African American Review articles from June 1998

African American Review archives from June 1998

"In the land of cotton": economics and violence in Jean Toomer's 'Cane.' (African-American woman author)
June 22, 1998... Critics of Jean Toomer's Cane disagree about the text's relation to the economic and social realities confronting rural and small-town Georgia blacks in the early 1920s. Some scholars read the novel as a nostalgic celebration of a vanishing...

"Love me like I like to be": the sexual politics of Hurston's 'Their Eyes Were Watching God,' the classic blues and the Black Women's Club movement. (book by African-American woman author Zora Neal Hurston)
June 22, 1998... Zora Neale Hurston's Their Eyes Were Watching God is a text at once (ac)claimed for its ability to speak to contemporary gender and sexual politics and blamed for its inability to speak to the local, particularized politics of its time. Their...

The double truth, Ruth: 'Do the Right Thing' and the culture of ambiguity. (film by director Spike Lee)
June 22, 1998... In "Of Our Spiritual Strivings," the famous first chapter of The Souls of Black Folk, W. E. B. Du Bois ascribes to the African-American consciousness what he perceives to be a fundamental "two-ness." This "double-consciousness . . . two souls,...

"The laws were laid down to me anew": Harriet Jacobs and the reframing of legal fictions. (African American woman author and former slave)
June 22, 1998... The narrative of Harriet Jacobs's life in slavery and eventual escape, published the year the Civil War began, poses a political argument that both condemns the laws of slavery and critiques dominant standards of (white) womanhood. As a literary...

Beneath the Black aesthetic: James Baldwin's primer of Black American masculinity. (African American gay author)
June 22, 1998... It has become commonplace to suggest the similarities in the histories of the black and feminist consciousness movements of the 1960s and '70s, especially the critical blindnesses that threatened to undermine the very solidarity crucial to...

Call-and-response: parallel "slave narrative" in August Wilson's 'The Piano Lesson.' (African American author)
June 22, 1998... So much has been written on August Wilson's project to chronicle the African-American experience through each decade of the twentieth century that the series, which now includes seven plays - Jitney!(1979), Ma Rainey's Black Bottom (1984), Fences...

History, myth, and revolt in Lorraine Hansberry's 'Les Blancs.' (drama by African American woman author)
June 22, 1998... Lorraine Hansberry began drafting Les Blancs (The Whites) as early as 1960, soon after the publication of her remarkably successful A Raisin in the Sun (1959). But it was not until 1970 that Robert Nemiroff, her former husband, put together the...

Tip-toeing on the tightrope: a personal essay on Black writer ambivalence.
June 22, 1998... A drum roll roared, a crowd hissed, cymbals clashed, and a muscular young African woman finessed her way up the ladder to the landing, then to the wire. Fans around the world marveled at this glamorous Black woman with sparkly make-up and neon...

The fourth face: the image of God in Toni Morrison's 'The Bluest Eye.'
June 22, 1998... Religious references, both from Western and African sources, abound in Toni Morrison's fiction, but nowhere are they more intriguing or perplexing than in The Bluest Eye. And of the many fascinating religious references in this novel, the most...

Paule Marshall's 'Brown Girl, Brownstones': reconciling ethnicity and individualism. (African American woman author's semi-autobiographical novel)
June 22, 1998... Edward Said claims that "students of post-colonial politics have not . . . looked enough at the ideas that minimize orthodoxy and authoritarian or patriarchal thought, that take a severe view of the coercive nature of identity politics" (219)....

Retelling our selves: collective memory and the body in Charlotte Watson Sherman's 'One Dark Body.' (African American woman author)
June 22, 1998... African American literature often identifies and confronts political oppression, societal racism, and economic exploitation. Recently, writers of these texts have broadened the parameters of their discursive worlds to explore historic (even...

Criticism and the Color Line: Desegregating American Literary Studies.
June 22, 1998... Henry B. Wonham, ed. New Brunswick: Rutgers UP, 1996. 299 pp. $50.00 cloth/$18.95 paper. Reviewed by Georgina Dodge The Ohio State University In "Unspeakable Things Unspoken: The Afro-American Presence in American Literature," Toni...

The Dialect of Modernism: Race, Language and Twentieth-Century Literature.
June 22, 1998... Michael North, New York: Oxford UP, 1994. 255 pp. $39.95 cloth/$16.95 paper. Reviewed by Susan M. Marren University of Arkansas, Fayetteville A decade ago, Houston A. Baker, Jr., famously noted that even the most sympathetic chroniclers...

Negritude and Literary Criticism: The History and Theory of "Negro-African" Literature in French.
June 22, 1998... Belinda Elizabeth Jack. Westport: Greenwood P, 1996. 203 pp. $55.00. Reviewed by A. James Arnold University of Virginia Greenwood Press has done a real service to U.S. scholars of African and diaspora literatures in French by publishing...

Things of Darkness: Economies of Race and Gender in Early Modern England.
June 22, 1998... Kim F. Hall. Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1995. 319 pp. $45.00 cloth/$17.95 paper. Reviewed by Dorothy Stephens University of Arkansas For any of us who have ever told a student that Shakespeare's sonnets to the dark lady refer only to a brunette,...

The City in African-American Literature.
June 22, 1998... Yoshinobu Hakutani and Robert Butler, eds. Cranbury: Associated UP, 1995. 265 pp. $39.50. Reviewed by Charles Scruggs University of Arizona There are sixteen essays in this volume, plus an editors' introduction which states that the...

Catching Sense: African American Communities on a South Carolina Sea Island.
June 22, 1998... Patricia Guthrie. Westport: Bergin & Garvey, 1996. 156 pp. $49.95. Reviewed by John Stewart University of California, Davis From time to time we rub the wound of slavery to vitalize our connectedness to the past and through it to each...

A Fire in the Bones: Reflections on African-American Religious History.
June 22, 1998... Albert J. Raboteau. Boston: Beacon P. 1995. 235 pp. $23.00 Reviewed by Dolan Hubbard The University of Georgia A Fire in the Bones is a continuation of Raboteau's landmark study Slave Religion: The "Invisible Institution "in the...

Katie's Canon: Womanism and the Soul of the Black Community.
June 22, 1998... Katie Geneva Cannon. New York: Continuum, 1995. 191 pp. $19.95. Reviewed by La Vinia D. Jennings University of Tennessee, Knoxville Strongly recommended by James H. Cone as essential reading for "every theologian, student and lay person....

Platform for Change: THe Foundations of the Northern Free Black Community, 1775-1865.
June 22, 1998... Harry Red. Platform for Change: The Foundations of the Northern Free Black Community, 1775-1865. East Lansing: Michigan State UP, 1994. 264 pp. $29.95. Reviewed by Shane White University of Sydney According to Harry Reed there was,...

Conversations with Ernest Gaines.
June 22, 1998... John Lowe, ed. Jackson: UP of Mississippi, 1995. 354 pp. $15.95. Reviewed by Valerie Babb Georgetown University Devotees of Ernest Gaines will no doubt welcome John Lowe's collection Conversations with Ernest Gaines. They will be...

Conversations with Chester Himes.
June 22, 1998... Michel Fabre and Robert E. Skinner, eds. Conversations with Chester Himes. Jackson: UP of Mississippi, 1995. 150 pp. $15.95. Reviewed by Bernard W. Bell Pennsylvania State University "American male writers don't produce manly books," John...

William Grant Still: A Bio-Bibliography.
June 22, 1998... Judith Anne Still, Michael J. Dabrishus, and Carolyn L. Quin. Westport: Greenwood P, 1996. 331 pp. $85.00. Reviewed by B. A. Nugent University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign The significance of American composer William Grant Still...

Revolution of Conscience: Martin Luther King, Jr., and the Philosophy of Nonviolence.
June 22, 1998... Moses Greg. New York: Guilford P, 1997. 256 pp. $23.95 Reviewed by Hans A. Baer University of Arkansas at Little Rock Mr. Martin Luther King, Jr., is widely regarded to have been prominent as a minister, orator, and Civil Rights activist -...

Selected Works of Edythe Mae Gordon.
June 22, 1998... Edythe Mae Gordon. Ed. Henry Louis Gates and Jennifer Burton. Intro. Lorraine Elena Roses. New York: G. K. Hall, 1996. 129 pp. $25.00. Reviewed by Lovalerie King University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill Add the voice of Edythe Mae Gordon...

The Cattle Killing.
June 22, 1998... John Edgar Wideman, Boston: Houghton, 1996. 212 pp. $22.95. Reviewed by Philip Page California State University, San Bernardino John Edgar Wideman has done it again. He has written another spellbinding, provocative - and difficult - novel....