 2007... Passing in the "Mulatto Millennium" In the last decade, persons of mixed race have been often represented as hip testimony to American democracy, the corporeal resolution of racial diversity and national unity. Assertion of a mixed race...

An end of Southern history: the down-home quests of Toni Morrison and Colson Whitehead.(Critical essay)
December 22, 2007... Since something seems to be ending, the time has come to ask how much force the historical South still exerts in the black literary imagination. Not that the postmodern South's concrete locale, its regional traits, as well as the speech and...

These--are--the "breaks": a roundtable discussion on teaching the post-soul aesthetic.(Essay)
December 22, 2007... We met at Duke University--mid-summer, Atlantic, at mid-campus--to talk about teaching courses that focused on the post-soul aesthetic. We met outside the John Hope Franklin Center, and soon enough we five youngish black professors were walking...

Nicholas Brown. Utopian Generations: The Political Horizon of Twentieth-Century Literature.(Book review)
December 22, 2007... Nicholas Brown. Utopian Generations: The Political Horizon of Twentieth-Century Literature. Princeton: Princteon UP, 2005. 243 pp. $60.00/$26.95. In Utopian Generations, Nicholas Brown provides readers with both a sound theoretical...

Polycarp Ikuenobe. Philosophical Perspectives on Communalism and Morality in African Traditions.(Book review)
December 22, 2007... Polycarp Ikuenobe. Philosophical Perspectives on Communalism and Morality in African Traditions. Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2006. 329 pp. $27.95. This book is a much-needed conceptual and pragmatic study of the existence and significance...

Michael A. Gomez, ed. Diasporic Africa: A Reader.(Book review)
December 22, 2007... Michael A. Gomez, ed. DiasporicAfrica: A Reader. New York: New York UP, 2006. 317 pp. $23.00. Michael Gomez begins this collection of essays with an ambitious purpose statement: "It is the argument of this book that the envisioning of an...

Lisa D. McGill. Constructing Black Selves: Caribbean American Narratives and the Second Generation.(Book review)
December 22, 2007... Lisa D. McGill. Constructing Black Selves: Caribbean American Narratives and the Second Generation. New York: New York UP, 2005. 327 pp. $50.00. Using second generation Americans Harry Belafonte, Paule Marshall, Audre Lorde,...

Steven J. Belluscio. To Be Suddenly White: Literary Realism and Racial Passing.(Book review)
December 22, 2007... Steven J. Belluscio. To Be Suddenly White: Literary Realism and Racial Passing. Columbia: U of Missouri P, 2006. 288 pp. $44.95. Although Belluscio's book takes up two heavily studied topics, literary realism and racial...

Eric J. Sundquist. Strangers in the Land." Blacks, Jews, Post-Holocaust America.(Book review)
December 22, 2007... Eric J. Sundquist. Strangers in the Land." Blacks, Jews, Post-Holocaust America. Cambridge, MA: Belknap P of Harvard UP, 2005. 662 pp. $35.00. In a sense this extensively documented, exhaustively researched book does not...

Yolanda Pierce. Hell without Fires: Slavery, Christianity, and the Antebellum Spiritual Narrative.(Book review)
December 22, 2007... Yolanda Pierce. Hell without Fires: Slavery, Christianity, and the Antebellum Spiritual Narrative. Gainesville: UP of Florida, 2005. 151 pp. $59.95. This book examines the conversion of experiences five antebellum African...

Lucas E. Morel, ed. Ralph Ellison and the Raft of Hope: A Political Companion to Invisible Man.(Book review)
December 22, 2007... Lucas E. Morel, ed. Ralph Ellison and the Raft of Hope: A Political Companion to Invisible Man. Lexington: U of Kentucky P, 2006. 249 pp. $45.00 cloth/$24.95 paper. Although Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man has been heavily...

Lenard D. Moore. Gathering at the Crossroads.(Book review)
December 22, 2007... Lenard D. Moore. Gathering at the Crossroads [Haiku by Lenard D. Moore, Photographs by Eugene B. Redmond]. Winchester, VA: Red Moon P, 2003.12 pp. $7.00. In, autumn last year, we once again recalled the "gathering at the...

Dwight A. McBride. Why I Hate Abercrombie & Fitch: Essays on Race and Sexuality.(Book review)
December 22, 2007... Dwight A. McBride. Why I Hate Abercrombie & Fitch: Essays on Race and Sexuality. New York: New York UP, 2005. 251 pp. $60.00 cloth/$19.00 paper. This collection of essays exposes and explores the racialized and heterosexist...