African American Review articles from June 2001

African American Review archives from June 2001

Toni Morrison, Oprah Winfrey, and Postmodern Popular Audiences.(African-American author, television personality)
June 22, 2001... Throughout the twentieth century, African-American writers have faced what James Weldon Johnson called "a special John Young problem which the plain American author knows nothing Pr about-the problem of the double audience" (247). The...

Toni Morrison and the Burden of the Passing Narrative.(Critical Essay)
June 22, 2001... Passing for white, a phenomenon that once captivated writers as diverse as Charles Chesnutt, Sinclair Lewis, Nella Larsen, and Mark Twain, no longer seems to engage contemporary novelists. The long list of authors from the first half of the...

Toni Morrison's Jazz and the City.
June 22, 2001... Out of the three volumes of Toni Morrison's trilogy starting with Beloved (1987) and ending with Paradise (1997), Jazz (1992) may very well be the most vocal. The narrative's deliberately ungendered, unspecific voice and its avatars take center...

The One All-Black Town Worth the Pain: (African) American Exceptionalism, Historical Narration, and the Critique of Nationhood in Toni Morrison's Paradise.(Critical Essay)
June 22, 2001... In her most recent novel, Paradise (1998), Toni Morrison offers us the story of a small western African American community, Ruby, whose contemporary members understand themselves in relation to an historical narrative of ancestral perseverance,...

A Conversation with Kevin Willmott.(filmmaker)(Interview)
June 22, 2001... Kevin Willmott is, by necessity, a person of many talents. As an independent filmmaker on a small (sometimes approaching nonexistent) budget, he must be, by turns, screenwriter, actor, producer, director, impresario, and salesperson to keep his...

Which Way to the Promised Land?: Spike Lee's Clockers and the Legacy of the African American City.(filmmaker Spike Lee)(Critical Essay)
June 22, 2001... Nothing is experienced by itself, but always in relation to its surroundings, the sequences of events leading up to it, the memory of past experiences.... Every citizen has had long associations with some part of his city, and his image is...

Passed Over: The Tragic Mulatta and (Dis)Integration of Identity in Adrienne Kennedy's Plays.(Critical Essay)
June 22, 2001... Much recent interest in the drama of Adrienne Kennedy has been spawned by the publication of her innovative autobiography People Who Led to My Plays (1987), the 1992 Great Lakes festival devoted to her work, and the recent productions of her...

"A Gentleman of Superior Cultivation and Refinement": Recovering the Biography of Frank J. Webb.
June 22, 2001... The 1997 reissue of Frank J. Webb's 1857 novel of free Black life in antebellum Philadelphia, The Garies and Their Friends, may finally lead to the consideration--both in our scholarship and our classrooms--that the book and its author rightly...

Audiography and Black Identity Politics: Racialization in Twentieth Century America.(Review)
June 22, 2001... Kenneth Mostern. Audiography and Black Identity Politics: Racialization in Twentieth Century America. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1999 280 pp. $19.95. Kermeth Mostern's Autobiography and Black Identity Politics builds upon the work of Cedric...

Dreaming Black/Writing White: The Hagar Myth in American Cultural History.(Review)
June 22, 2001... Janet Gabler-Hover. Dreaming Black/Writing White: The Hagar Myth in American Cultural History. Lexington: UP of Kentucky, 2000. 208 pp. $34.95. Let us recall the Genesis story of Hagar--the Egyptian slave entreated into concubinage with...

Disarming the Nation: Women's Writing and the American Civil War.(Review)
June 22, 2001... Elizabeth Young. Disarming the Nation: Women's Writing and the American Civil War. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1999. 405 pp. $47.00 cloth/$18.00 paper. The title of this book misleads, because (to paraphrase the author) Disarming the Nation...

Black Venus: Sexualized Savages, Primal Fears, and Primitive Narratives in French.(Review)
June 22, 2001... T. Denean Sharpley-Whiting. Black Venus: Sexualized Savages, Primal Fears, and Primitive Narratives in French, Durham: Duke UP, 1999. 190 pp. $49.95 cloth/$17.95 paper. Contemporary cultural and race theorists will benefit greatly from T....

Conjugal Union: The Body, the House, and the Black American.(Review)
June 22, 2001... Robert F. Reid-Pharr. Conjugal Union: The Body, the House, and the Black American. New York: Oxford UP, 1999. 166 pp. $35.00. Conjugal gal Union, by Robert F. Reid-Pharr, is an ambitious book that endeavors to reconsider notions of black...

The Harlem Renaissance: The One and the Many.(Review)
June 22, 2001... Mark Helbling. The Harlem Renaissance: The One and the Many. Westport: Greenwood, 1999. 211 pp. $57.95. Mark Heibling has written a useful, intelligent book, but his title is misleading. His slant on the Harlem Renaissance is very...

Contemporary Literature in the African Diaspora.(Review)
June 22, 2001... Olga Barrios and Bernard W. Bell, eds. Contemporary Literature in the African Diaspora. Salamanca, Spain: Universidad de Salamanca, 1997. 170 pp. This collection of essays by eighteen literary scholars is the outcome of symposium on the...

The Late Great Johnny Ace and the Transition from R and B to Rock 'n' Roll.(Review)
June 22, 2001... James M. Salem. The Late Great Johnny Ace and the Transition from R&B to Rock 'n' Roll. Urbana: U of Illinois P.1999. 304 pp.$29.95. At a time when popular music books are inundated with tales of false innovators of Rock 'n' Roll, James M....

A Life Is More Than A Moment: The Desegregation of Little Rock's Central High.(Review)
June 22, 2001... Will Counts. A Life Is More Than A Moment: The Desegregation of Little Rock's Central High. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1999. 76 pp. $29.95. In a recent informal survey, members of the Arkansas Historical Association selected the Little Rock...

To Make a New Race: Gurdjieff, Toomer, and the Harlem Renaissance.(Review)
June 22, 2001... Jon Woodson. To Make a New Race: Gurdjieff, Toomer, and the Harlem Renaissance. Jackson: UP of Mississippi, 1999. 218 pp. $45.00 cloth/$18.00 paper. It would take a Gurdjieffian, literary modernist and African American historian to review...

Caribbean Waves: Relocating Claude McKay and Paule Marshall.(Review)
June 22, 2001... Heather Hathaway. Caribbean Waves. Relocating Claude McKay and Paule Marshall. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1999. 200 pp. $29.95. Published in Indiana's Blacks in the Diaspora series, Caribbean Waves is a book that promises more than it...

Love Across Color Lines: Ottilie Assing and Frederick Douglass.(Review)
June 22, 2001... Maria Diedrich. Love Across Color Lines: Ottilie Assing & Frederick Douglass. New York: Hill and Wang, 1999. 488 pp. $35.00. Inventing stories about the lives of other people, biographers sometimes find themselves peeping through the...

Willis Richardson, Forgotten Pioneer of African-American Drama.(Review)
June 22, 2001... Christine Rauchfuss Gray. Willis Richardson, Forgotten Pioneer of African-American Drama. Westport: Greenwood, 1999. 130 pp. $55.00. Christine Rauchfuss Gray's slim but valuable biography Willis Richardson, Forgotten Pioneer of...

Toni Morrison: A Critical Companion.(Review)
June 22, 2001... Missy Dehn Kubitschek. Toni Morrison: A Critical Companion. Westport: Greenwood, 1998. 203 pp.$29.95. The past decade has seen the publication of a great number of books and anthologies on the work of Toni Morrison, including several of the...

The Papers of Martin Luther King, Jr. Vol. III: Birth of a New Age.(Review)
June 22, 2001... Claybome Carson, ed. The Papers of Martin Luther King, Jr. Vol. III: Birth of a New Age. Berkeley: U of California P, 1997. 566 pp. $40.00. The third volume of The Papers of Martin Luther King, Jr., Birth of a New Age: December...

Those Bones Are Not My Child.(Review)
June 22, 2001... Toni Cade Bambara. Those Bones Are Not My Child. New York: Pantheon, 1999. 676 pp. $27.50. In the preface to The Black Woman, Toni Cade Bambara remarked that the work to be done in and around Black women's literature and feminism was "a...

Communion: Poems, 1976-1998.(Review)
June 22, 2001... Primus St. John. Communion: Poems, 1976-1998. Port Townsend, WA: Copper Canyon P, 1999.233 pp. $16.00. Copper Canyon Press has for years been one of the country's best poetry publishers; its list boasts some of the best poets around. That...

Desdemona's Fire.(Review)
June 22, 2001... Ruth Ellen Kocher. Desdemona's Fire. Detroit: Lotus P, 1999. 62 pp. $12.00. This shapely first collection, 1999 winner of the Naomi Long Madgett Poetry Award, rises with independent grace from its framework of myth and allusion. The title,...