African American Review articles from June 1999

African American Review archives from June 1999

Unmaking the male body: the politics of masculinity in 'The Long Dream.'.
June 22, 1999... Less than a quarter of the way into Richard Wright's The Long Dream, readers are faced with the stark image of a lifeless body, and a passage which describes a man's torture and castration for transgressing the cultural taboo of miscegenation....

Reading the painterly text: Clarence Major's "The Slave Trade: View from the Middle Passage.".
June 22, 1999... Many writers of the black diaspora have embarked upon figurative journeys to the troubled waters of the Middle Passage in their poetry, fiction, and criticism. Their attempts to wrest meaning from this historical site of terror speak to a...

Keeping an "old wound" alive: 'The Marrow of Tradition' and the legacy of Wilmington.
June 22, 1999... The historical and sociopolitical context of Charles W. Chesnutt's The Marrow of Tradition is the legacy of Reconstruction, and - more specifically - the circumstances surrounding what H. Leon Prather calls the "Wilmington Racial Massacre and...

Hysteria and trauma in Pauline Hopkins' 'Of One Blood, Or, the Hidden Self.'.
June 22, 1999... Though the medical and psychological literature contemporaneous with Pauline Hopkins might lead one to suspect that only white, middle-class women were vulnerable to the medical diagnosis of hysteria, Hopkins, in her novel Of One Blood; Or, the...

"I'm not the boy you want": sexuality, "race," and thwarted revolution in Baldwin's 'Another Country.'.
June 22, 1999... Among the tortures and devastations of life is this then - our friends are not able to finish their stories. (Virginia Woolf 39) Critics of Another Country have been eager to see in the novel the promise of a transparent sexual utopia...

Somebody else's foremother: David Haynes and Zora Neale Hurston.
June 22, 1999... If there is a single distinguishing feature of the literature of black women - and this accounts for their lack of recognition - it is this: their literature is about black women; it takes the trouble to record the thoughts, words, feelings,...

Folk culture and masculine identity Charles Burnett's 'To Sleep with Anger.'.
June 22, 1999... A major concern of story-telling should be restoring values, reversing the erosion of all those things that made a better life. (Burnett, "Inner City Blues" 224) It seems that the object of all films should be to generate a sense of...

Representation, race, and the "language" of the ineffable in Toni Morrison's narrative.
June 22, 1999... bell hooks has made the insightful remark "images that of race and representation have become a contemporary obsession," yet "little progress is made if we transform images without shifting paradigms, changing perspectives, ways of looking"...

Violence, home, and community in Toni Morrison's 'Beloved.'.
June 22, 1999... The terms home and community are frequently uttered with reverence by feminists, non-feminists, and anti-feminists alike. These terms and the spaces they conjure up are invoked as the cure to no end of social ills, from stress and malaise to...

"Mislike me not for my complexion...": Ira Aldridge in whiteface.
June 22, 1999... Ira Aldridge, the first important black American Shakespearean actor, had an odd but remarkable theatrical career. Born in New York City in 1807, educated for a few years in the second African Free School in lower Manhattan, employed in his...

What Else But Love?: The Ordeal of Race in Faulkner and Morrison.(Review)
June 22, 1999... Philip Weinstein. The Ordeal of Race in Faulkner and Morrison. New York: Oxford UP, 1997. 237 pp. $42.00 cloth/$15.50 paper. Reviewed by William R. Nash Middlebury College Philip Weinstein enters the ongoing debate over literary...

The Inhuman Race: The Racial Grotesque in American Literature and Culture.(Review)
June 22, 1999... Leonard Cassuto. The Racial Grotesque in American Literature and Culture. New York: Columbia UP, 1997. 308 pp. $49.50 cloth/$17.50 paper. Reviewed by Christopher Looby University of Pennsylvania This book joins a distinguished...

Writing Tricksters: Mythic Gambols in American Ethnic Literature.(Review)
June 22, 1999... Jeanne Rosier Smith. Mythic Gambols in American Ethnic Literature. Berkeley: U of California P, 1997. 196 pp. $45.00 cloth/$15.95 paper. Reviewed by Alice Hall Petry Southern Illinois University, Edwardsville Some scholarly studies...

Lost Plays of the Harlem Renaissance: 1920-1940.(Review)
June 22, 1999... James V. Hatch and Leo Hamalian, eds. 1920-1940. Detroit: Wayne State UP, 1996. 467 pp. $25.95. Reviewed by Cary D. Wintz Texas Southern University In the past several years a number of scholars have refocused their attention on...

Social Rituals and the Verbal Art of Zoal Neale Hurston.(Review)
June 22, 1999... Lynda Marion Hill. Washington: Howard UP, 1996. 269 pp. $29.00. Reviewed by Australia Tarver Texas Christian University In her 1995 study of the philosophy and politics of Zora Neale Hurston, Every Tub Must Sit on Its Own Bottom,...

Jackie Robinson: A Biography.(Review)
June 22, 1999... Arnold Rampersad. New York: Knopf, 1997. 512 pp. $27.50. Reviewed by Hoyt Purvis University of Arkansas Baseball was supposed to be America's game. However, until fifty years ago, major league baseball, the pinnacle of the national...

The Several Lives of Chester Himes.(Review)
June 22, 1999... Edward Margolies and Michael Fabre. Jackson: UP of Mississippi, 1997. 213 pp. $28.00. Reviewed by Mark A. Sanders Emory University The French novelist Jean Giano once remarked that he would "give all of Dos Passos and Fitzgerald...

Ed Bullins: A Literary Biography.(Review)
June 22, 1999... Samuel A. Hay. Detroit: Wayne State UP, 1997. 302 pp. $34.95. Reviewed by Nathan Grant State University of New York at Buffalo In 1967, Robert Macbeth, founder of the New Lafayette Theater in Harlem, had read one of Ed...

Native in a Strange Land: Trials and Tremors.(Review)
June 22, 1999... Wanda Coleman. Santa Rosa: Black Sparrow P, 1996. 292 pp. $27.50 cloth/$15.00 paper. Reviewed by Sandra K. Stanley California State University, Northridge For Raymond Chandler, Angeles is a labyrinth of mean streets, for Joan...

Patches of Fire: A Story of War and Redemption.(Review)
June 22, 1999... Albert French. New York: Anchor, 1997. 241 pp. $22.95 cloth/$12.95 paper. Reviewed by Jeff Loeb The Pembroke Hill School, Kansas City Without question, rapidly disappearing century's most tumultuous era in race relations was...

Understand This.(Review)
June 22, 1999... Jervey Tervalon. 271 pp. New York: Morrow, 1994, $20.00 cloth/New York: Anchor, 1995, $10.95 paper. Reviewed by Richard Yarborough University of California, Los Angeles These are indeed special times for new black writers in...