African American Review articles from June 2006

African American Review archives from June 2006

A Black gay man's reflections on torture and dictatorship.(Back Talk)
June 22, 2006... Not long ago, a black gay man asked me why I write about topics "different" than those that--according to him--other contemporary black gay male writers typically address. Provoked, in turn I asked him exactly what he meant. He responded that...

Numerological tradition in the works of Jupiter Hammon.(Critical essay)
June 22, 2006... Introduction Jupiter Hammon, notable as the first African American poet ever published, has also had the unhappy distinction of being almost universally misunderstood. Critical prejudices and predilections, anachronistic comparisons with...

Speak.(Poem)
June 22, 2006... Speak i am a poet i die many deaths when a line ends when a child grows out of its shoes when sorrow marches across the front of the newspapers or the season makes rain, the city...

"The strangest freaks of despotism": queer sexuality in Antebellum African American slave narratives.(Critical essay)
June 22, 2006... In a well-known passage from Zora Neale Hurston's Their Eyes Were Watching God the elderly ex-slave Nanny explains to Janie, her adolescent and newly sexually awakened granddaughter, the plight of African American women and families under...

Que(e)rying the prison-house of Black male desire: homosociality in Ernest Gaines's "three men".(Critical essay)
June 22, 2006... Interviewer: [Critics] say Miss Jane Pittman is the greatest Black female character since Dilsey. Gaines: (Laughter): Oh, yeah, Dilsey. Interviewer:. Dilsey is nowhere compared to Miss Jane. You are much better at your Black people...

Revising critical judgments of The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man.(Critical essay)
June 22, 2006... The indeterminate status accorded James Weldon Johnson's The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man (1912) is, to a great extent, attributable to its standing as the first "fictional" text written by an African American that deliberately masks its...

A love supreme: jazzthetic strategies in Toni Morrison's Beloved.(Critical essay)
June 22, 2006... Black Americans were sustained and healed and nurtured by the translation of their experience into art, above all in the music. That was functional.... My parallel is always the music, because all of the strategies of the art are there.... The...

Simon wasn't there: the Sambo strategy, consumable theater, and Rebecca Gilman's Spinning into Butter.(Critical essay)
June 22, 2006... When Spinning into Butter debuted at the Goodman Theatre in Chicago in 1999, Rebecca Gilman was transformed, in the words of Chris Jones, from a struggling writer into "one of America's most talked-about and sought-after playwrights" (26). The...

The conspiracy of masculinity in Ishmael Reed.(Critical essay)
June 22, 2006... Those who believe that major world events result from planning are laughed at for believing in the "conspiracy theory of history." Of course, no one in this modern day and age really believes in the conspiracy theory of history--except those...

The counterfeit sock.(Short story)
June 22, 2006... Sitting on a creaking, weathered stool, Marcus used a rusted machete to slice ten inches from the sleeve of a faded, black jersey. He peered into the predawn gloom of the other room to see if his uncle Sean stirred from the noise, but the old...

The art of Tom Dent: notes on early evidence.(Critical essay)
June 22, 2006... TOM DENT COLLECTIVE During the 2001 MLA Annual Convention (New Orleans) special session "In the Wind of History," which I organized, several writers, scholars, and friends had the opportunity to discuss the life and work of Tom Dent--poet,...

The need to speak: Tom Dent and the shaping of a black aesthetic.(Critical essay)
June 22, 2006... we speak to disturb you who think poetry, music should only be beautiful. --Tom Dent ... we are as radical as society demands the truth to be.--"Foreword." Umbra 1 (1963) Greenwich Village has always been an irresistible lure to the...

Tom Dent's role in the organizational mentoring of African American Southern writers: a memoir.(Biography)
June 22, 2006... Thomas Covington Dent left a legacy larger than his published works. He left a legacy of caring, nurturing, passionate involvement in the grooming of writers and the organizations that support them. His work with the Umbra Workshop in the New...

All Tom's Children.(Poem)
June 22, 2006... All Tom's Children Facile yet frantic time heralds a year's passage of grief-stricken sameness among us as remembrance foams at our mouths. We retreat to our alonenesses to think him back, his patient,...

My father is dead. Again.(Poem)
June 22, 2006... my father is dead. again. (for my father-friend tom dent) 1. i was thousands of miles away when tom's tree fell the weight of missing him answers the age old question because his aftershock's...

Baseball as history and myth in August Wilson's: Fences.
June 22, 2006... The game of baseball has long been regarded as a metaphor for the American dream--an expression of hope, democratic values, and the drive for individual success. According to John Thorn, baseball has become "the great repository of national...

The urban gothic vision of Colson Whitehead's The Intuitionist (1999).
June 22, 2006... But we do have in the Negro the embodiment of a past tragic enough to appease the spiritual hunger of even a James; and we have in the oppression of the Negro a shadow athwart our national life dense and heavy enough to satisfy even the gloomy...

A Picture of My Father.(Poem)
June 22, 2006... A Picture of My Father As role model I chose a father Who was not physically present; I remember the last night we shared The same space in my grandfather's house. He was an aspiring musician That married a sweet,...

Anissa Janine Wardi. Death and the Arc of Mourning in African American Literature.(Book review)
June 22, 2006... Anissa Janine Wardi. Death and the Arc of Mourning in African American Literature. Gainesville: UP of Florida, 2003. 214 pp. $55.00 cloth/$5.95 digital. One of James Baldwin's recurrent themes is the belief of many white Americans, linked...

Karen Sotiropoulos. Staging Race: Black Performers in Turn of the Century America.(Book review)
June 22, 2006... Karen Sotiropoulos. Staging Race: Black Performers in Turn of the Century America. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 2006. 298 pp. $39.95. The subject matter of this engaging but unoriginal book refers to black performers during one of the most...

Michael Eric Dyson. Mercy, Mercy Me: The Art, Loves and Demons of Marvin Gaye.(Book review)
June 22, 2006... Michael Eric Dyson. Mercy, Mercy Me: The Art, Loves and Demons of Marvin Gaye. New York: BasicCivitas, 2004. 290 pp. $23.95 cloth/ $13.95 paper. This essay, the author announces as "a work of biocriticism" (p. xiii), that is, not so much...

E. Ethelbert Miller. How We Sleep on The Nights We Don't Make Love.(Book review)
June 22, 2006... E. Ethelbert Miller. How We Sleep on The Nights We Don't Make Love. Willimantic, CT: Curbstone P, 2004. 74 pp. $12.95. E. Ethelbert Miller's 2004 poetry collection leaves readers with a glimpse into the mind of a sensitive observer of human...

Lydia Cabrera. Afro-Cuban Tales.(Book review)
June 22, 2006... Lydia Cabrera. Afro-Cuban Tales. Trans. Alberto Hernandez-Chiroldes and Lauren Yoder. Intro. Isabel Castellanos. Lincoln: U of Nebraska P, 2004. 169 pp. $16.95. This first English translation of one of the defining imaginative works by...

Claude McKay. Complete Poems.(Book review)
June 22, 2006... Claude McKay. Complete Poems. Ed. William J. Maxwell. American Poetry Recovery Series. Urbana: U of Illinois P, 2004. 464 pp. $40.00. Despite his reputation as the first Afro-Caribbean poet to write dialect poetry, as well as recognition...

Laurie F. Leach. Langston Hughes: A Biography.(Book review)
June 22, 2006... Laurie F. Leach. Langston Hughes: A Biography. Westport, CT: Greenwood P, 2004. 176 pp. $29.95. Laurie Leach's compact biography of Langston Hughes is part of a series designed for high schools and public libraries and is intended...

Mona Z. Smith. Becoming Something: The Story of Canada Lee.(Book review)
June 22, 2006... Mona Z. Smith. Becoming Something: The Story of Canada Lee. New York: Faber and Faber, 2004. 409 pp. $27.00. Born into a wealthy and successful West Indian family (St. Croix) of doctors and businessmen, Lionel Cornelius Canegata, "Canada...

Henry Louis Gates, Jr., and Hollis Robbins, eds. In Search of Hannah Crafts: Critical Essays on The Bondwoman's Narrative.(Book review)
June 22, 2006... Henry Louis Gates, Jr., and Hollis Robbins, eds. In Search of Hannah Crafts: Critical Essays on The Bondwoman's Narrative. New York: BasicCivitas, 2004. 458 pp. $27.50 cloth/ $17.50 paper. In search of Hannah Crafts concerns itself with a...

Raymond Wolters. Du Bois and His Rivals.(Book review)
June 22, 2006... Raymond Wolters. Du Bois and His Rivals. Columbia: U of Missouri P, 2002.311 pp. $19.95. The year 2003 proved especially important in W. E. B. Du Bois scholarship. Throughout the year, scholars convened at such varied sites as the...