African American Review articles from March 1996

African American Review archives from March 1996

Popular fronts: 'Negro Story' magazine and the African American literary response to World War II.
March 22, 1996... Critical accounts of African American literary history and U.S. radicalism of the 1940s have often viewed the decade as an apocalyptic turning point in the formation of a radical black politics. Books such as Wilson Record's The Negro and the...

Passing as autobiography: James Weldon Johnson's 'The Autobiography of an Ex-Coloured Man.'
March 22, 1996... The Autobiography of an Ex-Coloured Man - the narrative of a fair-skinned mulatto man who, after many difficulties on both sides of the color-line and much agonizing over "the Negro problem" in America, chooses to pass for white - was published...

'To Disembark': the slave narrative tradition.
March 22, 1996... Art is a social construct. A work of art is what an artist says is a work of art, and is considered great when, over time, it manages to transcend the circumstances of its making and its expression. (David Ross, Director of the Whitney Museum of...

Nigger in the Window. (fiction)
March 22, 1996... What's it called when niggers toting gifts go calling door-to-door? Father's Day in the Flats. Funny joke, Darryl thinks. Yeah. Real funny. The day the joke was told though, Darryl hadn't laughed. He might have laughed had a Black friend, Two...

Re-membering America: Phyllis Wheatley's intertextual epic.
March 22, 1996... Though Phillis Wheatley's poetry has received considerable critical attention, much of the commentary on her work focuses on the problem of the "blackness," or lack thereof, of the first published African American woman poet. The issue of race...

Toni Morrison's 'Sula': a satire on binary thinking.
March 22, 1996... Attempts to define Toni Morrison's novel Sula are as numerous as they are diverse. The text has been read as a "black woman's epic," a study of "female friendship," an "antiwar novel," a "fable," an exploration of the "feminine psyche," and "a...

Aspects of Africanness in August Wilson's drama: reading 'The Piano Lesson' through Wole Soyinka's drama.
March 22, 1996... The experimental flourish of the Counterculture and Civil Rights Movement eras brought tremendous developments in American drama. But by the mid-'70s, new conditions in the nation - political, social, cultural, and technological - combined to...

A History of African American Artists from 1792 to the Present.
March 22, 1996... Reviewed by Barbara Chase-Ribound Paris A History of African Artists from 1792 to the Present is a landmark work, lavishly illustrated and definitive in its treatment. While giving a conspectus of more than fifty signal African American artists...

I Heard it Through the Grapevine: Rumor in African-American Culture.
March 22, 1996... Reviewed by Trudier Harris Emory University Seldom does reading a scholarly book become a page-turning adventure, but that is what happened for me with Patricia Turner's I Heart It Through the Grapevine, a study of rumor in African American...

Radical Representations: Politics and Form in U.S. Proletarian Fiction, 1929-1941.
March 22, 1996... Reviewed by Craig Wemer University of Wisconsin-Madison An important change is taking place in the way American literary history is being written. Prior to the Black Studies movement of the 1960s and 1970s, standard histories of American...

American Culture Between the Wars: Revisionary Modernism and Postmodern Critique.
March 22, 1996... Reviewed by Craig Wemer University of Wisconsin-Madison An important change is taking place in the way American literary history is being written. Prior to the Black Studies movement of the 1960s and 1970s, standard histories of American...

The Negro Traditions.
March 22, 1996... Reviewed by Roger Abrahams University of Pennsylvania With the development of the blackface minstrel stage, the imitation of African American plantation performances came to be known throughout the world. But after Emancipation a series of...

Lyrics of the Afro-American Spiritual: A Documentary Collection.
March 22, 1996... Reviewed by Dena J. Epstein University of Chicago (retired In compiling a collection of the words of spirituals without music, the editor offers as his purpose "to emphasize the substantial value of the words themselves . . . [which] tell a...

Rayford W. Logan and the Dilemma of the African-American Intellectual.
March 22, 1996... Reviewed by Sterling Stuckey University of California, Riverside Disillusioned by advances that cost more in human suffering than even now we can calculate, black activists in the sixties urged their people to look to Africa for a sense of...

A Jean Toomer Reader: Selected Unpublished Writings.
March 22, 1996... Reviewed by Rudolph P. Byrd Emory University Frederick L. Rusch's A Jean Toomer Reader: Selected Unpublished Writings significantly enlarges our understanding of a major figure in American letters. The portrait of Jean Toomer which emerges from...

Invisible Darkness: Jean Toomer and Nella Larsen.
March 22, 1996... Reviewed by Rudolph P. Byrd Emory University Frederick L. Rusch's A Jean Toomer Reader: Selected Unpublished Writings significantly enlarges our understanding of a major figure in American letters. The portrait of Jean Toomer which emerges from...

Jean Toomer and the Prison-House of Thought: A Phenomenology of the Spirit.
March 22, 1996... Reviewed by George Hutchinson University of Tennessee-Knoxville I must begin by admitting some embarrassment. Having recently written a foreword to a fine forthcoming anthology of Toomer's writings edited by the late Robert B. Jones, I looked...

Discrepant Engagement: Dissonance, Cross-Culturality, and Experimental Writing.
March 22, 1996... Reviewed by Heather Hathaway Marquette University A pairing of the Black Mountain poets with black writers from the United States and the Caribbean probably would not immediately occur to most readers, yet Nathaniel Mackey's study Discrepant...

A History of Twentieth-Century African Literatures.
March 22, 1996... Reviewed by Bemard Nganga Universite Marien Ngouabi In his introduction to this book, Oyekan Owomoyela defines modern African literatures as essentially a twentieth-century phenomenon. While he agrees on the continuity between traditional oral...

Hand Me My Griot Clothes: The Autobiography of Junior Baby.
March 22, 1996... Reviewed by Shirley Lumpkin Marshall University Chanting his signature refrain, "Hand me my griot clothes," Peter J. Harris's character/speaker/poet Junior Baby insists, through the ten poem-chapters of his autobiography, that his life and art...

Minor Casualties.(Brief Article)
March 22, 1996... Reviewed by E. Ethelbert Miller Howard University There are a number of African American intellectuals whose scholarly work at times overshadows their creative talent. One thinks immediately of Houston Baker, Jr., Jerry Ward, Jr., and bell...

Remembrances of Spring: Collected Early Poems.
March 22, 1996... Reviewed by Pinkie Gordon Lane Baton Rouge, Louisiana Naomi Long Madgett has provided for the literary world a collection of her early poems written, for the most part, before she was twenty-one and some, according to her prefatory essay, as...

Forever Home.
March 22, 1996... Reviewed by Matthew C. Brennan Indiana State University Lenard Moore's first two full-length volumes of poetry explore widely different subjects - Forever Home (1992), the poet's familial roots in rural North Carolina; Desert Storm (1993), the...

Desert Storm: A Brief History.
March 22, 1996... Reviewed by Matthew C. Brennan Indiana State University Lenard Moore's first two full-length volumes of poetry explore widely different subjects - Forever Home (1992), the poet's familial roots in rural North Carolina; Desert Storm (1993), the...

Sorrow's End.
March 22, 1996... Reviewed by Fahamisha Patricia Brown Trinity College (Hartford, CT) I will court you in the melody of my passion I will sruggle to win you with my song These stanzas, which end Hilda Vest's poem "Lyrics I," are from her second collection...

Life of Death.
March 22, 1996... Reviewed by Jerome Klinkowitz University of Northern Iowa Philip Lewis's first novel comes with a strong endorsement from John A. Williams, who compares it to Celine's Death on the Installment Plan and Doblin's Berlin Alexanderplatz. There's a...