African American Review articles from March 2004

African American Review archives from March 2004

"I verily believed myself to be a free woman": Harriet Jacobs's journey into capitalism.
March 22, 2004... In Harriet Jacobs's Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl: Written by Herself, Linda Brent's initial act of freedom consists of walking into a Philadelphia shop and making a purchase--the first time in the narrative during which she trades...

Black father: the subversive achievement of Joel Chandler Harris.
March 22, 2004... Fer all I kin tell you, de man mought er bin ez w'ite ez de driven snow, er he mought er bin de blackes' Affikin er de whole kit en b'illin'. I'm des tellin' you de tale, en you kin take en take de man en w'itewash 'im, er you kin black 'im up...

A lynching in stereoscope.(Short Story)
March 22, 2004... Jelly I turn Elizabeth Street. On the sidewalk there's up a penny. Lincoln, great emancipator. I decide to kick him rather than pick him up. There's enough Honest Abes in my pocket. I drain my Pepsi, letting the caffeine hit, while the...

Reading Hurston writing.
March 22, 2004... "He can read my writing but he sho' can't read my mind." (Hurston, Mules 3) I have always been intrigued by Alice Walker's positioning of Hurston's two most popular works, Mules and Men and Their Eyes Were Watching God, at opposite ends of...

"Papa Legba, ouvrier barriere por moi passer": Esu in Their Eyes & Zora Neale Hurston's Diasporic Modernism.
March 22, 2004... Papa Legba, opener of gates, (opportunities) is always the first to receive sacrifice in any ritual invocation of the loa.... they sing "Papa Legba, ouvrier barriere por moi passer." (Tell 148) She thought awhile and decided that her...

Harvard 1917.(Short Story)
March 22, 2004... Morning light and the shadows of the branches beyond the window danced on the far wall. Clay lay in crumpled bedclothes watching the play of sun and shadow. On the floor beside his bed lay one folded sheet of paper sent from Aiden and received...

Domestic violence in the Harlem Renaissance: remaking the record in Nella Larsen's Passing and Toni Morrison's Jazz.(Critical Essay)
March 22, 2004... women with knives February 8, 1928, front-page headline in the New York Amsterdam News--"Jealous Man Kills Woman and Self in Basement Apartment"; the following week, February 15, 1928, front-page headline once again in the News--"Husband...

He is a "Bad Mother*S%@!#": Shaft and contemporary black masculinity.
March 22, 2004... The essence of masculinity is performance. And the essence of the performance has grown increasingly violent. -Jackson Katz, Tough Guise (1999) America is currently caught up in an odd nostalgia for the 1970s, and American popular culture...

Yearn.(Short Story)
March 22, 2004... Kiki didn't have anything smaller than a twenty on him at lunch time. He'd pulled out a role of twenties and fifties and told Stephen to meet him at the park when school let out. Stephen had never seen so much money on someone his own age. And...

The white reception of Jazz in America.
March 22, 2004... It came almost like a start of terror, like a sudden awakening, this shattering storm of rhythm, these tone elements never previously combined and now let loose upon us all at once. (Darius Milhaud) From 1917 to 1930, white America was...

Social Scientist.(Brief Article)(Poem)
March 22, 2004... SOCIAL SCIENTIST Try telling three dozen African females that God didn't create us, we created God, he tells the staff room, and of course, they've never heard of Marx, he sneers, as he strides to his class. ...

First Day Back.(Brief Article)(Poem)
March 22, 2004... FIRST DAY BACK Despite their stifled yawns he tries to tell them about Marx and to sum up his thesis in a sentence. Our reality, consciousness, identity, our political, cultural and economic systems are determined...

Baptismal.(Brief Article)(Poem)
March 22, 2004... BAPTISMAL Run, Eliza... run from Simon... A slip of ice on the river-- Current running, falls, Wounded rocks embedded, Bruised rivermouth agape. Bloodspools, strung waterbeads Skirt spindle thighs. ...

From Sorrow Songs.(Poem)
March 22, 2004... From Sorrow Songs I. Portrait in Baptist Pose "I told Jesus it would be alright if He changed my name... "and He told me that I would go hungry if He changed my name." Jolly, Charlie Beard,...

Borrowing Dead.(Poem)
March 22, 2004... Borrowing Dead She never looked so fragile, so frail pale beige, spirit like complexion drowned in frame of pasty curtains albino floors & nude walls with imitation Van Goghs. Her limbs, iron coat hangers ...

We Are The Land Where Everyman.(Brief Article)(Poem)
March 22, 2004... We Are The Land Where Everyman stands his ground, as short of ideas as of faith, ever ablaze to inject inanities, to capsize conversations. Homunculus. Photographic negative of Columbus, a mind ...

Paul Carter Harrison, Victor Leo Walker, II, and Gus Edwards, eds. Black Theatre: Ritual Performance in the African Diaspora.(Book Review)
March 22, 2004... Paul Carter Harrison, Victor Leo Walker, II, and Gus Edwards, eds. Black Theatre: Ritual Performance in the African Diaspora. Philadelphia: Temple UP, 2002. 418 pp. $27.95. Paul Carter Harrison, who brought us The Drama of the Nommo (1972),...

George Yancey. Who is White?: Latinos, Asians, and the New Black/Nonblack Divide.(Book Review)
March 22, 2004... George Yancey. Who is White?: Latinos, Asians, and the New Black/Nonblack Divide. Boulder: Lynne Rienner P, 2003. 239 pp. $49.95. By now we likely reports that have all heard whites will soon lose their foothold as America's racial majority...

Renee C. Romano. Race Mixing: Black-White Marriage in Postwar America.(Book Review)
March 22, 2004... Renee C. Romano. Race Mixing: Black-White Marriage in Postwar America. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 2003. 368 pp. $35.00. Following its release in 2002, Far From Heaven, Todd Haynes's film about interracial love in the white suburbs of 1950s'...

Jun Xing and Lane Ryo Hirabayashi, eds. Reversing the Lens: Ethnicity, Race, Gender, and Sexuality through Film.(Book Review)
March 22, 2004... Jun Xing and Lane Ryo Hirabayashi, eds. Reversing the Lens: Ethnicity, Race, Gender, and Sexuality through Film. Boulder: UP of Colorado, 2003. 270 pp. $45.00 cloth/$19.95 paper. This essay collection about using film as a teaching tool to...

Robert B. Betts. In Search of York: the Slave Who Went to the Pacific with Lewis and Clark.(Book Review)
March 22, 2004... Robert B. Betts. In Search of York: The Slave Who Went to the Pacific with Lewis and Clark. Rev. ed. with a new epilogue by James J. Holmberg. Boulder: UP of Colorado and The Lewis and Clark Trail Heritage Foundation, 2000. 216 pp. $29.95. ...

Lynn Orilla Scott. James Baldwin's Later Fiction: Witness to the Journey.(Book Review)
March 22, 2004... Lynn Orilla Scott. James Baldwin's Later Fiction: Witness to the Journey. East Lansing: Michigan State UP, 2002. 224 pp. $43.95. "What in the world was I by now," James Baldwin wondered in No Name in the Street, "but an aging, lonely,...

Elizabeth Ann Beaulieu, ed. The Toni Morrison Encyclopedia.(Book Review)
March 22, 2004... Elizabeth Ann Beaulieu, ed. The Toni Morrison Encyclopedia. Westport: Greenwood P, 2003. 423 pp. $89.95. This publication certainly a measure Toni Morrison's contemporary stature, as it is extremely rare for an encyclopedia of a living...

Charles E. Wilson, Jr. Walter Mosley: a Critical Companion.(Book Review)
March 22, 2004... Charles E. Wilson, Jr. Walter Mosley: A Critical Companion. Westport: Greenwood P, 2003. 232 pp. $35.00. Despite the acclaim popular crime and mystery writing has achieved for its revelations of dark motives concealed beneath the veneer of...

Cecil Brown. Stagolee Shot Billy.(Book Review)
March 22, 2004... Cecil Brown. Stagolee Shot Billy. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 2003. 295 pp. $29.95. Cecil Brown's Stagolee Shot Billy tracks more than a century's songs and tales celebrating the violent doings of the legendary killer Stagolee. Brown also...

Nikki Giovanni. Quilting the Black-Eyed Pea: Poems and Not Quite Poems.(Book Review)
March 22, 2004... Nikki Giovanni. Quilting the Black-Eyed Pea: Poems and Not Quite Poems. New York: Morrow, 2002. 122 pp. $16.95. Nikki Giovanni's magnificent poetic voice sings like a choir wearing new robes in her new book Quilting the Black-Eyed Pea. She...