African American Review articles from March 2003

African American Review archives from March 2003

Other nature: resistance to ecological hegemony in Charles W. Chesnutt's The Conjure Woman.
March 22, 2003... The nation was founded on the principles of "free land" (stolen from Native Americans and Mexicans), "free labor" (cruelly extracted from African slaves), and "free men" (white men with property). From the outset, institutional racism shaped...

"This strange communion": surveillance and spectatorship in Ann Petry's The Street.
March 22, 2003... From the time of its publication in 1946, Ann Petry's The Street has inspired comparisons to the work of prominent black male writers, including Richard Wright, Chester Himes, and Ralph Ellison. (1) In the first decades after its publication,...

Richard Wright's Lawd Today! And the political uses of modernism.
March 22, 2003... Readers have long considered Lawd Today!, Richard Wright's first written and last published novel, an anomaly--when they have considered it at all. The novel, which Wright began perhaps as early as 1933 and which he continued to compose and...

Call-and-response: tracing the ideological shifts of Richard Wright through his correspondence with friends and fellow literati.
March 22, 2003... On February 12, 1945, at precisely 3:20 p.m., noted African American intellectual and writer Richard Wright sat down at his desk in New York City and, true to his disciplined regimen, wrote the following in his personal journal: Why can't...

Transgressing race and community in Chester Himes's If He Hollers Let Him Go.
March 22, 2003... During World War II, Chester Himes was one of more than 70,000 African Americans who moved to Los Angeles and one of the many transcontinental migrants who would double the existing black population in southern California (Sides 252). Much like...

"1 + 1 = 3" and other dilemmas: reading vertigo in Invisible Man, My Life in the Bush of Ghosts, and Song of Solomon.
March 22, 2003... ... the metaphor of the chain of communication picks up the sense of contingency as contiguity, while the question of the "link" immediately raises the issue of contingency as the indeterminate. (Homi K. Bhabha 188) I won't even talk about...

Truth in timbre: Morrison's extension of slave narrative song in Beloved.(Toni Morrison)
March 22, 2003... His voice was faint. A rustle of leaves. Then Reb lifted his head and began to croon in a tongue incomprehensible to me. Another mourner began to sing. Then another. The sound swelled, expanded, ate space, filled the woods like a splash of...

Master-slave dialectics in Charles Johnson's "The Education of Mingo".
March 22, 2003... The slave is a part of the master, a living but separated part of his bodily frame. (Aristotle, Politics 1255b-10) In a postscript to "The Phenomenology of the Black Body" (1993), Charles Johnson describes the difficult circumstances under...

"We's the leftovers": whiteness as economic power and exploitation in August Wilson's twentieth-century cycle of plays.
March 22, 2003... The widespread critical attention August Wilson's work has enjoyed has helped establish his stature as the African American playwright of the late twentieth century. In particular, scholars have focused almost exclusively on Wilson's black...

"Is Race a Trope?": Anna Deavere Smith and the question of racial performativity.
March 22, 2003... "Is race a trope?" Anna Deavere Smith's performances not only ask but embody this question. They also ask another, equally important question: "Who is asking?" Anna Deavere Smith is an African American performance artist known for her...

Langston Hughes's "Mississippi--1955": a note on revisions and an appeal for reconsideration.
March 22, 2003... I want the whole world to see what they did to my boy. -- Mrs. Mamie Till Bradley On September 24, 1955, an all-white Mississippi jury, after a mere sixty-seven minutes of deliberation, acquitted J. W. Milam and Roy Bryant of the murder of...

African American Autobiographers: A Sourcebook. (Reviews).(Book Review)
March 22, 2003... Emmanuel S. Nelson, ed. African American Autobiographers: A Sourcebook. Westport: Greenwood P, 2002. 431 pp. $94.95. For the large and growing numbers of scholars and students of African American autobiography, Emmanuel Nelson's sourcebook...

Impossible Witnesses: Truth, Abolitionism, and Slave Testimony. (Reviews).(Book Review)
March 22, 2003... Dwight A. McBride. Impossible Witnesses: Truth, Abolitionism, and Slave Testimony. New York: New York UP, 2001. 207 pp. $55.00 cloth/$18.00 paper. Drawing upon Foucault, Bakhtin, and Holocaust survivors' testimonies, McBride creates a...

Black Identity and Black Protest in the Antebellum North. (Reviews).(Book Review)
March 22, 2003... Patrick Rael. Black Identity and Black Protest in the Antebellum North. Chapel Hill: U of North Carolina P. 2002. 421 pp. $55.00 cloth/$19.95 paper. We have become accustomed to hearing W. E. B. Du Bois's refrain that the problem of the...

Deep River: Music and Memory in Harlem Renaissance Thought. (Reviews).(Book Review)
March 22, 2003... Paul Allen Anderson, Deep River: Music and Memory in Harlem Renaissance Thought. Durham: Duke UP, 2001, 335 pp. $19.95. In this important book, Paul Allen Anderson explores the development of ideas about black music during a period that...

Strange Fruit: Billie Holiday, Cafe Society, and an Early Cry for Civil Rights. (Reviews).(Book Review)
March 22, 2003... David Margolick. Strange Fruit: Billie Holiday, Cafe Society, and an Early Cry for Civil Rights. Philadelphia: Running P, 2000. 160 pp. $18.95. David Margolick has written a remarkable history of a unique song, its genesis, its recordings,...

The Daughter's Return: African-American and Caribbean Women's Fictions of History. (Reviews).(Book Review)
March 22, 2003... Caroline Rody. The Daughter's Return: African-American and Caribbean Women's Fictions of History. New York: Oxford UP, 2001. 267 pp. $49.95. The return to an ancestral past in order to move forward has characterized much of black writing...

Black Male Fiction and the Legacy of Caliban. (Reviews).(Book Review)
March 22, 2003... James W. Coleman. Black Male Fiction and the Legacy of Caliban. Lexington: UP of Kentucky, 2001. 208 pp. $45.00. The last decade has witnessed a profusion of studies on African-American masculinity in multiple contexts--film, art,...

A Hubert Harrison Reader. (Reviews).(Book Review)
March 22, 2003... Jeffrey B. Perry, ed. A Hubert Harrison Reader. Middletown: Wesleyan UP, 2001. 504 pp. $24.95. In the first quarter of the twentieth century, Hubert Harrison emerged as one of the most creative, wide-ranging, biting, and perceptive...

A Langston Hughes Encyclopedia. (Reviews).(Book Review)
March 22, 2003... Hans Ostrom. A Langston Hughes Encyclopedia. Westport: Greenwood P. 2002. 495 pp. $95.00. In 2002, the United States celebrated the centennial of the birth of Langston Hughes. The celebration was highlighted by the issuance of a U.S....

Robert Hayden: Essays on the Poetry. (Reviews).(Book Review)
March 22, 2003... Laurence Goldstein and Robert Chrisman, eds. Robert Hayden: Essays on the Poetry. Ann Arbor: U of Michigan P, 2001. 337 pp. $57.50. Admirers and students of Robert Hayden's poetry will welcome Robert Hayden: Essays on the Poetry, edited by...

Black Orpheus: Music in African American Fiction from the Harlem Renaissance to Toni Morrison. (Reviews).(Book Review)
March 22, 2003... Saadi A. Simawe, ed. Black Orpheus: Music in African American Fiction from the Harlem Renaissance to Toni Morrison. New York: Garland, 2000. 275 pp. $80.00. When in 1935 the Martinican writer Aime Cesaire coined the term negritude in an...

Alice Walker. (Reviews).(Book Review)
March 22, 2003... Maria Lauret. Alice Walker. New York: St Martin's P, 2000. 252 pp. $35.00. Within the last two decades, Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist Alice Walker has emerged, both nationally and internationally, as one of the most versatile and...

He Sleeps. (Reviews).(Book Review)
March 22, 2003... Reginald McKnight. He Sleeps. New York: Halt, 2001. 210 pp. $23.00. Reginald McKnight's most recent novel He Sleeps as been hailed elsewhere as his most ambitious novel to date. This declaration, is indeed an accurate one, for what seems...