African American Review articles from March 2002

African American Review archives from March 2002

Who owns the whip?: Chesnutt, Tourgee, and Reconstruction justice.
March 22, 2002... Justice is pictured blind and her daughter, the law, ought at least to be color-blind. (Albion Tourgee, qtd. in Olsen, Thin 90) Nowhere, in the history of our jurisprudence, has [the] power of the courts been more strongly exerted than in...

Reading and insight in Toni Morrison's Paradise.
March 22, 2002... Now hear this and, beyond all doubt, believe it: the good of grace is in exact proportion to the ardor of love that opens to receive it. (Dante, Paradiso XXIX) I once was lost but now I'm found, Was blind but now I see. ("Amazing Grace,"...

Inscriptions in the dust: A Gathering of Old Men and Beloved as ancestral requiems.
March 22, 2002... The American South, a landscape of contradiction and continuity, is cast as a repository of cultural memory in twentieth-century African American literature. Many writers recuperate the South as a site of reconnection with ancestral history as...

Plants and ghosts.(Short Story)
March 22, 2002... On November 8, 1935, blind and eighty-nine years old, Elizabeth Nietzsche--sister of the German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche--died atop her bed fully clothed, the little triangular head of her fox-fur neatly nipped to its tail. This was not...

The caregiver.(Short Story)
March 22, 2002... O God, O God, if she doesn't stop that damn racket I'm going to beat her unconscious! No, no, no, no! My mother... Mother... old, sick. Something wrong with me, thinking like that. SHUT UP, LOU, HUSH HOLLERING! I'll come in there and make you...

Liberty, equality, fraternity.(Short Story)
March 22, 2002... Broken glass was all in my brain It use to fall out my dreams and Cut me in my bed... (Jimi Hendrix) The stairwell slanted up from basement to kitchen. Each stair deep, firm; darkness. Under pressure of shoed foot each blind plank a shrill...

8 a.m.(Short Story)
March 22, 2002... EST I chose this jet and put the Atlas logo on the tail when it was green, fresh off the assembly line. I had this engraved glass partition installed, to separate my office from the rest of the passenger seats. I need my own zone to work...

Redemption.(Short Story)
March 22, 2002... I remember walking up through the dirt, the sun at my shoulders guiding me to the brick house, "the place where voodoo lives," as some called it. It had been a long day at church in Mississippi, the type of nowhere Mississippi where the darkest...

"Black Skins" and White Masks: Comic books and the secret of race.
March 22, 2002... The stereotypes through which American popular culture often interprets and represents racial identity operate not only as tools of defamation but also as vehicles for far more subtle manipulations of race. In his 1946 essay "Twentieth-Century...

Phillis Wheatley's construction of otherness and the rhetoric of performed ideology.
March 22, 2002... Sometime in 1772, a young African girl walked demurely into a room in Boston to undergo an oral examination, the results of which would determine the direction of her life and work. Perhaps she was shocked upon entering the appointed room. ...

Race and Reunion: The Civil War in American Memory.
March 22, 2002... David W. Blight. Race and Reunion: The Civil War in American Memory. Cambridge: Belknap P of Harvard UP, 2001. 397 pp. $29.95. In his book Race and Reunion, David Blight, Professor of History and Black Studies at Amherst College, has...

Race and the Writing of History.
March 22, 2002... Maghan keita. Race and the Writing of History. New York: Oxford UP, 2000. 214 pp. $45.00. Martin Bernal has spawned a cottage industry of which I am a part," says Maghan Keita toward the end of his discussion of the reception of Bernal's...

Neo-Slave Narratives: Studies in the Social Logic of a Literary Form.
March 22, 2002... Ashraf H. A. Rushdy. Neo-Slave Narratives: Studies in the Social Logic of a Literary Form. New York: Oxford UP, 1999. 286 pp. $45.00. Many African-American novels have a political sub text, however veiled it may be, and this is especially...

Writing America Black: Race Rhetoric in the Public Sphere.
March 22, 2002... C. K. Doresk. Writing America Black: Race Rhetoric in the Public Sphere. New York: Cambridge up, 1998. 301 pp. $64.95 cloth/ $19.95 paper. At the beginning of the twentieth century, Charles Chesnutt had one of his characters comment on how...

Victims and Heroes: Racial Violence in the African American Novel.
March 22, 2002... Jerry Bryant. Victims and Heroes: Racial Violence in the African American Novel. Amherst: U of Massachusetts P, 1997. 374 pp. $19.95. Bryant's study explores racial violence in African American novels from William Wells Brown's Clotel to...

Women in Chains: The Legacy of Slavery in Black Women's Fiction.
March 22, 2002... Venetria K. Patton. Women in Chains: The Legacy of Slavery in Black Women's Fiction. Albany: State U of New York P, 2000. 194 pp. $49.50 cloth/$1 6.95 paper. One of the SUNY Series in Afro-American Studies, this book begins with chapters...

Reading Race in American Poetry: "An Area of Act".
March 22, 2002... Alden Lynn Nielsen, ed. Reading Race in American Poetry: "An Area of Act". Urbana: U of Illinois P, 2000. 232 pp. $18.95. With the publication of Reading Race in American Poetry: "An Area of Act", Aldon Nielsen continues the investigation...

Black on Black: Twentieth-Century African American Writing About Africa.
March 22, 2002... John Cullen Gruesser. Black on Black: Twentieth-Century African American Writing About Africa. Lexington: UP of Kentucky, 2000. 218 pp. $29.95. Black on Black is an interesting discussion of selected twentieth-century African American...

Recovering the Black Female Body: Self Representations by African American Women.
March 22, 2002... Michael Bennett and Vanessa Dickerson, ed. Recovering the Black Female Body: Self Representations by African American Women. New Brunswick: Rutgers UP, 2000. 331 pp. $52.00 cloth/$22.00 paper. Dynamic in scope and complexity, Recovering the...

Body Politics and the Fictional Double.
March 22, 2002... Debra Walker King, ed. Body Politics and the Fictional Double. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 2000. 214 pp. $39.95 cloth/$18.95 paper. The strength of many books is also their weakness--and so it is with Debra Walker King's eclectic collection of...

Slippery Characters: Ethnic Impersonators and American Identities.
March 22, 2002... Laura Browder. Slippery Characters: Ethnic Impersonators and American Identities. Chapel Hill: U of North Carolina P, 2000. 312 pp. $49.95 cloth/$18.95 paper. When the French philosopher Maurice Blanchot slyly warned, "If there is, among...

Mother Imagery in the Novels of Afro-Caribbean Women.
March 22, 2002... Simone A. James Alexander. Mother Imagery in the Novels of Afro-Caribbean Women. Columbia: u of missouri p, 2001. 215 pp. $32.50. Mother Imagery in the Novels of Afro Caribbean Women is a major contribution to African Diaspora Studies,...

Writing Himself Into History: Oscar Micheaux, His Silent Films, and His Audience.
March 22, 2002... Pearl Bowser and Louise Spence. Writing Himself Into History: Oscar Micheaux, His Silent Films, and His Audience. new brunswick: rutgers UP, 2000. 313 pp. $52.00 cloth/$20.00 paper. With painstaking research and outstanding skill scholars...

Jean Toomer and the Harlem Renaissance.
March 22, 2002... Genevieve Fabre and Michael Feith, eds. Jean Toomer and the Harlem Renaissance. New Brunswick: Rutgers UP, 2001. 235 pp. $22.0O. This collection of essays on Jean Toomer is very much a French affair. Its two editors are French and teach at...

Remember Me to Harlem: The Letters of Langston Hughes and Carl Van Vechten, 1925-1964.
March 22, 2002... Emily Bernard, ed. Remember Me to Harlem: The Letters of Langston Hughes and Carl Van Vechten, 1925-1964. New York: Knopf, 2001. 356 pp. $30.00. On 16 August 1943, Carl Van Vechten began a letter to Langston Hughes, "What letters you...

Zora Neale Hurston: The Breath of Her Voice.
March 22, 2002... Ayana karanja, Zora Neale Hurston: The Breath of Her Voice. new york: lang, 1999. 176 pp. $29.95. Zora Neale Hurston: The Breath of Her Voice is a laudatory appraisal of and critical inquiry into the life and work of Zora Neale Hurston....

The Identifying Fictions of Toni Morrison: Modernist Authenticity and Postmodern Blackness.
March 22, 2002... John N. Duvall. The Identifying Fictions of Toni Morrison: Modernist Authenticity and Postmodern Blackness. New York: St. Martin's (Palgrave), 2000. 182 pp. $45.00. Several decades ago, Henry James served as the American academy's premier...

The Aesthetics of Toni Morrison: Speaking the Unspeakable.
March 22, 2002... Marc C. Conner, ed. The Aesthetics of Toni Morrison: Speaking the Unspeakable. Jackson: UP of Mississippi, 2000. 153 pp. $18.00. This collection of eight essays, with an introduction by the editor, Mark C. Conner, enters the apparently...

Josh White: Society Blues.
March 22, 2002... Elijah Wald. Josh White: Society Blues. Amherst: U of Massachusetts P, 2000. 336 pp. $32.50. Musician/journalist Elijah Wald explores the road less traveled in his alluring biography of forgotten legend Joshua Daniel White (1914-1969)....

I May Not Get There With You: The True Martin Luther King, Jr.
March 22, 2002... Michael Eric Dyson. I May Not Get There With You: The True Martin Luther King, Jr. New York: Free P, 2000. 400 pp. $25.00. A pioneering investigation and persuasive interpretation, I May Not Get There With You is, up to this point, the most...

Rails Under My Back.
March 22, 2002... Jeffery Renard Allen. Rails Under My Back. San Diego: Harcourt, 2000. 563 pp. $14.00. Rails Under My Back is an impressive first novel announcing a fresh voice in African American fiction. Boldly impressionistic and held together...

Don't the Moon Look Lonesome: A Novel in Blues and Swing.
March 22, 2002... Stanley Crouch. Don't the Moon Look Lonesome: A Novel in Blues and Swing. New York: Pantheon, 2000. 558 pp. $26.95. Stanley Crouch's recent novel is a revelation. A sho nuff, in yo' face revelation. But I fear not in the way its author...

New Bones: Contemporary Black Writers in America.
March 22, 2002... Kevin Everod Quashie, Joyce Lausch, and Keith D. Miller, eds. New Bones: Contemporary Black Writers in America. Upper Saddle: Prentice Hall, 2001. 1128 pp. $51.00. Since the beginning of the 1990s, the significance of the black written and...