African American Review articles from June 1996

African American Review archives from June 1996

Syndetic redemption: above-underground emergence in David Bradley's 'The Chaneysville Incident.'
June 22, 1996... I've got to hide, he told himself. His chest heaved as he waited, crouching in a dark corner of the vestibule. He was tired of running and dodging. Either he had to find a place to hide, or he had to surrender. (Richard Wright) I was in the...

Images of subversion: Ishmael Reed and the hoodoo trickster.
June 22, 1996... "HooDoo" explains Ishmael Reed in Shrovetide in Old New Orleans, "might be called Vodoun, streamlined. In New Orleans it's all over town, invisible to all but the trained eye. Faced with curious and sometimes comical suppression by the police, it...

A 'commonplace' conversation with Lani Guinier. (founder of non-profit organization Commonplace)(Interview)
June 22, 1996... Funderburg: What do you hope to remedy with Commonplace, your recently established, not-for-profit group? Guinier: Accomplish would be a better word; remedy sounds much too ambitious for the shoestring operation that we are presently. Perhaps...

Femininity, publicity, and the class division of cultural labor: Jessie Redmon Fauset's 'There Is Confusion.'
June 22, 1996... To no modern race do its women mean so much as to the Negro, nor come so near to the fulfillment of its meaning. (Du Bois, Darkwater 172) Critics have long debated the meaning and significance of the Harlem Renaissance, some arguing that the...

"You Just Can't Keep a Good Woman Down": Alice Walker sings the blues.
June 22, 1996... Oh - Just can't keep a real good woman down Oh - Just can't keep a real good woman down If you throw me down here Papa, I rise up in some other town (Miller) Alice Walker has been profoundly influenced and inspired both by African American...

Postmodern ethnography and the womanist mission: postcolonial sensibilities in 'Possessing the Secret of Joy.'
June 22, 1996... Reading Possessing the Secret of Joy is a dual exercise in reading culture. First, the novel's actions focus on the cultural rite of female circumcision. Second, the creator of the fictional world within which the novel's African protagonist...

His honor responds. (poem)
June 22, 1996... who's to step forth and be our guide on the shores of this lake so large it might just as well be an ocean? where multitudes have come looking for miracles for a river to cross hungry for stones that will not of themselves turn into the bread...

Where we begin. (poem)
June 22, 1996... the bar is not crowded... few men... fewer women... small round tables, metal legs like tuning forks, tilt every which way / old chairs, all black, show-pocked pieces of wood she was here once before / this time a friend comes too, a...

Incident. (poem)
June 22, 1996... the day of the accident we were waiting for the train on the elevated platform above westchester avenue / the avenue that never saw sunlight except filtered through the cracks of the tracks / its abstract fretwork on the cars below. we didn't see...

Soweto, the present tense. (poem)
June 22, 1996... By the power lines, their long catenaries dipped with copper, I stop at the clearing unfolding in the patch of sorrel and grass and watch how the telephone cables trail off in the neural passage between sender and receiver. Eye rifling through...

Names. (poem)
June 22, 1996... Mama picked them from a loam of dead relatives, resurrections. One kick & she named Ned after Paw-paw. Claimed she smelled his pipe in her dreams. Sheila Marie after an aunt who passed the week she was born. Margaret Louise for two grandmothers....

Voyeur. (poem)
June 22, 1996... 1 The woods in morning when mist rises from lowground the very earth is breathing. When it is still dark pulls at boots and makes walking slow the trees drip with dew. The underbrush pushes against his thighs water runs in his jeans. Hollis...

The lowdown conjure woman blues. (poem)
June 22, 1996... She had the blues so bad she lay down wallowed in it she said You can set my cup of coffee right here on the floor o

Haunted by innocence: the debate with Dostoevsky in Wright's 'other novel,' "The Outsider."
June 22, 1996... Richard Wright's novel Native Son (1940) is widely recognized as a seminal work and one of the most influential texts in modern African-American literature. Margaret Walker Alexander suggests that Wright's influence on black writers parallels...

Richard Wright's 'The Long Dream' as racial and sexual discourse.
June 22, 1996... When The Long Dream, Wright's last novel, written in exile in France, appeared in 1958, two years before his death, it encountered largely negative reviews in America. Despite Wright's efforts to portray black people's bitter experiences in the...

Written By Herself: Literary Production by African American Women, 1746-1892.
June 22, 1996... This book is important because of the quality of its analysis, the breadth of its knowledge, and the significance of its concerns. In clear prose, Professor Foster examines a selection of extremely varied writings produced by African American...

Vessels of Evil: American Slavery and the Holocaust.
June 22, 1996... In his highly detailed and intriguing philosophical work Vessels of Evil, Laurence Thomas brings the subject of chattel slavery into sharp relief against that of the Holocaust. Today we know of the horrors of the Jewish Holocaust, and we are...

Free People of Color: Inside the African American Community.
June 22, 1996... James Oliver Horton is widely known for the pioneering study of Boston's antebellum black community that he published with Lois E. Horton in 1979. This was the first scholarly study of a free black community based on the kinds of materials - tax...

The Word in Black and White: Reading 'Race' in American Literature, 1638-1867.
June 22, 1996... Dana Nelson presents her important and engaging study of "race" in selected Anglo American texts as an answer to Toni Morrison's questioning of the attitude that white racism is somehow a black problem: "Why ask the victim to explain the...

Confronting Authority: Reflections of an Ardent Protester.
June 22, 1996... Peering through the keyhole into Derrick Bell's latest work incites pithy questions. Is this gussied gossip from an ivy-covered, ebony soap opera? Is it an exegesis on the "intensely personal" decision to "confront rather than conform"? In 1990...

Fatheralong: A Meditation on Fathers and Sons, Race and Society.
June 22, 1996... One of the consistent themes in the writings of John Edgar Wideman has been the status and condition of African American men. He has explored the subject in terms of their relationships to women, to each other, to the black community, and to the...

Sojourner Truth: Slave, Prophet, Legend.
June 22, 1996... In an effort to raise money while on speaking tours, Sojourner Truth would offer for sale to the public carte-de-visite photographs of herself that proclaimed the motto "I sell the shadow to support the substance." Until now, this motto could...

The History of Mary Prince, A West Indian Slave, Related by Herself.
June 22, 1996... At its publication in London and Edinburgh in 1831, The History of Mary Prince, A West Indian Slave did more than add yet another document to the narratives of British former slaves dating back to the eighteenth century, and to the many case...

Autobiographies: Narrative of the Life; My Bondage and My Freedom; Life and Times.
June 22, 1996... The Library of America series, created with the support of the National Endowment for the Humanities and the Ford Foundation, is "dedicated to preserving the works of America's greatest writers in handsome enduring volumes, featuring...

Minnie's Sacrifice; Sowing and Reaping; Trial and Triumph: Three Undiscovered Novels by Frances E.W. Harper.
June 22, 1996... As an act of literary archaeology, Frances Smith Foster has brought forth three previously unaccounted for novels by Frances E. W. Harper. Foster's text Minnie's Sacrifice, Sowing and Reaping, Trial and Triumph: Three Rediscovered Novels by...

Dark Laughter: The Satiric Art of Oliver W. Harrington.
June 22, 1996... For years, in order to contrast the authentic admiration of French fans who, from the start, considered jazz as highbrow culture with the American cliche of the Negro as a natural entertainer, I have circulated among my students Ollie...

Why I Left America and Other Essays.
June 22, 1996... For years, in order to contrast the authentic admiration of French fans who, from the start, considered jazz as highbrow culture with the American cliche of the Negro as a natural entertainer, I have circulated among my students Ollie...

Louis Armstrong: A Cultural Legacy.
June 22, 1996... Unlike other major figures in jazz history, Louis Armstrong has seldom been attached to a stable set of meanings. His most enduring image - the wide grin and the white handkerchief - has been read as the craven surrender to racist stereotypes,...

"Everyday Use" by Alice Walker.
June 22, 1996... Professors of American literature frequently bemoan the fact that college students of the nineties often have little knowledge of the Black Power Movement and the Second Wave of the Feminist Movement, two social interventions that define the...

"Big 'Fraid and Little 'Fraid": An Afro-American Folk Tale.
June 22, 1996... Minton's work will be of value to scholars interested in the debate over the origins of African American tales. This already limited audience, however, will be further confined by the very specific folkloric emphasis of the discussion and...

Ethnic Cultures in the 1920s in North America.
June 22, 1996... The fourteen essays in this collection address issues of ethnicity in the fields of literature, history, politics, and anthropology. Drawn from a Franco-German Colloquium initiated at the University of Erlangen-Nuremberg in July 1991, this...

Visions of Presence in Modern American Poetry.
June 22, 1996... Here are separate essays on Wallace Stevens, W. H. Auden, Theodore Roethke, Elizabeth Bishop, Robert Penn Warren, Richard Wilbur, A. R. Ammons, James Wright, and Howard Nemerov. Scott is a clear, appreciative critic with a broad intellectual...

Rite of Passage.
June 22, 1996... With the publication of the Library of America editions of Richard Wright's major works in 1991, an important new phase of Wright scholarship began - the arduous tasks of first recovering and then evaluating the texts which Wright actually wrote...

Iron City.
June 22, 1996... When Richard Wright's Native Son was published in 1940, it was a success de scandal. Reviewers from all over the U.S. praised the novel for its aesthetic merits and its iconoclasm. However, those who could have been expected to be closest to...

Me Dying Trial.
June 22, 1996... In Jamaica, when people exclaim, "See me dying trial," they are calling on a higher being to witness the trouble they have to bear. Patricia Powell appropriates this phrase and makes the reader the witness to the struggle of her protagonist,...

A Small Gathering of Bones.
June 22, 1996... In Jamaica, when people exclaim, "See me dying trial," they are calling on a higher being to witness the trouble they have to bear. Patricia Powell appropriates this phrase and makes the reader the witness to the struggle of her protagonist,...

School of Udhra.
June 22, 1996... School of Udhra is Nathaniel Mackey's second full-length book of poetry, and represents a fitting continuation of his provocative and exciting poetic-cultural project, an ongoing fusion of the harmonic and melodic techniques of the most advanced...