African American Review articles from June 2000

African American Review archives from June 2000

Prince Hall, Freemasonry, and Genealogy.
June 22, 2000... For scholars of early African-American literature, the question of influence can be particularly vexing. American writing about Africa and Africans preceded the emergence of the first African-American writers by a century or more. On the basis...

Road to Africa: Frederick Douglass's Rome.
June 22, 2000... Frederick Douglass visited Rome in 1887 and described his sojourn in the concluding section of his 1892 Life and Times of Frederick Douglass, an expanded version of his 1881 memoir of the same name. Typically, nineteenth-century American...

Trappings of Nationalism in Frederick Douglass's The Heroic Slave.
June 22, 2000... The social revolution of the nineteenth century cannot draw its poetry from the past, but only from the future. It cannot begin with itself before it has stripped off all superstitions in regard to the past. (Karl Marx, Eighteenth 18) We...

"Shifting Spirits": Ancestral Constructs in the Postmodern Writing of John Edgar Wideman.
June 22, 2000... We are difference....our reason is the difference of discourses, our history the difference of times, our selves the difference of masks. That difference, far from being the forgotten and recoverable origin, is this dispersion that we are and...

Storytelling and Democracy (in the Radical Sense): A Conversation with John Edgar Wideman.
June 22, 2000... In his introduction to Best American Short Stories 1996, John Edgar Wideman wrote that "stories that mount a challenge to our everyday conventions and assumptions stir my blood. Not only because they are exciting formally and philosophically,...

"Relate Sexual to Historical": Race, Resistance, and Desire in Gayl Jones's Corregidora.
June 22, 2000... Narration in Gayl Jones's work, particularly the narrating of the experience of New World slavery, constitutes an act of intersubjective communion, the creating of a sensibility that the hearer is an equal sharer in the story to the degree of...

Possessing the Self: Caribbean Identities in Zora Neale Hurston's Tell My Horse.
June 22, 2000... Zora Neale Hurston's leap beyond national boundaries in her 1938 book of Caribbean folklore, Tell My Horse, indicates her cross-cultural interest in identity politics at the beginning of World War II. Unfortunately, much of what Hurston had to...

Beyond Morrison and Walker: Looking Good and Looking Forward in Contemporary Black Women's Stories.
June 22, 2000... Lena did look good. She was looking like a woman from a Maya Angelou story. A character from a Toni Morrison novel. A person from an Alice Walker poem. (Ansa 273) Examining black women fiction writers' literary tradition ought to generate...

Body and Soul: Bob Kaufman's Golden Sardine.
June 22, 2000... The poetry of sound... marks the beginning of a new era... of revolt against the trite outworn language of the understandable. (Langston Hughes, qtd. in Rampersad 64) If jazz is music of revolt, it is a revolt towards more natural,...

Race, Rape, and Lynching: The Red Record of American Literature, 1890-1912.
June 22, 2000... Sandra Gunning. Race, Rape, and Lynching: The Red Record of American Literature, 1890-1912. New York: Oxford UP, 1996. 195 pp. $42.00. In this literary study of racial violence, Sandra Gunning explores the work of both black and white...

What the Music Said: Black Popular Music and Black Popular Culture.
June 22, 2000... Mark Anthony Neal. What the Music Said: Black Popular Music and Black Popular Culture. New York: Routledge, 1999. 214 pp. $19.99. Mark Anthony Neal's What the Music Said: Black Popular Music and Black Popular Culture interprets the volatile...

Barbara Ann Teer and the National Black Theatre: Transformational Forces in Harlem.
June 22, 2000... Lundeana Marie Thomas. Barbara Ann Teer and the National Black Theatre: Transformational Forces in Harlem. New York: Garland, 1997. 190 pp. $65.00. Although nearly 112 experimental black and white theatres were founded in New York City...

The Young Paul Robeson.
June 22, 2000... Lloyd L. Brown. The Young Paul Robeson. Boulder: Westview P, 1997. 187 pp. $24.00. Lloyd Brown's The Young Paul Robeson is a model of scholarship for the biographer of formative influences, and a remarkable distillation of Robeson's life...

Langston Hughes: The Contemporary Reviews.
June 22, 2000... Tish Dace, ed. Langston Hughes: The Contemporary Reviews. New York: Cambridge UP, 1997. 766 pp. $125.00. A compilation of book reviews on the major works of Langston Hughes is a labyrinthine undertaking. Tish Dace devoted sixteen years of...

Places of Silence, Journeys of Freedom: The Fiction of Paule Marshall.
June 22, 2000... Eugenia C. DeLamotte. Places of Silence, Journeys of Freedom: The Fiction of Paule Marshall. Philadelphia: U of Pennsylvania P. 1998. 198 pp. $39.95. Marshall celebrates the power of women's voices not only to sustain their interior lives...

Toni Morrison.
June 22, 2000... Jil Matus. Toni Morrison. New York: Manchester UP, 1998. 208 pp. $59.95. Jill Matus examines Toni Morrison's novels through the goals of the "Contemporary World Writers" series, which aims to present "comprehensive general introductions"...

Modern Medea: A Family Story of Slavery and Child-Murder from the Old South.
June 22, 2000... Steven Weisenburger. Modern Medea: A Family Story of Slavery and Child-Murder from the Old South. New York: Hill and Wang, 1998. 352 pp. $25.00. Since the publication of Toni Morrison's Beloved, the story of Margaret Garner, who killed her...

Circles of Sorrow, Lines of Struggle: The Novels of Toni Morrison.
June 22, 2000... Gurleen Grewal. Circles of Sorrow, Lines of Struggle: The Novels of Toni Morrison. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State UP, 1999. 154 pp. $25.00. Gurleen Grewal explores the combination of psychoanalytic mourning and postcolonial resistance that is...

Paul Marchand, F. M. C.
June 22, 2000... Charles W. Chesnutt. Paul Marchand, F. M. C. Intro. Matthew Wilson. Jackson: UP of Mississippi, 1998. 179 pp. $20.00. After the publication of The Colonel's Dream (1905), Charles W. Chesnutt's dream of professional authorship essentially...

The Healing.
June 22, 2000... Gayl Jones. The Healing. Boston: Beacon, 1998. 283 pp. $23.00. "And when you discover you can heal yourself...you soon discover you can heal others." So reports Harlan Jane Eagleton, the central character of Gayl Jones's recent novel, The...

Mosquito.
June 22, 2000... Gayl Jones. Mosquito. Boston: Beacon P, 1999. 616 pp. $28.50. Language leaps from the page and transforms from written to oral narrative throughout Gayl Jones's Mosquito. The black narrator, Sojourner Nadine Jane Johnson, makes a grand...

Two Cities.
June 22, 2000... John Edgar Wideman. Two Cities. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1998. 242 pp. $24.00. The Bible and the dictionary are not the typical cornerstones of love stories, but they rest at the foundation of John Edgar Wideman's Two Cities alongside the...