African American Review articles from March 1995

African American Review archives from March 1995

Repositioning: center and margin in Julie Dash's 'Daughters of the Dust.'
March 22, 1995... One of the first scenes in Julie Dash's Daughters of the Dust shows a woman looking through a kaleidoscope given to her by Mr. Snead, a photographer. As Snead explains the way the instrument works, she delights in the changing images. The...

Should their eyes have been watching God? Hurston's use of religious experience and Gothic horror. (Zora Neale Hurston)
March 22, 1995... The title of a literary work may be leading or misleading, but it is often a good place to start an analysis. When title words or phrases are repeated inside the text, connecting them to the specific place where they appear seems to offer the...

Authority, multivocality, and the new world order in Gloria Naylor's 'Bailey's Cafe.'
March 22, 1995... Bailey's Cafe, Gloria Naylor's latest and most ambitious novel to date, is a hauntingly lyrical text steeped in biblical allusion. With this fourth novel, which completes a series including The Women of Brewster Place, Linden Hills, and Mama Day,...

"The only voice is your own": Gloria Naylor's revision of 'The Tempest.'
March 22, 1995... In Gloria Naylor's novel Mama Day, Reema's boy comes from the university to conduct anthropological studies in Willow Springs, the novel's mysterious setting. Attempting to preserve "cultural identities" against "hostile social and political...

The fence. (short story)
March 22, 1995... Again? Seems like we were just out there. To Deacon's house. Why do we have to go every year? Why do we have to go at all is what I want to know, all the way out in the Boondocks . . . to the big-deal sub-urbs. So he's got a house. Big deal. My...

Traces of Derrida in Toni Morrison's 'Jazz.'
March 22, 1995... Toni Morrison's published work is infused with postmodern themes. For example, Sula is structured around the inter-play between supposed binary oppositions (such as Bottom/valley, white/black, male/female), and Beloved examines the necessary...

Race and domesticity in 'The Color Purple.'
March 22, 1995... An important juncture in Alice Walker's The Color Purple is reached when Celie first recovers the missing letters from her long-lost sister Nettie. This discovery not only signals the introduction of a new narrator to this epistolary novel but...

The African American historian: David Bradley's 'The Chaneysville Incident.'
March 22, 1995... . . . for a black person, history is a challenge because a black person is supposed not to have any history except the colonial one. We hardly know what happened to our people before the time when they met the Europeans who decided to give them...

"Leavin' a mark on the wor(l)d": marksmen and marked men in 'Middle Passage.'
March 22, 1995... The point is not that acts of racial violence are only words but rather that they have to have a word. . . . racism always betrays the perversion of a man, the "talking animal." . . . A system of marks, it outlines space in order to assign forced...

Black Popular Culture.
March 22, 1995... One of the blurbs on the cover of Michele Wallace's Black Popular Culture claims that this gathering of voices "comes smoking straight" from today's "best black minds." And so it does (from some of them, anyway), convening about thirty culture...

Black Macho and the Myth of the Superwoman.
March 22, 1995... One of the blurbs on the cover of Michele Wallace's Black Popular Culture claims that this gathering of voices "comes smoking straight" from today's "best black minds." And so it does (from some of them, anyway), convening about thirty culture...

Invisibility Blues - From Pop to Theory.
March 22, 1995... One of the blurbs on the cover of Michele Wallace's Black Popular Culture claims that this gathering of voices "comes smoking straight" from today's "best black minds." And so it does (from some of them, anyway), convening about thirty culture...

Domestic Allegories of Political Desire: The Black Heroine's Text at the Turn of the Century.
March 22, 1995... Challenging what he imagines to be a "resistance to theory where Afro-American women's literary and cultural studies are concerned," Houston A. Baker, Jr., has recently urged a move away from "a methodically historical mode of Black Studies,"...

Was Huck Black? Mark Twain and African-American Voices.
March 22, 1995... About halfway through her amazing book Was Huck Black? - I'll soon come to why it's amazing - Shelley Fiskin makes a claim that she both supports and also leaves for lengthy future attention: "We cannot understand fully that key strain of...

Conversations with Richard Wright.
March 22, 1995... Scanning the title of this book, I mused to myself, "What conversations with Richard Wright?" For unlike African American novelists Ralph Ellison and James Baldwin, who were widely interviewed throughout their careers in conversations that became...

Archibald Grimke: Portrait of a Black Independent.
March 22, 1995... Archibald Grimke (1849-1930) has at last received the scholarly attention he deserves in this first full-length biography by Dickson D. Bruce, Jr. Identified with many causes, including women's rights, economic reforms, and prohibition, Grimke...

White on Black: Contemporary Literature About Africa.
March 22, 1995... Several scholars who have in recent years investigated the formation of our current conception of realities have, for obvious reasons, devoted special attention to the West's various inventions of identities for other peoples it has interacted...

An Enchanting Darkness: The American Vision of Africa in the Twentieth Century.
March 22, 1995... Several scholars who have in recent years investigated the formation of our current conception of realities have, for obvious reasons, devoted special attention to the West's various inventions of identifies for other peoples it has interacted...

Redefining Black Film.
March 22, 1995... When asked about the recent studio interest in black films, black independent filmmaker Julie Dash responded: We need films financed by Hollywood. We deserve them, and it[']s long overdue. Filmmaking is a business venture. It's not a charity;...

Generations in Black and White: Photographs by Carl Van Vechten from the James Weldon Johnson Memorial Collection.
March 22, 1995... Carl Van Vechten (1880-1964) had an early career as an influential critic and a lucrative second career as a popular novelist, but he is more likely to be remembered as a gifted amateur photographer of celebrated people in the arts. During the...

The Third Door: The Autobiography of an American Negro Woman.
March 22, 1995... In the closing paragraph of her 1955 autobiography, Ellen Tarry anticipates a day when "we are united," when "there will be no door in America marked 'colored' and no door marked 'white.' Instead there will be the third door - free from racial...

A Mixed Race: Ethnicity in Early America.
March 22, 1995... This collection of thirteen original essays by some of our best critics of early American culture is an important contribution to the topical and energetic debate over ethnicity. The contributors seek to extend a self-conscious consideration of...

Race Contacts and Interracial Relations.
March 22, 1995... African American scholarship is well served by Jeffrey C. Stewart's rescue of this group of five lectures, subtitled "Lectures on the Theory and Practice of Race," from the massive trove of Alain Locke papers at the Moorland-Spingarn Research...

The Papers of Martin Luther King, Jr., vol. 1, Called to Serve.
March 22, 1995... The initial volume of The Papers of Martin Luther King, Jr. covers the first two decades of King's life and offers a chronologically arranged presentation of his letters, student papers, book reviews, and evaluations. It presents the essence of...

Conversations with Nikki Giovanni.
March 22, 1995... Virginia C. Fowler's edited collection Conversations with Nikki Giovanni is a remarkable book that brings together in one place all the bits and pieces of a human personality, intellect, and poetic genius of contemporary times. It carefully...

Voodoo Dreams.
March 22, 1995... For those who had the good fortune to grow up in an Afro-American community - whether north or south - our earliest memories include beliefs about man and nature that fascinated, and sometimes terrified, us. If you eat fish and milk at the same...

Divine Days.
March 22, 1995... In every sentence of their novels Divine Days and Free Enterprise Leon Forrest, native Chicagoan of Creole, African, and American ancestry, and Michelle Cliff, born and raised in Jamaica, embody the effects of their mixed cultural heritage....

Free Enterprise.
March 22, 1995... In every sentence of their novels Divine Days and Free Enterprise Leon Forrest, native Chicagoan of Creole, African, and American ancestry, and Michelle Cliff, born and raised in Jamaica, embody the effects of their mixed cultural heritage. Both...

Sarah Phillips.
March 22, 1995... Andrea Lee's 1984 book Sarah Phillips, brilliantly introduced in its new incarnation by Valerie Smith, is one of several out-of-print titles to appear in the Northeastern Library of Black Literature. The general editor of the series, Richard...

Her Own Place.
March 22, 1995... If you are looking for an imaginative mind that gives an added force to experience, then Dori Sanders is the author you are looking for. In her first novel, Clover, a young black girl comes to terms with a white stepmother raising her after her...