African American Review articles from September 1994

African American Review archives from September 1994

Heroic "hussies" and "brilliant queers": genderracial resistance in the works of Langston Hughes.
September 22, 1994... In his writings, Langston Hughes explores the convergence of race and gender in Black men's and women's lives, questioning binary constructions of identity and exploring sensuality in relation to social change. These are the pages, as bell...

Disseminating heterotopia.
September 22, 1994... Utopias afford consolation: although they have no real locality there is nevertheless a fantastic, untroubled region in which they are able to unfold: they open up cities with vast avenues, superbly planted gardens, countries where life is...

The River Jericho. (short story)
September 22, 1994... "I remember this river," the old man began most of his stories. His hand, blackened by the Jericho sun, would be raised above his brow to shield his eyes. "It cuts through these hills like the smooth strokes of a swimmer and splinters off like...

The process of literacy as communal involvement in the narratives of Frederick Douglass.
September 22, 1994... Harvey Graff has argued convincingly that faith in the grand promises of literacy has, more often than not, gone unrewarded. The nineteenth century, he contends, provided a fertile climate for educators such as Horace Mann to promulgate the...

Richard Wright's long journey from Gorky to Dostoevsky. (Maxim Gorky and Fyodor Dostoevsky)
September 22, 1994... Ours is an age, in Russia as in the United States, which revels in ethnic revivals and romanticizes cultural difference. In such a time of enthusiastic and sometimes euphoric reconstruction of a usable national identity, Richard Wright, like...

The chocolate man. (short story)
September 22, 1994... A man, standing high above a toilet peeing, stares in the wall-to-wall bathroom mirror of his new, upscale apartment. The image in the mirror is over six feet tall, not quite thirty, athletic and energetic, well-educated, well-paid, single, and...

The Nathan Heard interviews.
September 22, 1994... When I finished reading Nathan C. Heard's novel Howard Street for the first time, I felt that I'd been living under a cultural rock for too long. I'd read Richard Wright, Ralph Ellison, Malcolm X, and other great black male "individualist"...

"Preachin' the Blues": Bessie Smith's secular religion and Alice Walker's 'The Color Purple.'
September 22, 1994... A blues singer known as "Shug" Avery sweeps through Alice Walker's novel The Color Purple, bestowing her favors and her scorn capriciously, giving voice to the voiceless, power to the powerless, and money to the poor. She transforms the life of...

Is Morrison also among the prophets?: "psychoanalytic" strategies in 'Beloved.' (Toni Morrison)
September 22, 1994... In our efforts to consider the structure of "rememory" in Beloved, we should call to mind what Toni Morrison once said: Because so much in public and scholarly life forbids us to take seriously the milieu of buried stimuli, it is often...

Soon there will be none. (short story)
September 22, 1994... Marian had waited until Sunday morning at breakfast to tell him, putting it off all week. Now that the time had come, she couldn't hold back any longer. Sitting at the kitchen table across from him, she gazed out the window into the face of a...

"A chafing savage, down the decent street": the politics of compromise in Claude McKay's protest sonnets.
September 22, 1994... The project of cultural materialism is to examine the political implications of cultural artifacts, particularly their subversive potential. The critic attempts to reconstruct the social, political, and economic context that contributed to the...

"Nothing extenuate, nor set down aught in malice": new biographical information on Ira Aldridge.
September 22, 1994... The remarkable life of Ira Aldridge has been faithfully reconstructed in Herbert Marshall and Mildred Stock's fine biography Ira Aldridge: the Negro Tragedian (1958). Using materials gathered from libraries and archives in Western and Eastern...

Frederick Douglass.
September 22, 1994... Although the English building on my campus is not at all prepossessing, it is served by businesses with grandiloquent names: Master Key, Master Lock, Master Chem, Master Towel, Master Door, Master Glass, Master Brick, Master Casting, and Master...

Critical Essays on Frederick Douglass.
September 22, 1994... Although the English building on my campus is not at all prepossessing, it is served by businesses with grandiloquent names: Master Key, Master Lock, Master Chem, Master Towel, Master Door, Master Glass, Master Brick, Master Casting, and Master...

Frederick Douglass: New Literary and Historical Essays.
September 22, 1994... Although the English building on my campus is not at all prepossessing, it is served by businesses with grandiloquent names: Master Key, Master Lock, Master Chem, Master Towel, Master Door, Master Glass, Master Brick, Master Casting, and Master...

My Father's Shadow: Intergenerational Conflict in African American Men's Autobiography.
September 22, 1994... Although the English building on my campus is not at all prepossessing, it is served by businesses with grandiloquent names: Master Key, Master Lock, Master Chem, Master Towel, Master Door, Master Glass, Master Brick, Master Casting, and Master...

The Frederick Douglass Papers, Series One: Speeches, Debates, and Interviews.
September 22, 1994... Although the English building on my campus is not at all prepossessing, it is served by businesses with grandiloquent names: Master Key, Master Lock, Master Chem, Master Towel, Master Door, Master Glass, Master Brick, Master Casting, and Master...

Nikki Giovanni.
September 22, 1994... In the early 1980s, when I was at Hollins College, Nikki Giovanni canceled a poetry reading, and Don L. Lee (Haki Madhubuti) was brought in as her replacement. Reading Virginia Fowler's Nikki Giovanni, I was reminded again of the irony of...

Black American Music: Past and Present, 2d ed.
September 22, 1994... Readers who are familiar with the first edition of Black American Music will be pleasantly surprised to learn that the second edition of the text has been thoroughly reconceptualized, reorganized, and rewritten. Perhaps because Roach's goal for...

A Lesson Before Dying.
September 22, 1994... A Lesson Before Dying, Ernest J. Gaines's fifth adult novel, is the Louisiana writer's most compelling work to date. Gaines worked on this book for almost ten years, doing most of the writing in San Francisco during the summer months between...

The Ethnic American Woman: Problems, Protests, Lifestyles.
September 22, 1994... Edith Blicksilver's multicultural anthology first appeared in 1978. Despite the proliferation of such readers since that time, this one, devoted entirely to women, is still useful. The expanded edition, with some 100 pages more than the...