African American Review articles from March 1999

African American Review archives from March 1999

Days of Hope: Race and Democracy in the New Deal Era.(Review)
March 22, 1999... Patricia Sullivan. Chapel Hill: U of North Carolina P, 1996, 368 pp. $39.95 cloth/$17.95 paper. Reviewed by David L. Chappell University of Arkansas A central question in twentieth-century American history is why black voters, who...

The New Colored People: The Mixed-Race Movement in America.(Review)
March 22, 1999... Jon Michael Spencer. New York: New York UP, 1997. 220 pp. $24.95. Reviewed by Katya Gibel Azoulay Grinnell College The New Colored People: The Mixed Race Movement in America is a political, often speculative, critique of...

Double Consciousness/Double Bind: Theoretical Issues in Twentieth Century Black Literature.(Review)
March 22, 1999... Sandra Adell. Urbana: U of Illinois P, 1994. 172 pp. $25.95. Reviewed by Theodore O. Mason, Jr. Kenyon College Sandra Adell's Double-Consciousness/Double Bind is an extremely important and (thankfully) iconoclastic work. This is...

Granny Midwives and Black Women Writers: Double-Dutched Readings.(Review)
March 22, 1999... Valerie Lee. New York: Routledge, 1996. 215 pp. $60.00. Reviewed by Kimberly Blockett University of Wisconsin-Madison Pilate, the famous literary midwife in Toni Morrison s Song of Solomon, functions as conjure woman, healer,...

Martin Delany, Frederick Douglass, and the Politics of Representative Identity.(Review)
March 22, 1999... Robert S. Levine. Chapel Hill: U of North Carolina P, 1997. 328 pp. $45.00 cloth/$18.95 paper. Reviewed by John Ernest University of New Hampshire As has been noted more than once, U.S. culture seems to like to take its Black male...

The Problem of Embodiment in Early African American Narrative.(Review)
March 22, 1999... Katherine Fishburn. Westport: Greenwood P, 1997. 195 pp. $55.00. Reviewed by Frances Smith Foster Emory University In her preface, Katherine Fishburn, informs us that The Problem of Embodiment in Early African American Narrative...

Ten is the Age of Darkness: The Black Bildungsroman.(Review)
March 22, 1999... Geta LeSeur. Columbia: U of Missouri P, 1995. 245 pp. $34.95. Reviewed by Alice A. Deck University of Illinois The surge of scholarly interest since 1989 in Africa and its diaspora has yielded a number of articles, books, and...

Blue Rhythms: Six Lives in Rhythm and Blues.(Review)
March 22, 1999... Chip Deffaa. Urbana: U of Illinois P, 1996. 318 pp. $29.95. Reviewed by Darryl Cox Hershey, Pennsylvania When unique talent merges with the desire to display that singular quality before an adoring and paying public, the resulting...

"To Be An Author": Letters of Charles W. Chesnutt, 1889-1905.(Review)
March 22, 1999... Charles W. Chesnutt. Ed. Joseph R. McElrath Jr., and Robert C. Leitz, III. Princeton: Princeton UP, 1997, 248 pp. $24.95. Reviewed by William Gleason Princeton University This copiously annotated edition of Charles Chesnutt's...

From Emerson to King: Democracy, Race, and the Politics of Protest.(Review)
March 22, 1999... Anita Haya Patterson. New York: Oxford UP, 1997. 257 pp. $49.95. Reviewed by Len Gougeon University of Scranton The stated objectives of this dissertation-based study are to "show that . . . Emerson's writings exhibit a consistent...

The Blue Devils of Nada: A Contemporary American Approach to Aesthetic Statement.(Review)
March 22, 1999... Albert Murray. New York: Pantheon Books, 1996.238 pp. $23.00. Reviewed by Carolyn M. Jones Louisiana State University In The Blue Devils of Nada: A Contemporary American Approach to Aesthetic Statement, Albert Murray once again...

Deep Sightings and Rescue Missions: Fiction, Essays and Conversations.(Review)
March 22, 1999... Toni Cade Bambara. Ed. with a preface by Toni Morrison. New York: Pantheon, 1996. 266 pp. $23.00. Reviewed by Alice A. Deck University of Illinois The posthumous publication of Deep Sightings and Rescue Missions fills the void I...

Ash of Stars: On the Writings of Samuel Delany.(Review)
March 22, 1999... James Sallis, ed. Jackson: UP of Mississippi, 1996. 242 pp. $42.50 cloth/$17.95 paper. Reviewed by Sinda Gregory San Diego State University Samuel R. Delany has been challenging readers and critics since he burst onto the insular...

Longer Views: Extended Essays.(Review)
March 22, 1999... Samuel R. Delany. Middletown: Wesleyan UP, 1996. 382 pp. $50.00 cloth/$22.00 paper. Reviewed by Robert Elliot Fox Southern Illinois University at Carbondale Samuel R. Delany is not only a celebrated and prolific author (more than...

Woodholme: A Black Man's Story of Growing up Alone.(Review)
March 22, 1999... Dewayne Wickham. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1995, 285 pp. $14.95. Reviewed by Roland L. Williams, Jr. Temple University A little learning, indeed, may be a dangerous thing, but the want of learning is a calamity to any people....

GroundWork: New and Selected Poems of Don L. Lee/Haki R. Madhubuti from 1966-1996.(Review)
March 22, 1999... Haki R. Madhubuti. Chicago: Third World P, 1996.329 pp $29.95 cloth/$14.95 paper. Reviewed by Keith Gilyard Syracuse University On the cover of GroundWork are two visages. In the background is the mid-twenties Don L. Lee, Black...

The Fields of Praise: New and Selected Poems.(Review)
March 22, 1999... Marilyn Nelson. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State UP, 1997.220 pp. $24.95 cloth/$ 16.95 paper. Reviewed by Miller Williams University of Arkansas In a quietly lyrical voice, Marilyn Nelson writes poems of simple wisdom and...

"To a place blessed" : for Margaret Walker.(Obituary)
March 22, 1999... On November 30, 1998, Margaret Walker Alexander, at the age of 83, died in Chicago. Though the cause of her death was uncertain, she had recently been diagnosed with breast cancer and had become so feeble as to require a constant companion....

Racial hysteria: female pathology and race politics in France Harper's 'Iola Leroy' and W.D. Howells's 'An Imperative Duty.'.
March 22, 1999... Race as Illness "To be ill is a feminine verb," quipped Dr. S. Weir Mitchell in 1881, lightly putting his quite serious judgment that womanhood itself is a pathological condition (Diseases 3).(1) Indeed, according to both popular and...

Comic book masculinity and the new black superhero.
March 22, 1999... Following in the footsteps of feminist scholarship there have, in recent years, been a number of studies which have begun to consider masculinity, particularly heterosexual masculinity, as a social construction. Masculinity, always regarded as...

Between the rock and the hard place: mediating spaces in Harriet Jacob's 'Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl.'.
March 22, 1999... Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl is an extraordinary document - not, as some skeptics have charged, in the sense of the incredible (read 'unbelievable') nature of its storyline. While Jean Fagan Yellin's conclusive findings have largely...

June Jordan and the new black intellectuals.
March 22, 1999... In Race Matters, Cornell West states that "the time is past for black political and intellectual leaders to pose as the voice for black America." The contemporary black political and intellectual leader should "be a race-transcending prophet...

African jump ball.(poem)
March 22, 1999... for E. Ethelbert Miller Can you dribble? Aw, man, you can't dribble. Do you know traveling ain't going to the West Side to see your woman? Dribble, man! This ain't no Amtrak Metroliner! Don't bogarde me, trying to roll off to the left....

Michael Holley, Bruthaman Boston Globe sports writer, covers the Celtics - in the '96-'97 season - loss to loss.(poem)
March 22, 1999... It's the old teams you see at night in visions, the teams with faces as rare as not having names, brothers who played in places not recorded. Or it's the single champions like Jack Johnson grinning and dueling with monsters, men training rifles...

Kingfish.(poem)
March 22, 1999... for Major L. Jackson & Theodore Harris Box cars and snake eyes, the Boston, full-house, five-book no-trump uptown, six-book hearts-trump downtown. The kitty's full - "Sapphire! Where's my wallet? Where's my claim to acclaim?" Four...

To Malcolm X on his second coming.(poem)
March 22, 1999... Malcolm X, alias El Hajj Malik El Shabazz, alias Malcolm Little, alias Detroit Red - Deceased! The coffin breaks, fingers wriggle through clay, touch the light. A chiseled face comes full with flesh, eyes roaming the landscape of his...

On the page.(poem)
March 22, 1999... I posture between sheets laced in black. Ink absorbing into fibers of conversation undulating from the lips of women who identify them- selves as natural flaws in the fabric. Collapsing feelings to one, I long to be in their mouths, their...

Lighted path.(poem)
March 22, 1999... The moon kissed my womb and settled me into the life of everyone's someone, obliging me to find beauty between bruises. The river banks promised Jordan but import hungry children and diamonds instead. Sewer alleys and tenements reclaim...

Drawing parallels.(poem)
March 22, 1999... Cracked souls Finger in shadows cast from generations of dampness and barren light. Appending children and land they realize needs and desires able to bind flesh. The hold of the love shifts or strangles at the roots. Time shrinks to a...

Saint Norma.(poem)
March 22, 1999... Within time and outside of franchise she came to be known as Saint Norma, Who winked at the unsavory and beat discomfort down. Heaving her large body of wisdom up through the past she let vision depart as moist shadows settled old debts and...

Temporary marker.(poem)
March 22, 1999... When red clay dries and turns to dust, it can make almost anything seem like a sunset. Pulling into the shallow ditch that harnesses road to time and places forgotten we visit burial grounds ancient to me. In the granite stones I can touch...

Roxbury.(poem)
March 22, 1999... What shall I tell you? Should I dive into the sad eyes of that girl Who walks on the other side of Magnolia Street, With her headband, searching for a life, Under the sad color of the street lamps? Or should I tell you about Patricia? A...

Notetaking.(poem)
March 22, 1999... i come . . . as a black woman down a corridor of tears . . . pulling my history with bruised heels. (sonia sanchez) as lillian calls herself 'a strong black queen' i feel red flashes in my fingers work their way down my spine thru...

Bluebird.(poem)
March 22, 1999... Sanctuary: bathroom locked, skeleton key in one hand, works in the other, she contemplated flushing her fix, the toilet bowl redemptive as a cathedral's font. She remembered her fingers landing, swan-like, on holy water. God bless the child...

Alexandria revisited: what would have become.(poem)
March 22, 1999... (Remembering Arna Bontemps, 1902-1973) A glass world of Negro people: blueblack night and Red River moon, country-fed Black people in Louisiana boyhood memory - if Blackjack had met the boychild Arna, and they together went fishing for...

Her face.(poem)
March 22, 1999... she makes the men wonder: and wonder is the mother of all things men will run back to the same spot where they saw her put on beauty like a night gown: she was standing flat-footed with her hands on her hips her collarbone a cusp...

For the woman wants nothing.(poem)
March 22, 1999... her feet on the altar or raised to the blue sky not pressed to the earth where she has walked she does not allow malice will not curl up on the stone or wish, clothes that lay her body soft garments that fall about her feet like drapes ...

Single mother, anointing 133rd and Lennox.(poem)
March 22, 1999... You just know She descends from A wide-shoulder'd people. You know, by her carriage she was One of Harriet's defiant daughters, before She put on a red dress and became Ellington's flame. And became a sepia coquette, that lyrical flirt in...

Simple arithmetic.(poem)
March 22, 1999... No opposition mounted against it, no Challengers in the shadows, waiting in the wings. That's what a so-called charmed life has needed, An open season to fritter away, hunting Or cavorting about as snug in its getup As the ace of spaces is in...

500.(poem)
March 22, 1999... (for Eddie Murray) It's the night before 2pac Gets gunned down And Mike Tyson will Win his second heavyweight title In record time Amidst a chorus of Fix, Fix! And this poem will be embryonic I sit at a bus stop Knowing how tragic, yet...

Angel.(poem)
March 22, 1999... In the clamor of crows I hear my own voice demanding to know if I'm nuts or just plain crazy running alone through these woods, mud puddles sucking in my feet making it inconvenient like getting lost, which I got after...

Pieta.(poem)
March 22, 1999... for P. H. T. At the start they were lodestones, were miraculous. Had she yielded to her in-laws and named him Nicodemus, he would never have forgiven her later as a teenager when what others call us matters, so she named him...

Black wings.(poem)
March 22, 1999... (for Michael Johnson, Olympic Champion - 1996) God must have cut you from a big BAAAD cat - or perhaps a strain of graceful Afrikan gazelles - or a fleet of pink swans streaking through paradise. In your blazing evolutionary flight to...

Passages: an African experience of the kiaspora.(poem)
March 22, 1999... Many times man lives and dies Between his two eternities, That of race and that of soul (W. B. Yeats, "Under Ben Bulben") I Where the skull leans eastward to form a continent, where the ocean guts through the palmbeached rock, the...

'Beloved': ideologies in conflict, improvised subjects.
March 22, 1999... My father, by his nature, as well as by the habit of transacting business as a skil[l]ful mechanic, had more of the feelings of a freeman than is common among slaves. My brother was a spirited boy; and being brought up under such influences, he...

"A (b)igger's place": lynching and specularity in Richard Wright's "Fire and Cloud" and 'Native Son.'.
March 22, 1999... In 1947, casting the backward glance of a recent expatriate, Richard Wright observes in an interview, "To be American in the United States means to be white, protestant, and very rich. This excludes almost entirely black people and anyone else...

"Payin' one's dues": expatriation as personal experience and paradigm in the works of James Baldwin.
March 22, 1999... One April evening in 1980 Baldwin and I were reminiscing as fellow expatriates (I had lived abroad in the Sixties) about the old times in Paris. He had lectured the previous day at Emory University on the "New South," which he had wryly...

Room.(poem)
March 22, 1999... You've heard all this before. Mother falls asleep on the sofa, darkness wide-spreads the length of her body. Spills of clothes on the floor, and somewhere in the night father drives farther away, swearing he's never coming back. ...

Sisterwords.(poem)
March 22, 1999... i write because i really think i've got hold of something . . . that might enable someone to see more clearly and not . . . go for the okey-doke. (toni cade bambara) we need our words like we need our lungs to breathe in tight polluted...