African American Review articles from September 1999

African American Review archives from September 1999

Du Bois the Novelist: White Influence, Black Spirit, and The Quest of the Silver Fleece.(Critical Essay)
September 22, 1999... When writing about a canonical figure, one hopes for a measure of interest. And when writing about a novel by a canonical figure, one might almost assume a willing audience. Even further still, when the novel at hand engages with subtlety the...

The Mirror and the Veil: The Passing Novel and the Quest for American Racial Identity.(Critical Essay)
September 22, 1999... In this scene from James Weldon Johnson's Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man, the encounter between the young, nameless mulatto boy - who will soon transform into the still nameless "ex-colored man" of the novel's title - and his image in the...

"Nothing was Lost in the Masquerade": The Protean Performance of Genre and Identity in Charles Johnson's Oxherding Tale.(Critical Essay)
September 22, 1999... As many times as we reopen slavery's closure, we are hurtled rapidly forward into the dizzying motions of a symbolic enterprise, and it becomes increasingly clear that the cultural synthesis we call "slavery" was never homogeneous in its...

Angularity: An Interview with Leon Forrest.(Interview)
September 22, 1999... Leon Forrest was the author of four novels that effectively created an oral history of his mythical territory of Forrest County, which strongly resembles Chicago. In the first three works - There Is A Tree More Ancient Than Eden (1973), The...

From No Man's Land to Mother-land: Emasculation and Nationalism in Richard Wright's Depression Era Urban Novels.(Critical Essay)
September 22, 1999... Not to plunge into the complex jungle of human relationships and analyze them is to leave the field to the fascists and I won't and can't do that. (Wright, qtd. in Fabre 185) ... anything that is felt to give out goodness and beauty, and...

Migrant Labor, Folklore, and Resistance in Hurston's Polk County: Reframing Mules and Men.(Critical Essay)
September 22, 1999... In a recent article proposing a rethinking of the historiography of black working-class politics in the Jim Crow South, Robin Kelley has suggested that the historian's attention should shift from a focus on political leaders to a consideration...

When the Neighbors Fight.(Poem)
September 22, 1999... The trumpet's mouth is apology. We sit listening To Kind of Blue. Miles Davis Beat his wife. It hurts To know the music is better Than him. The wall Is damaged skin. Tears can purify The heart. Even the soft ...

Bass.(Poem)
September 22, 1999... in memory of Jimmy Garrison Sometimes I wish my fingers were thick enough to play you. Knuckles in a claw, bow discarded at my feet, I'd pluck the melody with bare hands, savor the smooth slide along ...

The Myth of Music.(Poem)
September 22, 1999... for my father If music can be passed on like brown eyes or a strong left hook, this melody is my inheritance, lineage traced through a title track, displayed on an album cover that you pin to the wall as...

Return to Temptation.(Poem)
September 22, 1999... Melvin's dead. A cloud-nine moves a 4-step sway to the left in 5-part harmony; the sun shines at half-mast; silent nights have a fit. Melvin's dead. I am 13 again sitting in a new beginner bra, first...

Answering "The Waste Land": Robert Hayden and the Rise of the African American Poetic Sequence.
September 22, 1999... April of 1966 was one of the most eventful and paradoxical months in the history of twentieth-century American poetry. At the Third World Festival of Negro Arts in Dakar, Senegal, Robert Hayden's A Ballad of Remembrance was awarded "the Grand...

Saint's Progeny: Assotto Saint, Gay Black Poets, and Poetic Agency in the Field of the Queer Symbolic.(Critical Essay)
September 22, 1999... agency is the hiatus in iterability (Judith Butler, Bodies That Matter 220) transformation is only real when you share it (Assotto Saint, "Sacred Life" 261) In "Why I Write," poet and playwright Assotto Saint notes that "most revolutions -...

"And Yet They Paused" and "A Bill to be Passed": Newly Recovered Lynching Dramas by Georgia Douglas Johnson.
September 22, 1999... My recent discovery Georgia Douglas Johnson's "lost" lynching plays ends a scholarly quest of many years and confirms Johnson's status as the leading playwright of the genre. The typescripts, dating from the 1930s and found among the NAACP...

In Hope of Liberty: Culture, Community, and Protest Among Northern Free Blacks, 1700-1860.(Review)
September 22, 1999... James Oliver Horton and Lois E. Horton. New York: Oxford UP, 1997. 340 pp. $35.00. Duke University Much has changed in the world of African American Studies since Leon Litwack published his important volume North of Slavery: The Negro...

To Awaken My Afflicted Brethren: David Walker and the Problem of Antebellum Slave Resistance.(Review)
September 22, 1999... Peter Hinks. University Park: Pennsylvania State UP, 1997. 301 pp. $45.00. The Pennsylvania State University I am not the first to detect similarities between Gary Collison's Shadrack Minkins: From Fugitive Slave to Citizen and Peter...

Shadrack Minkins: From Fugitive Slave to Citizen.(Review)
September 22, 1999... Gary Collison. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1997. 294 pp. $27.95. The Pennsylvania State University Peter Hinks. University Park: Pennsylvania State UP, 1997. 301 pp. $45.00. I am not the first to detect similarities between Gary...

The Harlem Renaissance, 1920-1940. Vol. 5 - Remembering the Harlem Renaissance.(Review)
September 22, 1999... Cary D. Wintz, ed. New York: Garland, 1996. 476 pp. $87.00. University of Arkansas, Fayetteville Almost everything about the period in African American literature that is typically termed the Harlem Renaissance has been contested. The...

The Harlem Renaissance, 1920-1940. Vol. 6 - Analysis and Assessment, 1940-1979, and Vol. 7 - Analysis and Assessment, 1980-1994.(Review)
September 22, 1999... Cary D. Wintz, ed. New York: Garland, 1996. Vol. 6, 504 pp., $83.00. Vol. 7, 482 pp., $80.00. University of Tennessee, Knoxville These final two volumes of Cary D. Wintz's seven-volume Harlem Renaissance anthology present a large...

Of Dreams Deferred, Dead or Alive: African Perspectives on African-American Writers.(Review)
September 22, 1999... Femi Ojo-Ade, ed. Westport: Greenwood P, 1996. 192 pp. $59.95. Centre of West African Studies, University of Birmingham/Savannah College of Art and Design The publication of this collection of essays is quite timely. It comes at a...

Negotiating Difference: Race, Gender, and the Politics of Positionality.(Review)
September 22, 1999... Michael Awkward. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1995. 225 pp. $14.95. University of Wisconsin, Madison In Negotiating Difference, Michael Awkward charts the politics and pitfalls of crossing boundaries created by race and gender. In this...

"The Changing Same": Black Women's Literature, Criticism, and Theory.(Review)
September 22, 1999... Deborah E. McDowell. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1995. 222 pp. $39.95 cloth/$12.95 paper. University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill Deborah McDowell's "The Changing Same": Black Women's Literature, Criticism, and Theory examines some of...

Recovered Writers/Recovered Texts: Race, Class, and Gender in Black Women's Literature.(Review)
September 22, 1999... Dolan Hubbard, ed. Tennessee Studies in Literature 38. Knoxville: U of Tennessee P, 1997. 171 pp. $30.00. University of North Carolina at Charlotte Recovered Writers/Recovered Texts offers some very interesting and important readings...

The Unruly Voice: Rediscovering Pauline Elizabeth Hopkins.(Review)
September 22, 1999... John Cullen Gruesser, ed. Champaign: U of Illinois P, 1996. 248 pp. $39.95 cloth/$16.95 paper. Emory University Oxford University Press's republishing of Pauline Hopkins's works has helped to sustain the already growing critical...

Richard Wright and Racial Discourse.(Review)
September 22, 1999... Yoshinobu Hakutani. Columbia: U of Missouri P, 1996. 334 pp. $34.95. Universita di Roma "La Sapienza" Yoshinobu Hakutani's Richard Wright and Racial Discourse is a new swing of the pendulum in Richard Wright criticism. For several...

Toni Morrison and the American Tradition: A Rhetorical Reading.(Review)
September 22, 1999... Herbert William Rice. New York: Peter Lang, 1996. 155 pp. $35.95. University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign To position and distinguish himself among scholars who read Toni Morrison's literary repertoire as a coherent unit, Herbert...

The Critical Response to Gloria Naylor.(Review)
September 22, 1999... Sharon Felton and Michelle C. Loris, ed. Westport: Greenwood P, 1997. 275 pp. $65.00. University of Florida Since receiving the 1983 American Book Award for The Women of Brewster Place, Gloria Naylor has been hailed as one of...