African American Review articles from March 2008

African American Review archives from March 2008

To lie, steal, and dissemble: representing segregation.
March 22, 2008... Segregation is a touchstone issue in African American history, and it profoundly shapes how we think about group identity and belonging in the United States. How have writers represented experiences of racial segregation in literary venues?...

Smacked upside the head--again.(Back Talk)(desegregation)
March 22, 2008... I recently viewed July '64 (2006), a documentary film by Carvin Eison about racial violence in Rochester, New York, on July 24 and 25, 1964. It was the first time in history that the National Guard had to be called out for racial disturbances...

American Graffiti: the social life of segregation signs.(Essay)
March 22, 2008... A streetcar conductor in a 1945 cartoon in the Chicago Defender points to a sign declaring "FROM HERE BACK FOR nEGROES." Beneath the sign, a Caucasian featured woman protests: "... But I'm not! I got this tan out at the beach" (see Fig. 1)....

A negative Utopia: protest memory and the spatio-symbolism of civil rights literature and photography.(Critical essay)
March 22, 2008... "Whereas Aragon persists within the realm of dream, here the concern is to find the constellation of awakening... here it is a question of the dissolution of 'mythology" into the space of history"--Walter Benjamin (Arcades Project [N 1, 9]...

In the crowd.(Artist's Statement)(lynching)
March 22, 2008... In the last decades of the nineteenth century and the first decades of the twentieth, thousands of men and women were murdered by mobs in the United States. The victims of lynching included people of all races and ethnicities, but the majority...

Embodying segregation: Ida B. Wells and the cultural work of travel.(Critical essay)
March 22, 2008... Writing about the return voyage from her first trip to the United Kingdom in 1893, Ida B. Wells notes two "delightful" circumstances of the journey: "First, there were few if any white Americans on board. Second, there were fifteen young...

Charles Chesnutt's "The Dumb Witness" and the culture of segregation.(Critical essay)
March 22, 2008... In 1897, when Charles Chesnutt composed "The Dumb Witness," he was returning to the literary form--his conjure tales"--that had won him his earliest successes. That literary return was likely bittersweet for Chesnutt, because while it led...

White Islands of Safety and Engulfing Blackness: Remapping Segregation in Angelina Weld Grimke's "Blackness" and "Goldie".(Critical essay)
March 22, 2008... We with our blood have watered these fields And they belong to us.--Margaret Walker, "Delta" (1942) I. Introduction: Loss and the Literary Landscape Jim Crow apartheid and northern segregation alike operated through the racialization...

Native Geography: Richard Wright's Work for the Federal Writers' Project in Chicago.(Forgotten Manuscripts)(Essay)
March 22, 2008... Perhaps the most famous anecdote about the influence of the Federal Writers Project (FWP) on writers in its employ is that about Ralph Ellison, who--while working on the "Living Lore" folklore project in New York City--collected a story about...

Black is a region: segregation and American literary regionalism in Richard Wright's: The Color Curtain.(Critical essay)
March 22, 2008... What has my geographical position on earth have to do with the faults or merits of a book?--Richard Wright "I am a rootless man," Richard Wright declares very early in White Man, Listen! (1957). The simple utterance captures the tie...

"Somewhat like war": the aesthetics of segregation, black liberation, and A Raisin in the Sun.(Critical essay)
March 22, 2008... ... We must come out of the ghettos of America, because the ghettos are killing us; not only our dreams, as Mama says, but our very bodies. It is not an abstraction to us that the average American Negro has a life expectancy of five to ten...

Housing the Black body: value, domestic space, and segregation narratives.(Critical essay)
March 22, 2008... We are things of dry hours and the involuntary plan, Grayed in, and gray. "Dream" makes a giddy sound, not strong Like "rent," "feeding a wife," satisfying a man." But could a dream send up through onion fumes Its white and violet, fight...

Into a burning house: representing segregation's death.(Critical essay)
March 22, 2008... But white Americans do not believe in death, and this is why the darkness of my skin so intimidates them.--James Baldwin, The Fire Next Time So long as the promises of integration remain unfulfilled, it is premature to inquire after...

Afterword.(segregation)
March 22, 2008... As I read the richly varied articles collected in "Representing Segregation," the legal case of the Jena Six made headlines across the United States. Its images of the lynching tree, the manacled black male body, and the self-righteous agent of...

Jacqueline Goldsby. A Spectacular Secret: Lynching in American Life and Literature.(Book review)
March 22, 2008... Jacqueline Goldsby. A Spectacular Secret: Lynching in American Life and Literature. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 2006. 418 pp. $25.00. Billie Holiday's 1939 version of "Strange Fruit" represents a crucial nexus in US social history. At age 24,...

Susan Gillman and Alys Eve Weinbaum, eds. Next to the Color Line: Gender, Sexuality, and W. E. B. Du Bois.(Book review)
March 22, 2008... Susan Gillman and Alys Eve Weinbaum, eds. Next to the Color Line: Gender, Sexuality, and W. E. B. Du Bois. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 2007. 416 pp. $25.00. Scholars have devoted their careers to addressing W. E. B. Du Bois's 1900...

John Charles Boger and Gary Orfield, eds. School Resegregation: Must the South Turn Back?(Book review)
March 22, 2008... John Charles Boger and Gary Orfield, eds. School Resegregation: Must the South Turn Back? Chapel Hill: U of North Carolina P, 2005. 388 pp. $24.95. For more than 30 years, social science scholars and historians have made cases for school...

Davison M. Douglas. Jim Crow Moves North: The Battle over Northern Schools, 1865-1954.(Book review)
March 22, 2008... Davison M. Douglas. Jim Crow Moves North: The Battle over Northern Schools, 1865-1954. New York: Cambridge UP, 2005. 344 pp. $24.99. After years of scholars and journalists focusing on histories of segregation in the South, and debating...

Jennifer Ritterhouse. Growing Up Jim Crow: The Racial Socialization of Black and White Southern Children, 1890-1940.(Book review)
March 22, 2008... Jennifer Ritterhouse. Growing Up Jim Crow: The Racial Socialization of Black and White Southern Children, 1890-1940. Chapel Hill: U of North Carolina P, 2006. 320 pp. $19.95. Growing Up Jim Crow is a substantial contribution to the...

Louis Chude-Sokei. The Last "Darky": Bert Williams, Black-on-Black Minstrelsy, and the African Diaspora.(Book review)
March 22, 2008... Louis Chude-Sokei. The Last "Darky": Bert Williams, Black-on-Black Minstrelsy, and the African Diaspora. Durham: Duke UP, 2006. 261 pp. $29.95. Louis Chude-Sokei insists in The Last Darky that Bert Williams, a crossover celebrity at the...

Cheryl Lynn Greenberg. Troubling the Waters: Black-Jewish Relations in the American Century.(Book review)
March 22, 2008... Cheryl Lynn Greenberg. Troubling the Waters: Black-Jewish Relations in the American Century. Princeton: Princeton UP, 2006.351 pp. $29.95. With a careful examination of archival sources from representative organizations, Cheryl Lynn...

Patricia Hill Collins. From Black Power to Hip Hop: Racism, Nationalism, and Feminism.(Book review)
March 22, 2008... Patricia Hill Collins. From Black Power to Hip Hop: Racism, Nationalism, and Feminism. Philadelphia: Temple UP, 2006. 256 pp. $20.95. In her new book Patricia Hill Collins reminds us why she is one of the most prolific and insightful...