African American Review articles from March 2005

African American Review archives from March 2005

In the swamp.(Short Story)
March 22, 2005... I figure my fiancee wants to know why I haven't explained myself. We have just driven south for two days to stand in the back of a funeral home parlor. Cherise has no idea why I wanted to go back to my hometown for a funeral of a man she has...

"Pulling in the natural environment": an interview with Pinkie Gordon Lane.(Interview)
March 22, 2005... I first met Pinkie Gordon Lane when I accepted a position in the English department of Louisiana State University in 1986. I had heard her give a spectacular reading, however, at the Modern Language Association some years back, so I instantly...

"Civil" War wounds: William Wells Brown, violence, and the domestic narrative.
March 22, 2005... In 1867, William Wells Brown, the first published black American novelist, wrote a fictionalized account of the Civil War, becoming also, it appears, the first black American war novelist in the process. However, Clotelle, The Colored Heroine,...

Dramatic deception and black identity in The First One and Riding the Goat.(Critical Essay)
March 22, 2005... While the Harlem Renaissance marked a point of freedom from literary oppression for African American writers, black women still struggled to make their voices heard on the stage of newfound black expression. Many black women playwrights during...

A ghost in the expressionist jungle of O'Neill's The Emperor Jones.(Eugene O'Neill, depiction of black people)
March 22, 2005... The Western World discovered that the Negro could be used as an artistic representation during the first decades of the twentieth century, though cast in the stereotypical mold of the primitive. (1) This image was not new, but it became...

Art, activism, and uncompromising attitude in Georgia Douglas Johnson's lynching plays.
March 22, 2005... Georgia Douglas Johnson (1877?-1966) is the central figure in an American dramatic genre formed by the responses of playwrights to the racial violence of lynching. (1) Johnson was one of the earliest African American women playwrights and, with...

Reading a "closet screenplay": Hollywood, James Baldwin's Malcolms and the threat of historical irrelevance.
March 22, 2005... I am attempting to read this odd thing I can only call a "closet screenplay"--James Baldwin's written version of a film about Malcolm X never realized in the visual medium. The reading skills that literary studies offer this anomalous and...

"This thing called playwrighting": an interview with Sonia Sanchez on the art of her drama.(Interview)
March 22, 2005... Introduction Critical and popular emphasis on the poetry of Sonia Sanchez, while clearly merited, has often overshadowed her work in drama and her role in the development of an African American female dramatic voice in America. Yet, as...

Domestic epic warfare in Maud Martha.(Maud Martha Brown)
March 22, 2005... Early critical analyses of Maud Martha, Gwendolyn Brooks's sole novel, either dismissed it as an unsuccessful fiction and/or viewed it as a mere extension of Brooks's lyrical poetry. Those early critics, often in reviews of less than a single...

Reflecting violence in the warpland: Gwendolyn Brooks's Riot.
March 22, 2005... Gwendolyn Brooks opens the second part of Riot with the following lines: The earth is a beautiful place. Watermirrors and things to be reflected. Goldenrod across the little lagoon. (lines 1-3) Besides affirming the...

After Vallejo.(Poem)
March 22, 2005... After Vallejo (title after Michael Harper) i will die in havana in a hurricane it will be morning, i'll be facing southwest away from the gulf, away from the storm away from home, looking to the virid hills of...

Dear John Coltrane.(Poem)
March 22, 2005... DEAR JOHN COLTRANE dead night has me writing poetry in another hotel room. j. s. bach is on the radio, the keyboard concerto in f minor: the one you also hear on oboe or violin, the largo second movement begins ...

Gloria Naylor's Mama Day: bridging roots and routes.
March 22, 2005... I. Introduction A sense continuity pervades Willow Springs, the fictitious Gullah island that Gloria Naylor depicts in her 1988 novel Mama Day. On Willow Springs, the Day family, a community of women, preserve their cultural memory through...

The mother-daughter Aje relationship in Toni Morrison's Beloved.(Aje Morrison )
March 22, 2005... Introduction Toni Morrison has often expressed disappointment with critical analyses of her art. In an interview with Thomas LeClair she said, "l have yet to read criticism that understands my work or is prepared to understand it. I don't...

Hiding fire and brimstone in lacy groves: the twinned trees of Beloved.(Interview)
March 22, 2005... Toni Morrison fills each of her novels with an abundance of natural imagery, but her fifth novel, Beloved, seems particularly grounded in metaphors drawn from the natural world. In an interview with Jane Bakerman in 1977, Morrison talked about...

Biblical trees, biblical deliverance: literary landscapes of Zora Neale Hurston and Toni Morrison.
March 22, 2005... Enslaved by law or custom, African Americans have found the Promised Land metaphor an apt vehicle for describing the epic proportion of their suffering. Using this metaphor, they can identify with the Old Testament Israelites who were under...

Echoes of Africa in To Sleep With Anger and Eve's Bayou.
March 22, 2005... There are many films made African American filmmakers that have more obvious African resonances than either To Sleep With Anger (1990), written and directed by Charles Burnett, or Eve's Bayou (1997), written and directed by Kasi Lemmons, but...

"Ironic soil" (1): recuperative rhythms and negotiated nationalisms.
March 22, 2005... The fact of the matter is that major nationalist theoreticians have generally been exceedingly humanistic.... In fact, a strong tendency to reach beyond themselves toward union with mankind has been a marked characteristic of most nationalist...

Kimberly Wallace-Sanders, ed. Skin Deep, Spirit Strong: The Black Female Body in American Culture.(Book Review)
March 22, 2005... Kimberly Wallace-Sanders, ed. Skin Deep, Spirit Strong: The Black Female Body in American Culture. Ann Arbor: U of Michigan P, 2002. 350 pp. $24.95. This well-conceived volume organizes 13 recent essays on the Black female body into a...

Wanda Coleman. Ostinato Vamps.(Book Review)
March 22, 2005... Wanda Coleman. Ostinato Vamps. Pittsburgh: U of Pittsburgh P, 2003. 115 pp. $12.95. The title of Wanda Coleman's latest book provides one of the keys to unlocking the poetry within. Like pieces from a musician, her collection of poetry...

Nathalie Dessens. Myths of the Plantation Society: Slavery in the American South and the West Indies.(Book Review)
March 22, 2005... Nathalie Dessens. Myths of the Plantation Society: Slavery in the American South and the West Indies. Gainesville: UP of Florida, 2003. 213 pp. $55.00. Happy darkies, southern belles, Samboes, Mammies, southern hospitality... The American...

Clarence Major. One Flesh.(Book Review)
March 22, 2005... Clarence Major. One Flesh. New York: Kensington, 2003. 304 pp. $15.00. To those accustomed to reading Clarence Major's wonderfully self-reflexive metafictions such as Reflex and Bone Structure and Emergency Exit, his new novel One Flesh...

Nancy Morejon. Looking Within: Selected Poems, 1954-2000 / Mirar Adentro: Poemas Escogidos, 1954-2000.(Book Review)
March 22, 2005... Nancy Morejon. Looking Within: Selected Poems, 1954-2000 / Mirar Adentro: Poemas Escogidos, 1954-2000. Edited with an introduction by Juanamaria Cordones-Cook Bilingual ed. Detroit: Wayne State UP, 2003. 367 pp. $39.95 cloth/$24.95 paper. ...

Mark Anthony Neal. Songs in the Key of Black Life: A Rhythm and Blues Nation.(Book Review)
March 22, 2005... Mark Anthony Neal. Songs in the Key of Black Life: A Rhythm and Blues Nation. New York: Routledge, 2003. 214 pp. $85.00/ $19.95 paper. With the publication of Songs in the Key of Black Life, Mark Anthony Neal has enriched the field of...

Osonye Tess Onweume. What Mama Said: An Epic Drama.(Book Review)
March 22, 2005... Osonye Tess Onweume. What Mama Said: An Epic Drama. Detroit: Wayne State UP, 2003. 200 pp. $19.95. Osonye Tess Onwueme, a prolific and versatile dramatist, has earned a place among the coterie of more important African authors. Her stature...

Sterling D. Plumpp. Velvet BeBop Kente Cloth.(Book Review)
March 22, 2005... Sterling D. Plumpp. Velvet BeBop Kente Cloth. Chicago: Third World P, 2003. 158 pp. $21.95. In the introductory note to Mexico City Blues (1959), Jack Kerouac frames his extended poetic experiment with spontaneous composition and jazz...

Ronald Radano. Lying Up a Nation: Race and Black Music.(Book Review)
March 22, 2005... Ronald Radano. Lying Up a Nation: Race and Black Music. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 2003. 436 pp. $75.00 cloth/$27.50 paper. Ronald Radano, a professor of music at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, has written an important, provocative, and...

Alan Rice. Radical Narratives of the Black Atlantic.(Book Review)
March 22, 2005... Alan Rice. Radical Narratives of the Black Atlantic. London: Continuum, 2003. 244 pp. $115.00 cloth/$24.95 paper. Somewhere Mark Twain wrote that Wagner's music was better than it sounds. Similarly one could say Alan Rice's Radical...