African American Review articles from March 2000

African American Review archives from March 2000

Raising Voices, Lifting Shadows: Competing Voice-Paradigms in Frances E. W. Harper's Iola Leroy.(Critical Essay)
March 22, 2000... One of the most interesting and frequently overlooked features of Frances E.W. Harper's 1892 novel Iola Leroy, or Shadows Uplifted is its dual climaxes. The first climax is the rural church meeting in Chapter XX that brings together Iola,...

Unmasking the Genteel Performer: Elizabeth Keckley's Behind the Scenes and the Politics of Public Wrath.(Critical Essay)
March 22, 2000... When Elizabeth Keckley wrote her 1868 autobiography Behind the Scenes; or, Thirty Years a Slave, and Four Years in the White House, one of her primary goals was to defend herself and Mary Todd Lincoln from public ridicule. Because Keckley had...

No Accident: From Black Power to Black Box Office.(Critical Essay)
March 22, 2000... It's no accident that people like Malcolm X and Martin Luther King were destroyed at those moments of their political careers when [ldots] they replaced nationalism with a critique of imperialism. (hooks 37) The years between Malcolm X as...

The Story Must Go On and On: The Fantastic, Narration, and Intertextuality in Toni Morrison's Beloved and Jazz.(Critical Essay)
March 22, 2000... A fixed law, an established rule: that is what immobilizes narrative. (Todorov 165) Rereading [is] an operation contrary to the commercial and ideological habits of our society, which would have us "throw away" the story once it has been...

Embodying Cultural Memory in Paule Marshall's Praisesong for the Widow.(Critical Essay)
March 22, 2000... As an epigraph to the section entitled "Lave Tete," the third section of her novel Praisesong for the Widow, Paule Marshall uses a brief quotation from a poem by Randall Jarrell: "Oh, Bars of my [ldots] body, open, open!" (148). It is in this...

An Interview with Edward P. Jones.(Interview)
March 22, 2000... Edward P. Jones is the author of Lost in the City, a collection of fourteen short stories which was nominated for the National Book Award in 1992. In the fall of 1997, Jones answered my questions after meeting with a Howard University African...

Faith flight (from Salvation Song).(Excerpt)
March 22, 2000... June Bug thought he heard a voice calling him to come help. After having fallen asleep with his empty bottle next to him, he wasn't sure. But it wasn't his Big Momma's voice that he heard, which made him jump up from his cot and wonder what was...

The Worm Against the Word: The Hermeneutical Challenge in Hurston's Jonah's Gourd Vine.(Critical Essay)
March 22, 2000... Daughter of a Baptist preacher, Zora Neale Hurston spoke from the pulpit every time that she wrote. She did not follow the conventional path of testifying to her father's faith. Although she enjoyed her parent's rhapsodic language at revival...

Reading the Scars: Rita Dove's The Darker Face of the Earth.(Critical Essay)
March 22, 2000... Writer as Reader Rita Dove's The Darker Face of the Earth is a recounting of the Oedipus drama, framed in terms of the African-American experience of slavery. It is a poet's reading of Oedipus the King, resonating with the beauty and...

Trouble in Mind: Black Southerners in the Age of Jim Crow.(Review)
March 22, 2000... Leon F. Litwack. Trouble in Mind: Black Southerners in the Age of Jim Crow. New York: Knopf, 1998. 620 pp. $35.00. By any method of reckoning, Trouble in Mind by Leon F. Litwack, one of America's most talented historians, is a highly...

Civil Rights and Social Wrongs: Black-White Relations since World War II.(Review)
March 22, 2000... John Higham, ed. Civil Rights and Social Wrongs: Black-White Relations since World War II. University Park: Pennsylvania State UP, 1997. 231 pp. $28.50. A funny thing happened at the Baich Institute conference in Philadelphia, October...

Resistance, Parody, and Double Consciousness in African-American Theatre.(Review)
March 22, 2000... David Krasner. Resistance, Parody, and Double Consciousness in African-American Theatre, 1895-1910: New York: St. Martin's P, 1997.218 pp. $60.00 cloth/$17.95 paper. In his only known essay, "The Comic Side of Trouble," Bert Williams...

Black Chant: Languages of African-American Postmodernism.(Review)
March 22, 2000... Aldon Lynn Nielsen. Black Chant: Languages of African-American Postmodernism. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1997. 288 pp. $59.95 cloth/$18.95 paper. Duiring the past decade, Aldon Lynn Nielsen has emerged as one of our most useful and valuable...

The Feminist Difference: Literature, Psychoanalysis, Race, and Gender.(Review)
March 22, 2000... Barbara Johnson. The Feminist Difference: Literature, Psychoanalysis, Race, and Gender. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1998. 215 pp. $22.00. The Feminist Difference, by Barbara Johnson, is a collection of essays that invokes the titles of the...

Frederick Douglass: Freedom's Voice, 1818-1845.(Review)
March 22, 2000... Gregory P. Lampe. Frederick Douglass: Freedom's Voice, 1818-1845. East Lansing: Michigan State UP, 1998. 350 pp. $45.00 cloth/$22.95 paper. Frederick Douglass: Freedom's Voice, 1818-1845, is an ambitious first manuscript by Gregory P....

The Trials of Anthony Burns: Freedom and Slavery in Emerson's Boston.(Review)
March 22, 2000... Albert J. Von Frank. The Trials of Anthony Burns: Freedom and Slavery in Emerson's Boston. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1998. 409 pp. $27.95. The political and legal efforts of Boston abolitionists to keep the escaped Virginia slave Anthony...

The Jim Dilemma: Reading Race in Huckleberry Finn.(Review)
March 22, 2000... Chadwick-Joshua offers a spirited and often eloquent defense of Huckleberry Finn. Even for someone, such as myself, who cannot accept without reservation the premises or the argument, there is much to be learned from her inquiry into the "Jim...

Charles W. Chesnutt: A Study of the Short Fiction.(Review)
March 22, 2000... Henry B. Wonham. Charles W. Chesnutt: A Study of the Short Fiction. New York: Twayne, 1998. 168 pp. $25.95. As a good many readers of Charles Chesnutt's work now recognize, to study his brief literary career is to study and read for the...

Toni Morrison: Contemporary Critical Essays.(Review)
March 22, 2000... Linden Peach, ed. Toni Morrison: Contemporary Critical Essays. New York: St. Martin's P, 1998. 211 pp. $18.95. This New Casebook features eleven critical essays on the novels of Toni Morrison. Linden Peach's introduction provides an...

Jamaica Kincaid: Where the Land Meets the Body.(Review)
March 22, 2000... Moira Ferguson. Jamaica Kincaid: Where the Land Meets the Body. Charlottesville: UP of Virginia, 1994. 206 pp. $16.95. Moira Ferguson's book Jamaica Kincaid: Where the Land Meets the Body offers an energized exploration of the concept of...

Blue as the Lake: A Personal Geography.(Review)
March 22, 2000... Robert B. Stepto. Blue as the Lake: A Personal Geography. Boston: Beacon P, 1998. 209 pp. $23.00. Like the most engaging autobiographies, Robert Burns Stepto's Blue as the Lake moves from recapitulating the past to anticipating the future....

The Men of Brewster Place.(Review)
March 22, 2000... Gloria Naylor. The Men of Brewster Place. New York: Hyperion, 1998. 173 pp. $22.95. In The Men of Brewster Place Gloria Naylor not only revisits the dilapidated urban environs of her award-winning first novel, she breathes new life into...

Ornate With Smoke.(Review)
March 22, 2000... Sterling Plumpp. Ornate With Smoke. Chicago: Third World P, 1997. 103 pp. $12.95. In the preface to Ornate With Smoke, his latest volume of jazz poetry, Sterling Plumpp describes the book as "my way of saying thanks to the music which...

Like the Singing Coming Off the Drums.(Review)
March 22, 2000... Sonia Sanchez. Like the Singing Coming Off the Drums. Boston: Beacon P, 1998. 133 pp. $15.00. While Sanchez is known as an activist poet, much of her poetic impulse in Like the Singing Coming Off the Drums derives from the tradition of...

Understanding Richard Wright's Black Boy: A Student Casebook to Issues, Sources, and Historical Documents.(Review)(Young Adult Review)(Brief Article)
March 22, 2000... Felgar, Robert. Understanding Richard Wright's Black Boy: A Student Casebook to Issues, Sources, and Historical Documents. Westport: Greenwood P, 1998. 178 pp. $39.95. Designed for high-school students, this guide is long on social and...

On the Cultural Achievements of Negroes.(Review)(Brief Article)
March 22, 2000... Gregoire Henri. On the Cultural Achievements of Negroes. Trans. Thomas Cassirer and Jean-Francois Briere Amherst: U of Massachusetts P, 1996. 189 pp. $40.00 cloth/$13.95 paper. A true revolutionary believer in literte, egalite fraternite the...

Pioneer of the Civil Rights Movement.(Review)
March 22, 2000... Pfeffer, Paula F. A. Philip Randolph, Pioneer of the Civil Rights Movement. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State UP, 1996. 390 pp. $15.95 paper. As the title suggests, this book argues that "Randolph's ideologies and strategies provided the blueprint...

New Brunswick: Rutgers UP and The Paul Robeson Cultural Center.(Review)(Brief Article)
March 22, 2000... Stewart, Jeffrey C., ed. Paul Robeson: Artist and Citizen. New Brunswick: Rutgers UP and The Paul Robeson Cultural Center, 1998. 369 pp. $40.00 cloth/$22.00 paper. Martin Duberman's massive biography is the fullest record of Paul Robeson's...

Going Through the Storm: The Influence of African American Art in History.(Review)(Brief Article)
March 22, 2000... Stuckey, Sterling. Going Through the Storm: The Influence of African American Art in History. New York: Oxford UP, 1994. 308 pp. $15.95 paper. This collection of related essays by one of our finest cultural historians is an indispensable volume...

Against the Tide: Commentaries on a Collection of African Americana.(Review)(Brief Article)
March 22, 2000... Weinstein, Randy F. Against the Tide: Commentaries on a Collection of African Americana, 1711-1987 New York: Glen Horowitz Bookseller, 1996. 284 pp. $60.00. This beautifully produced quarto volume includes an enthusiastic foreword by Henry...

The Harlem Renaissance.(Review)(Brief Article)
March 22, 2000... Wintz, Cary D., ed. The Harlem Renaissance, 1920-1940: Vol. 1--The Emergence of the Harlem Renaissance. New York: Garland, 1996. 370 pp. $90.00; Vol. 2--The Politics and Aesthetics of New Negro Literature. New York: Garland, 1996. 395 pp....