African American Review articles from March 2007

African American Review archives from March 2007

African American Review at 40: a retrospective.
March 22, 2007... The recollections below were first presented as part of the Division on Black American Literature and Culture panel of the same title at the 2006 convention of the Modern Language Association. Each author has served on the AAR Advisory Board...

A Guy in a Black SUV.(Poem)
March 22, 2007... A GUY IN A BLACK SUV As I slowly inch toward the toll booth A guy in a black SUV Cuts In front of me Pretends I'm not there Edges forward In his massive black machine I mutter but I do nothing ...

Mother to Son.(Poem)
March 22, 2007... MOTHER TO SON Dear Son, Imagine You at the Great white university In California Son we are proud of you Enclosed 5 dollars Per A Who says education Doesn't pay (Smile) ...

The Famous Colored Writer.(Poem)
March 22, 2007... THE FAMOUS COLORED WRITER "Gee, are you The famous colored writer?" No. "Gee, you look just like him." William J. Harris teaches American Literature, African American Literature, Creative Writing and Jazz...

Dunbar.(Poem)
March 22, 2007... DUNBAR Dunbar, I'm your homeboy Or at least lived nearby In Yellow Springs Am middle class too A descendant Of Your wonderful Starched white collar Yet I am so middle class I wear...

Traumatic theology in the Narrative of the Life of Henry Box Brown, written by himself.
March 22, 2007... In an 1859 essay entitled "The Great Conflict Requires Great Faith," abolitionist and minister J. W. C. Pennington complains that "influences are constantly bearing upon us strongly calculated to affect us unfavorably towards the institutions...

"You have no business to whip me": the freedom suits of Polly Wash and Lucy Ann Delaney.
March 22, 2007... As recounted in Lucy Delaney's c.1891 slave narrative From the Darkness Cometh the Light, in 1829, Missouri Supreme Court Judge Robert Wash, began to shatter her small family. As executor of the estate of his wife, Fanny Christy Berry Wash, the...

"Suddenly and shockingly black": the atavistic child in turn-into-the-twentieth-century American fiction.(Critical essay)
March 22, 2007... From at least the Civil War through the Harlem Renaissance, black and white authors alike regularly imagined interracial babies who grew lighter-skinned with each generation: the greater the proportion of white ancestry, the less obvious are...

How the socialism of W. E. B. Du Bois still matters: black socialism in The Quest of the Silver Fleece--and beyond.(Critical essay)
March 22, 2007... One prominent trend in African American and African diaspora studies involves the search for a more thoroughly egalitarian black politics, especially by reopening the question of race and economic equality. The radicalism of W. E. B. Du Bois...

Begging to differ: Nella Larsen's Quicksand and Anzia Yezierska's Arrogant Beggar.
March 22, 2007... In the opening scene of Nella Larsen's 1928 novel Quicksand, the protagonist Helga Crane contemplates ways of escaping the stifling life she has been leading as a teacher in the black southern educational institution Naxos. Her sudden decision...

Toward feminine mythopoetic visions: the poetry of Gayl Jones.(Critical essay)
March 22, 2007... "The center of Song for Anninho is a love story and I also wanted to move beyond the 'blues relationships' of most of my earlier published stories to perhaps the "spiritual mode.'" --Gayl Jones (qtd. in Rowell, "Interview" 41) Gayl...

Following her act: sequence and desire in Gayl Jones's The Healing.(Critical essay)
March 22, 2007... Near the end of The Healing (1998), Gayl Jones's protagonist and narrator, Harlan Eagleton, undergoes an examination that compresses one of the novel's central issues: a struggle for power couched as a contest over sequence. When her employer...

Literary free jazz? Mumbo Jumbo and Paradise: language and meaning.(Critical essay)
March 22, 2007... Ishmael Reed's novel Mumbo Jumbo (1972) and Toni Morrison's Paradise (1998) stand as two crucial signposts identifying the trajectory of an African American aesthetic. Central to the aesthetics of each is a subversion of the very process of...

"Do I look like someone you can come home to from where you may be going?": re-mapping interracial anxiety in Octavia Butler's Kindred.
March 22, 2007... Although Octavia Butler's 1979 novel about slavery and time-travel, Kindred, occupies a privileged position within the African American literary tradition, at its center is what we would have to admit is a rather unconventional portrayal of a...

Revisiting Funnyhouse: an interview with Billie Allen.(Adrienne Kennedy's Funnyhouse of a Negro)(Interview)
March 22, 2007... Billie Allen has been intimately associated with one of the most significant plays in African American literature, Adrienne Kennedy's Funnyhouse of a Negro. In 1964, she created the lead role of Sarah the Negro in the Off-Broadway premiere of...

Cynthia Carr. Our Town: A Heartland Lynching, a Haunted Town, and the Hidden History of White America.(Book review)
March 22, 2007... Cynthia Carr's Our Town: A Heartland Lynching, a Haunted Town, and the Hidden History of White America. New York: Crown, 2006. 512 pp. $25.95. Cynthia Carr's Our Town: A Heartland Lynching, a Haunted Town, and the Hidden History of White...

Shirley A. Hill. Black Intimacies: A Gender Perspective on Families and Relationships.(Book review)
March 22, 2007... Shirley A. Hill. Black Intimacies: A Gender Perspective on Families and Relationships. Walnut Creek, CA: AltaMira P, 2005. 255 pp. $24.95. Shirley A. Hill's third book Black Intimacies: A Gender Perspective on Families and Relationships,...

Philip C. Kolin. Understanding Adrienne Kennedy.(Book review)
March 22, 2007... Philip C. Kolin. Understanding Adrienne Kennedy. Columbia: U of South Carolina P, 2005. 234 pp. $34.95. Understanding Adrienne Kennedy is the most complete study I have read about the works of one of America's most interesting African...

Ahmed Shawki. Black Liberation and Socialism.(Book review)
March 22, 2007... Ahmed Shawki. Black Liberation and Socialism. Chicago: Haymarket Books, 2006. 256 pp. $12.00. "There is a greater sense of alienation and powerlessness in Black America," argues Ahmed Shawki, just when "the need for an organized movement...

Darryl Dickson-Carr. The Columbia Guide to Contemporary African American Fiction.(Book review)
March 22, 2007... Darryl Dickson-Carr. The Columbia Guide to Contemporary African American Fiction. New York: Columbia UP, 2005. 280 pp. $60.00. "Some books are to be tasted, others to be swallowed, and some few to be chewed and digested," wrote Sir Francis...

Bernard W. Bell. The Contemporary African American Novel: Its Roots and Modern Literary Branches.(Book review)
March 22, 2007... Bernard W. Bell. The Contemporary African American Novel: Its Roots and Modern Literary Branches. Amherst: U of Massachusetts P, 2004. 490 pp. $80.00 cloth/ $24.95 paper. A sequel to Bell's award-winning 1987 study The Afro-American Novel...

Susan Courtney. Hollywood and Fantasies of Miscegenation: Spectacular Narratives of Gender and Race, 1903-1967.(Book review)
March 22, 2007... Susan Courtney. Hollywood and Fantasies of Miscegenation: Spectacular Narratives of Gender and Race, 1903-1967. Princeton: Princeton UP, 2005.404 pp. $47.50 cloth/ $22.95 paper. Fabrication of "racial epistemology" in the United States...

Henry B. Wonham. Playing the Races: Ethnic Caricature and American Literary Realism.(Book review)
March 22, 2007... Henry B. Wonham. Playing the Races: Ethnic Caricature and American Literary Realism. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2004. 204 pp. $47.50 cloth/$22.95 paper. Caricature and realism: are there any other antipodes so glaringly at odds as these two terms?...