African American Review articles from June 2004

African American Review archives from June 2004

"Everything we hoped she'd be": contending forces in Hopkins scholarship.
June 22, 2004... Pauline Hopkins's emergence in American and African American literary scholarship has been quite a success story. Rescued from obscurity with a biographical article by Ann Allen Shockley in 1972 and with the reissuing of her novels by the...

Remaking black motherhood in Frank J. Webb's The Gaffes and their Friends.
June 22, 2004... The book which now appears before the public may be of interest in relation to a question which the late agitation of the subject of slavery has raised in many thoughtful minds; viz.--Are the race at present held as slaves capable of freedom,...

The city as refuge: constructing urban blackness in Paul Laurence Dunbar's The Sport of the Gods and James Weldon Johnson's The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man.
June 22, 2004... Almost as soon as blacks could write, it seems, they set out to redefine--against already received racist stereotypes--who and what a black person was. (Gates 131) This essay analyzes the narrative strategies that Paul Laurence Dunbar and...

Blues poetics and blues politics in Walter Mosley's RL's Dream.
June 22, 2004... In September 1998 the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame and Museum's American Music Master Series held a tribute for blues legend Robert Johnson. Hellhounds on My Trail a film by Robert Mugge documenting the event, came out the next year and features a...

A prophet overheard: a juxtapositional reading of Gwendolyn Brooks's "In the Mecca".
June 22, 2004... As Gwendolyn Brooks's last collection of poetry to be published by a mainstream press (Harper, 1968), and the first to come out of her conversion to the Black Arts Movement, In the Mecca marks the end of one age for the poet, and the beginning...

Incident in the lives of three African American poets, written by themselves.
June 22, 2004... Early in November of 2002, three poets, all members of the Carolina African American Writers' Collective, began a journey from our homes in Winston-Salem, Durham, and Raleigh, North Carolina. We had been invited to give a poetry reading in...

Ballad of bertie county.(Poem)
June 22, 2004... ballad of bertie county i. it was our hope to get there long before dark, but this part of carolina had been dark for two hundred years or more: dim-lit by white flames of cotton on thin brown stalks, we...

Holy-Oiled Fingers.(Poem)
June 22, 2004... HOLY-OILED FINGERS for Evie Shockley and L. Teresa Church June says a ghost, an old white man, has floated into the kitchen--we cut eyes at each other, mouths open. June dabs our foreheads, palms and feet...

Freedom at Sunrise.(Poem)
June 22, 2004... Freedom at Sunrise (Dedicated to Lenard D. Moore and Evie Shockley) November morning turns jubilee when black-velvet night retreats like rope-pulleyed curtains parting. Sun rises red then yellows, flickers along the...

Preface.(Editorial)
June 22, 2004... A word about the genesis of "circumspect penelope regards ragged odysseus is, I think, in order. As an honors student at Howard University in the sixties, I studied the classics. Later on I re-read Lattimore's translation of Homer's two epics:...

Alpha.(circumspect penelope regards ragged odysseus)(Poem)
June 22, 2004... alpha this one too has come, like the rest of them carpet-baggers, to try his luck at impersonating my husband the unfortunate mortal who was fated to incur ancient poseidon's implacable wrath and run the gauntlet i...

Beta.(circumspect penelope regards ragged odysseus)(Poem)
June 22, 2004... beta look, look at him: this expanding contracting mystery man; now a foot taller, now looking an ordinary greek; now filled with vigor, now an exhausted worker, now looking like a god, now the despicable beggar; now...

Gamma.(circumspect penelope regards ragged odysseus)(Poem)
June 22, 2004... gamma i am tired of keeping faith with a dead man's empty bed, i might have had another child now in this one-son-per-generation house; but my companion at night is my wet pillow; groaning from side to side; awaiting news...

Delta.(circumspect penelope regards ragged odysseus)(Poem)
June 22, 2004... delta old maid swears the great oath that he is who he is; telemachos urges that i embrace him for his absent father; now popular opinion is growing in his favor especially since there's no rival: do i have a chance to...

Epsilon.(circumspect penelope regards ragged odysseus)(Poem)
June 22, 2004... epsilon perhaps my time of freedom and reverie is up: for last night i had a dream which was more like a vision: odysseus embraced me the way he did before going to war; i was tense, my heart constricted, then the release...

Exode.(circumspect penelope regards ragged odysseus)(Poem)
June 22, 2004... exode "odysseus, husband, tired wanderer, come now, calm down, rest. welcome home to your wife, child and bed; the bed has never moved, but how was i to know you if i didn't shift its position somewhat? in my place,...

Black Pearls: recovered memories.
June 22, 2004... "On first listening," the liner notes warned, "one might think that Coltrane's music was an example of raw Dionysian spirit untamed by the guiding hand of Apollo." On the cover: Coltrane photographed from below so that his whole torso rises...

Kinds of Blue: Toni Morrison, Hans Janowitz, and the Jazz Aesthetic.
June 22, 2004... Play it, jazz band! You've got seven languages to speak in And then some... (Langston Hughes, "Jazz Band in a Parisian Cabaret") In 1951, James Baldwin wrote that"... it is only in his music... that the Negro of America has been able to...

The pastoral and the city in Carl Franklin's One False Move.
June 22, 2004... American film noir depicts a city as dark and labyrinthine as the fate of its protagonists, but the promise of rus in urbe is often present, hinting of a possible way out. Bisbee, Arizona, in L.A. Confidential (1997), the miniature village and...

Errol G. Hill and James V. Hatch. A History of African American Theatre.(Book Review)
June 22, 2004... Errol G. Hill and James V. Hatch. A History of African American Theatre. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2003. 632 pp. $110.00. Long before Moss Hart and George S. Kaufman coined the phrase the fabulous invalid as the title of their 1938 play,...

W. T. Lhamon, Jr. Jump Jim Crow: Lost Plays, Lyrics and Street Prose of the First Atlantic Popular Culture.(Book Review)
June 22, 2004... W. T. Lhamon, Jr. Jump Jim Crow: Lost Plays, Lyncs and Street Prose of the First Atlantic Popular Culture. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 2003. 457 pp. $39.95. Following World War II, blackface minstrelsy slipped quietly into a restless grave. Old...

Alexander Saxton. The Rise and Fall of the White Republic: Class Politics and Mass Culture in Nineteenth-Century America.(Book Review)
June 22, 2004... Alexander Saxton. The Rise and Fall of the White Republic: Class Politics and Mass Culture in Nineteenth-Century America. London: Verso, 2003. 2nd ed. 415 pp. $23.00. What Alexander Saxton grapples with in this book is one of the most...

Miriam DeCosta-Willis, ed. Daughters of the Diaspora: Afra-Hispanic Writers.(Book Review)
June 22, 2004... Miriam DeCosta-Willis, ed. Daughters of the Diaspora: Afra-Hispanic Writers. Kingston, Jamaica: Ian Randle P, 2003. 544 pp. $29.95. In a compelling and informative introduction, Miriam DeCosta-Willis observes that the last decade has...

Fred Moten. In the Break: the Aesthetics of the Black Radical Tradition.(Book Review)
June 22, 2004... Fred Moten. In the Break: The Aesthetics of the Black Radical Tradition. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 2003. 315 pp. $54.95 cloth/ $19,95 paper. Fred Moten's In the Break takes as its subject matter both black performance and black...

Herman Graham, III. The Brothers' Vietnam War: Black Power, Manhood, and the Military Experience Gainesville.(Book Review)
June 22, 2004... Herman Graham, Ill. The Brothers' Vietnam War: Black Power, Manhood, and the Military Experience Gainesville: U of Florida P, 2003. 179 pp. $55.00. During the 1960s, political movements that fought to express new racial awareness among...

Mary Ellen Doyle. Voices from the Quarters: the Fiction of Ernest J. Gaines.(Book Review)
June 22, 2004... Mary Ellen Doyle. Voices from the Quarters: The Fiction of Ernest J. Gaines. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State UP, 2002. 245 pp. $14.95. Ernest J. Gaines's fiction, while widely admired by a broad range of readers and scholars since the...

Mary Ellen Doyle. Voices from the Quarters: the Fiction of Ernest J. Gaines.(Book Review)
June 22, 2004... Mary Ellen Doyle. Voices from the Quarters: The Fiction of Ernest J. Gaines. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State UP, 2002. 245 pp. $14.95. Full-length studies of Ernest Gaines's fiction are pretty scant, and Mary Ellen Doyle's book is certainly a...