African American Review articles from September 2001

African American Review archives from September 2001

"So strangely interwoven": The Property of Inheritance, Race, and Sexual Morality in Pauline E. Hopkins's Contending Forces.(Critical Essay)
September 22, 2001... Representing middle-class, "moral" African Americans in Contending Forces: A Romance Illustrative of Negro Life North and South (1900), Pauline E. Hopkins challenged mainstream race discourses that maintained Jim Crow's social and political...

Not Black and/or White: Reading Racial Difference in Heliodorus's Ethiopica and Pauline Hopkins's Of One Blood.(Critical Essay)
September 22, 2001... In the ancient Greek novel Ethiopica, written by Heliodorus sometime in the fourth century A.D., a portrait of the mythical Andromeda figures prominently: When the Ethiopian princess Charicleia is born resembling the white-skinned Andromeda of...

Picturing the Mother, Claiming Egypt: My Bondage and My Freedom as Auto(bio)ethnography.(Critical Essay)
September 22, 2001... As many scholars of historical anthropology have noted, in taxonomizing difference, "American School" ethnographers (ca. 1820-1870) were drawing and policing the borders of euramerican racial identity and insinuating prescriptive markers for...

Moses and the Egyptian: Religious Authority in Olaudah Equiano's Interesting Narrative.(Critical Essay)
September 22, 2001... From the first image that greeted readers of his book, Olaudah Equlano presented the self of his 1789 autobiographical narrative as a pious Christian, one whose religious conversion meant a kind of freedom as significant as his manumission...

"Under the Umbrella of Black Civilization": A Conversation with Reginald McKnight.(Interview)
September 22, 2001... Talking to Reginald McKnight is like scanning an imaginary worldwide radio dial. At any given moment he can transform his pleasant speaking voice into a raspy, aged, Middle Eastern-by-way-of-New York accent--or a deep Southern drawl. In an...

Slouching toward Beastliness: Richard Wright's Anatomy of Thomas Dixon.(Critical Essay)
September 22, 2001... Like Nemesis of Greek tragedy," writes W. E. B. Du Bois L in Black Reconstruction, "the central problem of America after the Civil War, as before, was the black man" (237). U.S. literature has both tried to resolve this problem and contributed...

African/American: Lorraine Hansberry's Les Blancs and the American Civil Rights Movement.(Critical Essay)
September 22, 2001... Many scholars, including Margaret B. Wilkerson, note that Lorraine Hansberry was the first African-American playwright to explore, in her final work, Les Blancs, the African quest for freedom from European colonialists. Hansberry studied...

The Shaman's Apprentice: Ecstasy and Economy in Wilson's Joe Turner.(August Wilson and the African American Odyssey)(Critical Essay)
September 22, 2001... In his book August Wilson and the African American Odyssey, Kim Pereira briefly engages the theories of the renowned anthropologist Mircea Eliade in order to understand the events and characters of Wilson's play Joe Turner's Come and Gone...

Primitivist Modernism: Black Culture and the Origins of Transatlantic Modernism.(Review)
September 22, 2001... Sieglinde Lemke. Primitivist Modernism: Black Culture and the Origins of Transatlantic Modernism. New York: Oxford UP, 1998. 183 pp. $45.00. Sieglinde Lemke in Primitivist Modernism: Black Culture and the Origins of Transatlantic Modernism...

Performing the Word: African American Poetry as Vernacular Culture.(Review)
September 22, 2001... Fahamisha Patricia Brown. Performing the Word: African American Poetry as Vernacular Culture. New Brunswick: Rutgers UP, 1999. 174 pp. $17.00. Fahamisha Patricia Brown's Performing the Word: African American Poetry as Vernacular Culture is...

Charcoal and Cinnamon: The Politics of Color in Spanish Caribbean Literature.(Review)
September 22, 2001... Claudette M. Williams. Charcoal and Cinnamon: The Politics of Color in Spanish Caribbean Literature. Gainesville: UP of Florida, 2000. 186 pp. $49.95. Charcoal and Cinnamon proposes an auspicious project: "to explore what it means to be...

Clarence Major and His Art.(Review)
September 22, 2001... Bernard W. Bell, ed. Clarence Major and His Art. Chapel Hill: U of North Carolina P, 2001. 281 pp. $49.95 cloth/$19.95 paper. The last half-decade has seen Clarence Major receiving attention that his thirty-year career as a fictionist,...

The Absent Man: The Narrative Craft of Charles W. Chesnutt.(Review)
September 22, 2001... Charles Duncan. The Absent Man: The Narrative Craft of Charles W. Chesnutt. Athens: Ohio UP, 1998.214 pp. $32.95. The appearance of Charles Duncan"s The Absent Man: The Narrative Craft of Charles W. Chesnutt marks a pivotal moment in the...

Critical Essays on Alice Walker.(Review)
September 22, 2001... Ikenna Dieke, ed. Critical Essays on Alice Walker. Westport: Greenwood, 1999. 226 pp. $65.00. The work of Alice Walker has arguably generated more contested readings than that of any other living African American writer except Toni...

Shorter Views: Queer Thoughts & the Politics of the Paraliterary.(Review)
September 22, 2001... Samuel R. Delany. Shorter Views: Queer Thoughts & the Politics of the Paraliterary. Middletown: Wesleyan UP, 1999. 464 pp. $50.00 cloth/$22.00 paper. Samuel Delany is a writer of great intellectual and imaginative depth whose works often...

Scenes of Instruction: A Memoir.(Review)
September 22, 2001... Michael Awkward. Scenes of Instruction: A Memoir. Durham: Duke UP, 1999. 208 pp. $24.00. Probably because he is a scholar of literary narrative, Michael Awkward is more forthcoming than most autobiographers are about the goals and...

Multitudes: Poems Selected & New.(Review)
September 22, 2001... Afaa Michael Weaver. Multitudes: Poems Selected & New. Louisville, KY: Sarabande Books, 2000. 137 pp. $14.95. A "Selected Poems" always tends toward critical retrospective; that is, a sober accounting of a poet's career--either "thus far"...

Gold Indigoes.(Review)
September 22, 2001... George Elliot Clarke Gold Indigoes. Durham, NC: Carolina Wren P, 2000. 28 pp. $12.95. George Elliot Clarke's Gold Indigoes is the ongoing celebration of life's sensuous fabric, worried as it is by the transience of pleasure. Clarke's lines...

Wrong.(Review)
September 22, 2001... Reginald Shepherd. Wrong. Pittsburgh: U of Pittsburgh P, 1999. 104 pp. $12.95. One of the most striking and compelling features of Reginald Shepherd's new book Wrong is Shepherd's apparent love of language. During a time in which much...

The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano.(Review)(Brief Article)
September 22, 2001... Costanzo, Angelo, ed. The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano, or Gustavus Vassa, The African. Peterborough, Ontario: Broadview Literary Texts, 2001. 330 At a recent conference in Idaho, William L. Andrews spoke of the...

Masterpieces of Negro Eloquence.(Review)(Brief Article)
September 22, 2001... Dunbar, Alice Moore, ed. Masterpieces of Negro Eloquence, 1818-1913. Intro. Manning Marable. Mineola, NY: Dover, 2000.369 pp. $12.95. It is good to have this collection back in print after eighty-six years in a readable, inexpensive...

"Ain't But a Place": An Anthology of African American Writings About St. Louis.(Review)
September 22, 2001... Early, Gerald, ed. "Ain't But a Place": An Anthology of African American Writings About St. Louis. St. Louis: Missouri Historical P, 1998. 515 pp.$39.95 cloth/$24.95 paper. Compared to New York and Chicago, other centers of African American...

Student Companion to Richard Wright.(Review)(Brief Article)
September 22, 2001... Felgar, Robert. Student Companion to Richard Wright. Westport: Greenwood P, 2000. 134 pp.$29.95. This book by a veteran Wright specialist appears in a series designed for secondary schools, junior colleges, undergraduate students, and the...

Whispered Consolations: Law and Narrative in African American Life.(Review)(Brief Article)
September 22, 2001... Suggs, Jon-Christian. Whispered Consolations: Law and Narrative in African American Life. Ann Arbor: U of Michigan P, 2000.401 pp.$67.50. The first two sentences of the preface state the project of this interesting work: "This book is...

Safari West: Poems.(Review)(Brief Article)
September 22, 2001... Williams, John A. Safari West: Poems. Montreal: Hochelaga P, 1998. 78 pp. $10.95. Best known as a novelist, expecially for The Man Who Cried I Am, John Williams is a versatile, productive, and underappreciated biographer (of two...