African American Review articles from June 2003

African American Review archives from June 2003

Somebody blew off Baraka.(Amiri Baraka)(Editorial)
June 22, 2003... You can't help wondering what the New Jersey committee that picked Amiri Baraka as state poet laureate was thinking. ("New Jersey's Poet Dilemma" A28) His strengths outweighed some past reputation for being slightly outrageous. (Committee...

The character of consciousness.(Amiri Baraka)
June 22, 2003... Over years, Amiri Baraka has repeatedly demonstrated his generosity to other poets. Some established poets think of themselves as gatekeepers or "godfathers"--I'm thinking of someone who perhaps is a chancellor at the Academy of American...

Whoosh!(Poem)
June 22, 2003... Whoosh! (AFTER THE RAIN) I used to be simple When the world Was "When was that?" An LP after the '45 After the '78 When the sky was far away When humans had faces When the world minded ...

Fashion this, from the Irony of the world.(Poem)
June 22, 2003... Fashion this, from the Iroy Of the world That I, the undaunted Laureate of the place, daunted in some Un as yet/ed pre tense of what they see, they be As if, such where they was Was yet to be, and then to say They...

Somebody Blew Up America.(Poem)
June 22, 2003... SOMEBODY BLEW UP AMERICA (All thinking people oppose terrorism both domestic & international... But one should not be used To cover the other) They say it's some terrorist, some barbaric ...

The McVouty Bible.(Poem)
June 22, 2003... THE MCVOUTY BIBLE After they killed Nigger Jesus Put holes in His foots & hands A spear through His Hip I wait till the people leave Then go cross there To check him out Pulse,...

Amiri Baraka analyzes how he writes.(Interview)
June 22, 2003... Salaam: When you wrote A System of Dante's Hell, at one point you decided just to start with memory. You sat down and just started to write your first memories--without trying to make any sense of them or to order them, but rather just to write...

LeRoi Jones, Larry Neal, and The Cricket: jazz and poets' Black Fire.
June 22, 2003... Two quotes drawn from pages of The Cricket, mimeographed music magazine edited by LeRoi Jones, Larry Neal, and A. B. Spellman in 1968 and 1969, most aptly reflect the intent of the magazine's vision of inter-arts solidarity, aspiration, and...

Politics, process & (jazz) performance: Amiri Baraka's "It's Nation Time".(Critical Essay)
June 22, 2003... Politics In a recently published book, Amiri Baraka: The Politics and Art of a Black Intellectual, the scholar Jerry Watts invokes Baraka in iconic fashion. He prefaces the book with the following admonition: In the best of worlds,...

Baraka's bohemian blues.(Amiri Baraka)(Critical Essay)
June 22, 2003... In a letter to Down Beat in 1964, the avant-garde jazz trumpeter and composer Bill Dixon complained that LeRoi Jones's jazz writing "too obviously smacks of a kind of "in-group' superiority generally and rightly associated with...

"Pat your foot and turn the corner": Amiri Baraka, the Black Arts Movement, and the poetics of a popular avant-garde.
June 22, 2003... My larger objective here is to engage the current cultural conversation about the nature of the Black Arts Movement and its impact on politics and culture in the United States and beyond. So while I honor the significance of Amiri Baraka's work...

The logic of retribution: Amiri Baraka's Dutchman.
June 22, 2003... The Black Arts Movement of the 1960s has been criticized for substituting a neo-African essentialism for what was identified as Western essentialism. Henry Louis Gates, Jr., is among those who have critiqued the Black Arts Movement for...

Evolution or revolution in black theater: a look at the cultural nationalist agenda in select plays by Amiri Baraka.
June 22, 2003... ... we are on the verge of reclaiming and reexamining the purpose and pillars of our art and laying out new directions for its expansion. As such we make a target for cultural imperialists who seek to empower and propagate their ideas about the...

On the sound of water: Amiri Baraka's "Black Art".(Critical Essay)
June 22, 2003... On the Sound of Water Water flows and laps and pools, and in the flowing it makes a sound--the sound of water. The sound--. Music. The sound of music is without language or the sense of language, yet it is not without sense. In this way,...

Baraka's Billie Holiday as a blues poet of black longing.
June 22, 2003... In The Autobiography of LeRoi Jones/Amiri Baraka, Baraka devotes a full chapter to "Music," and the subject threads throughout the entire book: "I've said that one constant for me from the time of any consciousness in helping to define the...

Fugitive fictions.(Amiri Baraka)(Critical Essay)
June 22, 2003... "You're too erudite."... What that mean? (Amiri Baraka, Fiction 287) Ask Baraka. (Bob Perelman, Marginalization 150) There is no reason any intelligent man should have it easy in America--especially not any intelligent black man....

The space machine: Baraka and science fiction.(Critical Essay)
June 22, 2003... Music is the weapon of the Future. (Fela Kuti) Space is black. Check out any episode of Star Trek. When Captain Kirk and his faithful crew boldly go where no man has gone before, it's a journey into blackness, punctuated with a few bright...

In the tradition: Amiri Baraka, black liberation, and avant-garde praxis in the U.S.(Critical Essay)
June 22, 2003... The native intellectual who takes up arms to defend his nation's legitimacy and who wants to bring proofs to bear out that legitimacy, who is willing to strip himself naked to study the history of his body, is obliged to dissect the heart of...

"Hunting is Not Those Heads": the Jones/Baraka Critic as Taxidermist.(Critical Essay)
June 22, 2003... Everything mortal dies, beautiful language is easily broken. Dead words shall live and live words shall die, and only the mouths of men can decide, only what's said is said and therefore alive. (Horace, "The Art of Poetry") I always had to...

LeRoi Jones/Amiri Baraka and the limits of open form.(Critical Essay)
June 22, 2003... Only ideas, and their opposites. Like, he was really nowhere. ("A Poem for Speculative Hipsters," Transbluesency 110) In a well-known passage from his autobiography, Amiri Baraka--then called LeRoi Jones--remembers a...

"Progressive lit.": Amiri Baraka, Bruce Andrews, and the politics of the lyric "I".(Critical Essay)
June 22, 2003... Bruce Andrews's poetry and criticism have done much to establish the assumptions about dissent that became standard for readers of Language poetry during the seventies and eighties. For many readers, Andrews's position made oppositional poetry...

Sometimes funny, but most times deadly serious: Amiri Baraka as political satirist.(Critical Essay)
June 22, 2003... Smash and bludgeon Giuliani forty-one times a day Tie him to a tree in front of city hail So every one of his victims families and friends Can make Forty-one ass-whipping calls (Baraka, "Giuliani" 20) During a poetry workshop at the Betty...

The paradox of experience: black art and black idiom in the work of Amiri Baraka.(Critical Essay)
June 22, 2003... One of the perplexing ironies of recent theoretical work on ethnic writing and the ethnic self in Afro-American literature is that work's tendency to exclude any serious discussion of the writer who, perhaps more than any of his contemporaries,...

James O. and Lois E. Horton. Hard Road to Freedom: The Story of African America.(Book Review)
June 22, 2003... New Brunswick: Rutgers UP, 2001. 406 pp. $22.00. This is a telling synthesis of African American history from its origins on the West Coast of Africa to the close of the twentieth century. The Hortons' story is organized around roughly...

Shane White. Stories of Freedom in Black New York.(Book Review)
June 22, 2003... Cambridge: Harvard UP, 2002. 260 pp. $27.95. In Stories of Freedom in Black New York, Shane White takes as his subject the first African American theater company and the first black actor to star in a one-man show. He delivers much more...

David Brion Davis. In the Image of God: Religion, Moral Values, and Our Heritage of Slavery.(Book Review)
June 22, 2003... New Haven: Yale UP, 2001. 260 pp. $35.00. On the cover of Davis's book is Theodore Chasseriau's Study of a Nude Black (ca. 1836-38). While produced during the same period, Chasseriau's depiction of the black body lacks the serenity and...

Iyunolu Folayan Osagie. The Amistad Revolt: Memory, Slavery, and the Politics of Identity in the United States and Sierra Leone.(Book Review)
June 22, 2003... Athens: U of Georgia P, 2000. 197 pp. $19.95. The Amistad story and its complex triumph over the horrors of enslavement have lived within the collective memory of many African Americans since the incident occurred between 1839 and 1843. Its...

Matthew Pratt Guterl. The Color of Race in America, 1900-1940.(Book Review)
June 22, 2003... Cambridge: Harvard UP, 2001. 234 pp. $39.95. How did scientists and scholars, and politicians and artists, academic writers and popular readers go from thinking the world was populated by hundreds of races in the late nineteenth century to...

Georgina Hickey. Hope and Danger in the New South City: Working-Class Women and Urban Development in Atlanta, 1890-1940.(Book Review)
June 22, 2003... Athens: U of Georgia P, 2003. 296 pp. $39.95. Georgina Hickey has written an interesting and compelling book about working-class women and urban development in Atlanta from 1890 to 1940. She has woven a complex narrative of hope and danger...

Theresa Leininger-Miller. New Negro Artists in Paris: African American Painters and Sculptors in the City of Light, 1922-1934.(Book Review)
June 22, 2003... New Brunscwick: Rutgers UP, 2001. 320 pp. 120 illus. $32.00. The product of exceptional research and meticulous crafting, Theresa Leininger-Miller's new is a pioneering work in the field of African American art history. Her study focuses...

Gerald R. Butters, Jr. Black Manhood on the Silent Screen.(Book Review)
June 22, 2003... Lawrence: UP of Kansas, 2002. 270 pp, $35.00. A problematic crux in the criticism on "black film"--defining it according to content (coverage of black characters), according to who produces it, or by some other criterion--is solved by...

Paula J. Massood. Black City Cinema: African American Urban Experiences in Film.(Book Review)
June 22, 2003... Philadelphia: Temple UP, 2003. 268 pp. $19.95. Paula J. Massood is concerned in Black City Cinema with urban spaces, particularly areas of Los Angeles and New York City, and how they have been represented or acknowledged in black cinema....

Michael Syrotinksi. Singular Performances: Reinscribing the Subject in Francophone African Writing.(Book Review)
June 22, 2003... Charlottesville: U of Virginia P, 2002. 215 pp. $59.50. Michael Syrotinski's highly theoretical Singular Performances: Reinscribing the Subject in Francophone African Writing should be of interest to any scholar interested in postcolonial...

Keith Clark. Black Manhood in James Baldwin, Ernest J. Gaines, and August Wilson.(Book Review)
June 22, 2003... Urbana: U of Illinois P, 2002. 164 pp. $34.95. The tension between the individual male artist and his community is a perplexing one that deserves close attention. In this study Keith Clark writes with admirable confidence and authority...

Daryl Cumber Dance, ed. Honey, Hush!: An Anthology of African American Women's Humor.(Book Review)
June 22, 2003... New York: Norton, 1998. 712 pp. $17.95. Nikki Giovanni's "Foreword" to Honey, Hush! invites all possible readers by asserting that anyone can qualify as a "Black woman" who has "the indomitable spirit that is determined to love and laugh"...

William B. Gould, IV. Diary of a Contraband: The Civil War Passage of a Black Sailor.(Book Review)
June 22, 2003... Palo Alto: Stanford UP, 2002. 373 pp. $60.00 cloth/$24.95 paper. In 1862, William B. Gould, age 24, a skilled plasterer and mason, escaped slavery with seven of his fellows by rowing twenty-eight nautical miles down the Cape Fear River from...

Annetta B. Gomez-Jefferson. The Sage of Tawawa: Reverdy Cassius Ransom, 1861-1959.(Book Review)
June 22, 2003... Kent: Kent State UP, 2002. 325 pp. $42.00. Author of four biographical sketches of women in the theater in her Black Women in America and the biography of Joseph Gomez, a bishop in the African-American Methodist Church, Gomez-Jefferson,...

Herbert Woodward Martin and Ronald Primeau, eds. In His Own Voice: The Dramatic and Other Uncollected Works of Paul Laurence Dunbar.(Book Review)
June 22, 2003... Athens: Ohio UP, 2002. 315 pp. $49.95 cloth/$22.95 paper. In His Own Voice is a compendium of writings by Paul Laurence Dunbar, most of which have not appeared in previous collections of his work. Drawing on a variety of sources, editors...

William Seraile. Bruce Grit: The Black Nationalist Writings of John Edward Bruce.(Book Review)
June 22, 2003... Knoxville: U of Tennessee P, 2003. 280 pp. $34.00. An overview of John Edward Bruce's life reads like a thrilling work of fiction. Born a slave in Maryland in 1856, he met Charles Dickens, Martin Delany, and Henry Highland Garnet as a child...

Ula Yvette Taylor. The Veiled Garvey: The Life and Times of Amy Jacques Garvey.(Book Review)
June 22, 2003... Chapel Hill: U of North Carolina P, 2002. 328 pp. $39.95 cloth/$18.95 paper. Amy Jacques Garvey was the second wife of Marcus Garvey, founder of the Universal Negro Improvement Association (UNIA), Pan-Africanism's most successful mass...

Arnold Rampersad, ed. The Collected Works of Langston Hughes.(Book Review)
June 22, 2003... Vol. 1, Poems (1921-1940); Vol. 2, Poems (1941-1950); Vol. 3, Poems (1951-1967) Columbia: U of Missouri P, 2001. $29.95 each. These volumes of the work of Langston Hughes are the first three of a projected eighteen which, as the dust-jacket...

Robert W. Croft. A Zora Neale Hurston Companion.(Book Review)
June 22, 2003... Westport: Greenwood P, 2002. 256 pp. $74.95. In Their Eyes Were Watching God, Janie tells Pheoby Watson what she experienced, which Pheoby then narrates to us. In her books, Hurston attempts to maintain the oral tradition, one of the...

Frank Marshall Davis. Black Moods: Collected Poems.(Book Review)
June 22, 2003... Urbana: U of Illinois P. 2002. 275 pp. $29.95. Thanks to the meticulous research and dedicated efforts of John Edgar Tidwell, the works of reporter, columnist, editor, critic, political activist, and poet Frank Marshall Davis have now...

Nicole King. C. L. R. James and Creolization: Circles of Influence.(Book Review)
June 22, 2003... Jackson: UP of Mississippi, 2001. 163 pp. $40.00. The field of literature C.L.R. James, all but empty during the lifetime of the great Pan-Africanist (I confess to penning the first biography, and the first collection of essays), has been...

Deborah Willis and Carla Williams. The Black Female Body: A Photographic History.(Book Review)
June 22, 2003... Philadelphia: Temple UP, 2002. 228 pp. $60.00 cloth/$35.00 paper. Deborah Willis, professor of photography and imaging at New York University, and cultural critic Carla Williams have collaborated to author The Black Female Body: A...

Nancy Bunge, ed. Conversations with Clarence Major.(Book Review)
June 22, 2003... Jackson: UP of Mississippi, 2002. 193 pp. $46.00 cloth/$18.00 paper. In his talks with college students during the 1970s--particularly with white, middle-class students from nonurban areas of the Middle West--Clarence Major would warn them...

Martin Duberman. Left Out, the Politics of Exclusion: Essays, 1964-2002.(Book Review)
June 22, 2003... Cambridge: South End P, 2002. 504 pp. $22.00. This collection of essays written from the mid-1960s to the present is an interesting time capsule providing much useful information about this complex and turbulent period of American cultural...

Jack L. Daniel and Omari C. Daniel. We Fish: the Journey to Fatherhood.(Book Review)
June 22, 2003... Pittsburgh: U of Pittsburgh P, 2003. 206 pp. $25.00. In Jack L. Daniel's book We Fish, we are treated to a fascinating and selective autobiography that focuses on a father-son relationship over three generations. The book explores how a son...

Percival L. Everett. Erasure.(Book Review)
June 22, 2003... Hanover: UP of New England, 2001 265 pp. $26.00. A provocative satire on the impact of the publishing industry on the authority, authenticity, and agency of autonomous, non-conventional contemporary African American novelists in particular...

Philip Bryant. Sermon on a Perfect Spring Day.(Book Review)
June 22, 2003... Minneapolis: New Rivers P, 1998. 95 pp. $12.95. Bryant's manuscript begins with the very brief title poem describing what appears to be a congregation which speaks in tongues, or a church of the less than literate, as they shout "Gladiolus"...

Houston A. Baker, Jr. Turning South Again: Re-Thinking Modernism/Re-Reading Booker T.(Brief Article)(Book Review)
June 22, 2003... Durham: Duke UP, 2001. 117 pp. $15.95. Any new book by Houston Baker is mandatory reading for scholars of African American literature, and Turning South Again is no exception. After a fascinating account of his childhood in a cultured...

Arnold Rampersad, et al., eds. The Collected Works of Langston Hughes.(Brief Article)(Book Review)
June 22, 2003... Columbia: U of Missouri P, 2001-. Surely the general reader of African American literature has never been better served than by the monumental edition of The Collected Works of Langston Hughes in eighteen projected volumes, of which eleven...

Other works received.
June 22, 2003... Abrahams, Peter. The Black Experience in the 20th Century: An Autobiography and Meditation. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 2001. 409 pp. $29.95. Ahmad, Anjail Rashida. Necessary Kindling: Poems. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State UP, 2001. 62 pp....