African American Review articles from March 2001

African American Review archives from March 2001

"Make My Getaway": The Blues Lives of Black Minstrels in W. C. Handy's Father of the Blues.(Critical Essay)
March 22, 2001... "The St. Louis Blues," observed Langston Hughes in the summer of 1941, "is sung more than any other song on the air waves, is known in Shanghai and Buenos Aires, Paris and Berlin--in fact, is heard so often in Europe that a great many Europeans...

Invented by Horror: The Gothic and African American Literary Ideology in Native Son.(Critical Essay)
March 22, 2001... Richard Wright's Native Son is still usually taken as one of the foremost examples of late American naturalism, and much is made of the impact of modem sociology, particularly what became known as the Chicago School of Sociology, on the...

In the Family.(Short Story)
March 22, 2001... Old man Ferguson was snoring with his stupid ass self. And his feet was stinking. I know they was. I wished I could knock him off the pew but I couldn't from where I was sitting. He felt the hate I was sending him, though, 'cause he woke up...

All the Birds Sing Bass: The Revolutionary Blues of Jayne Cortez.(Critical Essay)
March 22, 2001... Although Jayne Cortez is one of the most popular poets in the United States, few critics have examined her work in detail. Eugene B. Redmond devotes some attention to her poetry in Drumvoices (1976); Barbara Christian has published review essay...

Here.(Short Story)
March 22, 2001... There's no way to not pass The Pita Hut and the men who come early to wait. Today, it makes me laugh, the way they lose language at the sight of live women. From thirty feet, they begin preparing. Shifting like ants, their circle opens in...

Mule Bone: Langston Hughes and Zora Neale Hurston's Dream Deferred of an African-American Theatre of the Black Word.(Critical Essay)
March 22, 2001... There ought to be a Negro play written by a Negro that no white could ever have conceived or executed. (Eugene O'Neill, 1925) Michael G. Cooke, in his study of Afro-American literature in the twentieth century, notes that, whereas modernism...

August Wilson on Playwriting: An Interview.(Interview)
March 22, 2001... How does August Wilson view his plays and the process by which he creates them? Where does he start when writing a new play? Is August Wilson writing with a particular audience in mind? Joan Herrington, in "I Ain't Sorry for Nothin'I Done":...

Power and Knowledge in Walter Mosley's Devil in a Blue Dress.(Critical Essay)
March 22, 2001... "One should try to locate power at the extreme points of its exercise," according to Michel Foucault, "where it is always less legal in character," where it is "completely invested in its real and effective practices" ("Two Lectures" 97)....

Suicide or Messianic Self-Sacrifice?: Exhuming Willa's Body in Gloria Naylor's Linden Hills.(Critical Essay)
March 22, 2001... Black liberation struggle must be re-visioned so that it is no longer equated with maleness. (bell hooks, yearning) Since joining the burgeoning canon of contemporary Black women's fiction, Gloria Naylor's Linden Hills (1985) has generated...

Afrotopia: The Roots of African American Popular History.(Review)
March 22, 2001... Wilson Jeremiah Moses. Afrotopia: The Roots of African American Popular History. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1998. 313 pp. $54.95 cloth/$17.95 paper. Wilson Jeremiah Moses has taken on Afrocentrism, a fraught topic in our racialized world...

Master Plots: Race and the Founding of American Literature.(Review)
March 22, 2001... Jared Gardner. Master Plots: Race and the Founding of American Literature. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1998. 238 pp. $39.95. Jared Gardner's fine book takes its place in the growing category of whiteness studies dedicated to showing how...

Black Women Writers and the American Neo-Slave Narrative: Femininity Unfettered.(Review)
March 22, 2001... Elizabeth Ann Beaulieu. Black Women Writers and the American Neo-Stave Narrative: Femininity Unfettered. Westport: Greenwood P. 1999. 177 pp. $49.95. In this study of the American neo-slave narrative, Elizabeth Ann Beaulieu explores the...

Gender-Voice-Vernacular.(Review)
March 22, 2001... Eva Boesenberg. Gender-Voice-Vemacular. Heidelberg: Universitatsverlag C. Winter, 1999. 324 pp. Gender-Voice-Vemacular by Eva Boesenberg, published as part of the German publisher Winter's monograph series in American Studies, is a work...

Popular Fronts: Chicago and American Cultural Politics, 1935-46.(Review)
March 22, 2001... Bill V. Mullen. Popular Fronts: Chicago and American Cultural Politics, 1935-46. Urbana: U of Illinois P, 1999. 242 pp. $39.95 cloth/$16.95 paper. Bill Mullen's Popular Fronts: Chicago and African-American Cultural Politics, 1936-46, makes...

New Negro, Old Left: African-American Writing and Communism Between the Wars.(Review)
March 22, 2001... William J. Maxwell. New Negro, Old Left: African-American Writing and Communism Between the Wars. New York: Columbia UP, 1999. 255 pp. $17.50. William J. Maxwell's New Negro, Old Left is one of the most recent contributions to a growing...

The New Red Negro: The Literary Left and African-American Poetry, 1930-1946.(Review)
March 22, 2001... James Edward Smethurst. The New Red Negro: The Literary Left and African-American Poetry, 1930-1946. New York: Oxford UP, 1999. 288 pp. $45.00. A pop quiz: What was "the first anthology of African-American writing to include vernacular...

Cultures in Babylon: Black Britain and African America.(Review)
March 22, 2001... Hazel V. Carby. Cultures in Babylon: Black Britain and African America. New York: Verso, 1999. 282 pp. Readers of Hazel Carby will be delighted to have available this collection of her previously published essays, and so too will readers...

Islands and Exiles: The Creole Identities of Post/Colonial Literature.(Review)
March 22, 2001... Chris Bongie. Islands and Exiles: The Creole identities of Post/Colonial Literature. Stanford: Stanford UP, 1998. 543 PP. $65.00 cloth/$24.95 paper. How to define the relationship between post-colonialism and postmodernism has been a...

The Furious Flowering of African American Poetry.(Review)
March 22, 2001... Joanne V. Gabbin, ed. The Furious Flowering of African American Poetry. Charlottesville: UP of Virginia, 1999. 330 pp. $59.50 cloth/$19.50 paper. On several beautiful days in September 1994, James Madison University in rural Virginia...

Write Me A Few Of Your Lines: A Blues Reader.(Review)
March 22, 2001... Steven C. Tracy, ed. Write Me A Few Of Your Lines: A Blues Reader. Amherst: U of Massachusetts P, 1999. 603 pp. $70.00 cloth/$28.95 paper. Many scholars and serious music fans will have heard or read of the classic articles in blues studies...

Miles and Me.(Review)
March 22, 2001... Quincy Troupe. Miles and Me. Berkeley: U of California P, 2000. 189 pp. $19.95. This is Quincy Troupe's book on interviewing Miles Davis for the autobiography on which they collaborated. It also analyzes his discoveries of the music of his...

Black, White & Huckleberry Finn: Re-imagining the American Dream.(Review)
March 22, 2001... Elaine and Harry Mensh. Black, White & Huckleberry Finn: Re-imagining the American Dream. Tuscaloosa: U of Alabama P, 2000. 167 pp. $29.95. Black, White & Huckleberry Finn: Re-imagining the American Dream is an earnest and well-meaning...

Critical Essays on Charles W. Chesnutt.(Review)
March 22, 2001... Joseph R. McElrath, Jr., ed. Critical Essays on Charles W. Chesnutt. New York: G. K. Hall, 1999. 306 pp. $49.00. Charles W. Chesnutt's career demonstrates that the myth of the talented artist who is not fully appreciated in his own time has...

"Harlem Gallery" and Other Poems.
March 22, 2001... Raymond Nelson, ed. "Harlem Gallery" and Other Poems. By Melvin B. Tolson. Intro, by Rita Dove. Charlottesville: U of Virginia P, 1999. 473 pp. $60.00 cloth/$18.95 paper. Between 1944 and 1965, Melvin B. Tolson published three volumes of...

Somethin' Proper: The Life and Times of a North American African Poet.(Review)
March 22, 2001... Marvin X (Marvin E. Jackmon) [El Muhajir]. Somethin' Proper: The Life and Times of a North American African Poet. Castro Valley, CA: Black Bird P, 1998. 278 pp. $29.95. Marvin X's autobiography Somethin' Proper is one of the most...

Understanding Gloria Naylor.(Review)
March 22, 2001... Margaret Earley Whitt. Understanding Gloria Naylor. Columbia: U of South Carolina P, 1999. 221 pp. $34.95. There is something peculiarly Southern about Gloria Naylor's fiction--and this despite her birth in New York City. Careful...