African American Review articles from June 2007

African American Review archives from June 2007

African American Review special issue--introduction.
June 22, 2007... Paul Laurence Dunbar was one of the best-known writers in the United States at the time of his death in 1906. His pioneering work in poetry, fiction, and nonfiction prose, which appealed to blacks and whites alike, has continued to shape...

Dunbar, the originator.(Paul Laurence Dunbar)
June 22, 2007... I once referred to accidental Dunbar scholar, understating the fact that I, like many African Americans of my generation, was born in the bed with Paul Laurence Dunbar, born in the bed, as they say, the way that some are born in the bed with...

Paul Laurence Dunbar: a credit to his race?
June 22, 2007... Over the course of the twentieth century, Paul Laurence Dunbar's reputation shifted between that of a "race man" and that of an embarrassment, before progressing to that of a forerunner and trickster, who possessed the dual, if contradictory,...

Intimate intercessions in the poetry of Paul Laurence Dunbar.
June 22, 2007... ... Then Br'er Adams, a white-haired patriarch, knelt and "took up the cross." --"Anner 'Lizer's Stumblin' Block" (Dunbar, Best Stories) Much of the poetry of Paul Laurence Dunbar reveals the intimate intercessions of a tormented poet,...

Paul Laurence Dunbar's performances and the epistolary dialect poem.
June 22, 2007... When the Western Association of Writers convened in Paul Laurence Dunbars hometown of Dayton, Ohio, in 1892, he read a welcome address in verse, which included the following lines: So, proud are you who claim the West As home land;...

Paul Laurence Dunbar and the African American Elegy.
June 22, 2007... A hush is over all the teeming lists, And there is pause, a breathspace in the strife; A spirit brave has passed beyond the mists And vapors that obscure the sun of life. And Ethiopia, with bosom torn, Laments...

Paul Laurence Dunbar and the genres of dialect.(Essay)
June 22, 2007... In a 1902 interview with the Chicago Tribune, Paul Laurence Dunbar was asked, "And when you do write have you more pleasure in negro songs or in others?" Sometimes I am fascinated by the negro song," Dunbar responded. "It carries me...

Dunbar's children.
June 22, 2007... An important but overlooked subgenre of Paul Laurence Dunbar's oeuvre is his poetry for and about children. The poetry is not simply, nor even primarily, for the prepubescent set: often the poetry is a reminiscence about children or about the...

"When Dey 'Listed Colored Soldiers": Paul Laurence Dunbar's poetic engagement with the Civil War, masculinity, and violence.
June 22, 2007... Paul Laurence Dunbar's poetic treatment of the Civil War and its legacies explores heroism, patriotism, citizenship, death, mourning, and trauma. In reflecting on the war, considered a worthy and elevated national theme, the author found an...

"When he is least himself": Dunbar and double consciousness in African American poetry.(Paul Laurence Dunbar)
June 22, 2007... Like Paul Laurence Dunbar, and like many people who don't even consider themselves to be poets, I began writing poetry as a child. Although Dunbar was not a poet I tried to emulate when I wrote my first poems, and although he is not among my...

"Purple haze": Dunbar's lyric legacy.(Paul Laurence Dunbar)
June 22, 2007... "The measure of our songs is our desires" --Paul Laurence Dunbar, "Prometheus" 1. 30 "Dunbar" was a name that had a certain gravitational force about it in my youth. For me, as for so many of my generation, it was an ever multiplying...

Second-generation realist; or, Dunbar the naturalist.(Paul Laurence Dunbar)
June 22, 2007... From February to August 1897, Paul Laurence Dunbar lectured and recited poems across England, capitalizing on his international stature as "Poet Laureate of the Negro Race," thanks in large part to William Howells's review of his poetry in...

The politics of incongruity in Paul Laurence Dunbar's The Fanatics.
June 22, 2007... In December 1898, the Chicago Record and numerous other papers printed Paul Laurence Dunbar's response to the race riots in Wilmington, Hogansville, and Urbana, in which he inveighs against the notion that violence against African Americans was...

Dunbar and the science of lynching.(Paul Laurence Dunbar)
June 22, 2007... "That black--" --Paul Laurence Dunbar, "The Lynching of Jube Benson" 236 Enthroned upon the mighty truth Within the confines of the laws, True Justice seeth not the man, But only hears his cause. Unconscious of his creed or race, She...

That old time religion: Christian Faith in Dunbar's "The Strength of Gideon".
June 22, 2007... To situate Paul Laurence Dunbar in the cultural, historical, and literary context in which he rightfully belongs, we must be willing to confront and to critique his ideas on religious faith; we must be willing to explore those elements of...

Paul Laurence Dunbar's overlooked play.
June 22, 2007... DUNBAR Ah, how poets sing and die! Make one song and Heaven takes it; Have one heart and Beauty breaks it; Chatterton, Shelley, Keats and I--Ah, how poets sing and die!--Anne Spencer Paul Laurence Dunbar is mainly known as a poet. And...

Picturing Dunbar's lyrics.(Paul Laurence Dunbar)
June 22, 2007... From 1899 until shortly after his death in 1906, Paul Laurence Dunbar published six books of poetry in African American dialect, patterned ornately with Art Nouveau decoration, and illustrated extensively with photographs, positioning text and...

Dunbar's Bohemian Gallery: Foreign Color and Fin-de-Siecle Modernism.(Paul Laurence Dunbar)
June 22, 2007... What's more elementary to 20th-century American bohemia than a studied, conflicted hatred of the bourgeoisie? According to this bohemia's most compelling recent historian, the answer is a few modest but theatrical restaurants. In American...

Right to ride: African American citizenship and protest in the era of Plessy v. Ferguson.(Jim Crow)
June 22, 2007... Jim Crow was a traveling intruder, a black interloper in all-white spaces. Originally, Jim Crow was a folk character featured in the rhyming games of slave children. (1) As the black-faced minstrel character played by the white performer Thomas...

Factoring out race: the cultural context of Paul Laurence Dunbar.
June 22, 2007... I am always intimidated when asked to speak to scholars, possibly because I recall the evaluation of one of my tutors at the University of London: "As a scholar, Bradley is adequate, as opposed to brilliant." That was, in fact, polite British...

Paul Laurence Dunbar and the project of cultural reconstruction.
June 22, 2007... Paul Laurence Dunbar presented a curious sight to the passengers who rode his elevator in the early 1890s. The clerks, craftswomen, and business managers of Dayton, Ohio, often saw the Century magazine in his hands (Matthews qtd in Martin,...

Paul Laurence Dunbar and Turn-into-the-20th-Century African American Dualism.
June 22, 2007... Paul Gilroy has powerfully claimed that the notion of double consciousness in which the black subject "ever feels his twoness" was used by W. E. B. Du Bois to figure a diasporic, and sometimes transatlantic black modernity expressing the...

"I know why the caged bird sings!": Dunbar in China.(Paul Laurence Dunbar's works studied in China)
June 22, 2007... Paul Laurence Dunbar used his poetry to express frustration and disappointment at the ways that his country treated his fellow African Americans. One hundred years after his death, however, he might be consoled to know that in a different part...

Dunbar lives!(Paul Laurence Dunbar)
June 22, 2007... In the course of writing this essay, I have found something that surprised me: Dunbar matters very much to contemporary African American poets. And I have also discovered how Dunbar matters to me. Several years ago I had a conversation with...