African American Review articles from September 2002

African American Review archives from September 2002

Reclaiming the Frontier: Oscar Micheaux as Black Turnerian.(Critical Essay)
September 22, 2002... Oscar Micheaux is best known as one of America's first black film makers. In a highly productive career spanning 1913-1948, Micheaux published seven novels and directed and produced at least thirty-four all-black-cast films. Before starting...

Hybrid embodiment and an ethics of masochism: Nella Larsen's Passing and Sherley Anne Williams's Dessa Rose.(Critical Essay)
September 22, 2002... In the African American tradition, hybridity is represented in the slave narratives as part of a sadistic configuration of master, mistress, overseer, and slave. But the shift in modalities of power from a regime of punishment to one of...

Pauline Hopkins's Of One Blood, Africa, and the "Darwinist trap".(Critical Essay)
September 22, 2002... An adventurous novel "intermingling [literary] traditions such as historical romance, realism, allegory, fantasy, science fiction, and mystery" (Horvitz 246), and also the first African American novel featuring "both an African setting and...

Constructing childhood: the Christian Recorder and literature for black children, 1854-1865.
September 22, 2002... African Americans have been producing and publishing literature for their children as early as 1854, (1) but much of it has been buried in the pages of black-owned periodicals and newspapers, such as the Christian Recorder. This previously lost...

Miles and Me: an interview with Quincy Troupe.(Interview)
September 22, 2002... A Renaissance man for the twenty-first century, author and poet Quincy Troupe is Professor of Creative Writing and American and Caribbean Literature at the University of California, San Diego. A nationally recognized poet and biographer, he has...

The feminism of Dorothy West's The Living Is Easy: a critique of the limitations of the female sphere through performative gender roles.(Critical Essay)
September 22, 2002... Dorothy West's first novel, The Living Is Easy (1948), is easily identified as a "satiric picture of Boston's 'counterfeit bourgeoisie,' its black middle class," and as a novel that "indicts black society artificially modeled on false white...

Bambara's feisty girls: resistance narratives in Gorilla, My Love.(Toni Cade Bambara)(Critical Essay)
September 22, 2002... When Thunderbuns, the "big and bad matron," charges the aisle of the movie theater in Toni Cade Bambara's story "Gorilla, My Love," the kids finally "shut up and watch the simple ass picture" (Gorilla 15). She is the "colored" matron, the one...

"From the Seen to the Told": the construction of subjectivity in Toni Morrison's Beloved.(Critical Essay)
September 22, 2002... In the final chapter of Beloved, the narrator repeats, "It was not a story to pass on." Nonetheless, like the ghost in the novel that haunts 124 Bluestone Road, that draws the life out of Sethe, the story is beloved. The "dearly beloved," those...

Preachin' and singin' just to make it over: the gospel impulse as survival strategy in Leon Forrest's Bloodworth Trilogy.(Critical Essay)
September 22, 2002... As an artist steeped in African American tradition and culture, Leon Forrest consistently drew from their wellsprings to recreate in his fiction both the horror and beauty of the African American experience as he perceived it. Among the many...

Leda: Crescent City, Florida 1952.(Poem)
September 22, 2002... Leda: Crescent City, Florida 1952. Lyrae van Clief-Stefanon for my mother Imagine Leda black-- skinny legs peach-switch scarred vaselined to gleaming like magnolia leaves Imagine a teenager hips asway like moss...

Daphne.(Poem)
September 22, 2002... Daphne. Lyrae van clief-stefanon Fear glistened In the sweat On my skin Until it dried And cracked And darkened My Father, Save me! Hovered In humid air Hung there until The brown bark Of prayer Encased me...

Danae.(Poem)
September 22, 2002... Dane Lyrae van Clief -- Stefanon i been thirsty so long that my mouth feels like parchment/got words written cross it (Patricia Jones) 1. Brass Room I spraypaint every piece of brass flat black: glass-topped coffee...

Tamar's Blues.(Poem)
September 22, 2002... Tamar's Blues Lyrae van Clief - Stefanon And Tamar put ashes on her head, and rent her garment of divers colors that was on her, and laid her hand on her head, and went on crying. So Tamar remained ...

Groove.(Poem)
September 22, 2002... Groove. Lyrae van Clief - Stefanon Facing my fear of being found wanting in black men's eyes meant nights of dancing. I pressed my palms against my partner's back, pulled myself into his chest, close enough to wear my...

The Big-Get-Tree Confronted.(Poem)
September 22, 2002... The big-get-tree confronted. Charles Curtis Blackwell The moon is stiff, enough to journey up river In light; the way into the river's Meeting place Golden leaves of Harper's Ferry fall smooth To the touch of fear So, so...

Comets, 1942.(Poem)
September 22, 2002... Comets, 1942. Myronn Hardy He watches women pass into the church their feet shedding daylight. They carry bibles in loose fingers the thin-skinned pages exhumed from death. He places his basket of avocados on the dirt...

Return to the Labyrinth.(Poem)
September 22, 2002... Return to the Labyrinth. Myronn Hardy We drink glasses of beer. I notice the bartender's hair thistles ready to break drift. On the small television we watch the matador his costume seared in sunlight thrust that...

Inferno.(Poem)
September 22, 2002... Inferno. Myronn Hardy Lazarus in Salvador your children sleep on the steps of churches. They wait for their sores to crawl off leeches ticks too full for more. No one gives them bread. The priests and nuns pass...

Night of Chappotin.(Poem)
September 22, 2002... Night of Chappotin. Myronn Harday We ride into Habana Vieja. The women brush off the dust of limbless buildings. The men are shirtless selling mangoes out of wheelbarrows. A friend's love of the city plays on the radio...

September 21.(Poem)
September 22, 2002... September 21. Myronn Hardy my father pressed lemons stirred their juice in water sugar a hail storm. Where are you going? I took down the atlas. No. Where are you going? Home. To find home. He looked...

For Dudley.(Poem)
September 22, 2002... For Dudley. Sterling D. Plumpp He is the only/Steel born to live. Builds a press to promulgate books his folks can get back change from five dollars after buying. Mimeographs his efforts and gets a literary...

The Black Hearts of Men: Radical Abolitionists and the Transformation of Race. (Reviews).(Book Review)
September 22, 2002... John Stauffer. The Black Hearts of Men: Radical Abolitionists and the Transformation of Race. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 2002. 367 pp. $29.95. Thirty-seven years ago, a collection of essays edited by Martin Duberman (The Abolitionist Vanguard:...

Passing and the Rise of the African American Novel. (Reviews).(Book Review)
September 22, 2002... M. Giulia Fabi. Passing and the Rise of the African American Novel. Urbana: U of Illinois P. 2001. 187 pp. $32.50. M Giulia Fabi's Passing builds on a number of well-known studies that have reexamined, reclassified, and reinterpreted...

Rethinking the Slave Narrative: Slave Marriage and the Narratives of Henry Bibb and Ellen Craft. (Reviews).(Book Review)
September 22, 2002... Charles J. Heglar. Rethinking the Slave Narrative: Slave Marriage and the Narratives of Henry Bibb and Ellen Craft. Westport: Greenwood P, 2001. 184 pp. $59.00. It is high time that someone directly challenged us to rethink our assumptions...

The Black Press: New Literary and Historical Essay. (Reviews).(Book Review)
September 22, 2002... Todd Vogel, ed. The Black Press: New Literary and Historical Essays. New Brunswick: Rutgers UP, 2001. 256 pp. $59.00 cloth/$22.00 paper. Even the most imaginative wondering could not have vaulted the survival of African American-published...

Richard Wright's Travel Writings: New Reflections. (Reviews).(Book Review)
September 22, 2002... Virginia Whatley Smith, ed. Richard Wright's Travel Writings: New Reflections. Jackson: UP of Mississippi. 2001. 248 pp. $40.00 cloth/$22.00 paper. Travel has long been associated with wisdom. The well-traveled person "knows" distant...

Autobiography as Activism: Three Black Women of the Sixties. (Reviews).(Book Review)
September 22, 2002... Margo V. Perkins. Autobiography as Activism: Three Black Women of the Sixties. Jackson: UP of Mississippi, 2001. 179 pp. $18.00. Recipient of Mississippi University for Women's Eudora Welty Prize in 1999, Margo Perkins's Autobiography as...

Fathering Words: The Making of an African American Writer. (Reviews).(Book Review)
September 22, 2002... E. Ethelbert Miller. Fathering Words: The Making of an African American Writer. New York: St. Martin's P, 2000. 178 pp. $21.95. E. Ethelbert Miller's memoir, as its title suggests, directs attention to the creation of the African American...

Paraph of the Bone and Other Kinds of Blue. (Reviews).(Book Review)
September 22, 2002... Ed Pavlic. Paraph of the Bone & Other Kinds of Blue. Philadelphia: American Poetry Review, 2001. 96 pp. $23.00 cloth/$14.00 paper. In the liner notes for Miles Davis's groundbreaking 1958 recording Kind of Blue, pianist, arranger, and...

To Repel Ghosts: Five Sides in B Minor. (Reviews).(Book Review)
September 22, 2002... Kevin Young. To Repel Ghosts: Five Sides in B Minor: Cambridge, MA: Zoland Books, 2001. 350 pp. $26.00. Kevin Young's To Repel Ghosts is a large poetic attempt in which much of the author's ambition is realized. Intrigued by the life and...

Other works received.(Bibliography)
September 22, 2002... Abrahams, Peter. The Black Experience in the 20th Century: An Autobiography and Meditation. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 2001. 409 pp. $29.95. Adisa, Opal Palmer. Leaf-of-Life: Poems. Oakland: Jukebox P, 2000. 64 pp. $10.00. Agosto,...

Approaching the Center. (Reviews).(Book Review)
September 22, 2002... Myronn Hardy. Approaching the Center. Kalamazoo: Western Michigan U, 2001. 97 pp. $14.00. Heliocentrism set the world spinning when Copernicus introduced the theory in 1543, naming the sun the center of our system of planets, something...