African American Review articles from September 2004

African American Review archives from September 2004

A letter from the editor.(Editorial)
September 22, 2004... Who's gonna make all that beautiful blk / rhetoric mean something. --Sonia Sanchez, "blk / rhetoric" We are: as we have for nearly 40 years, the contributors, readers, advisors, and editors of African American Review are gonna go on...

Spring, 1862 Dear Daughter.(Poem)
September 22, 2004... Spring, 1862 Dear Daughter, You asked in your last letter what it feels like to be free so I send you cape jasmine blossoms and the story of how I found them. At the end, though at the time I did not know it...

"Try to refrain from that desire": self-control and violent passion in Oscar Micheaux's African American Western.(Critical Essay)
September 22, 2004... Jean Baptiste, the protagonist of Oscar Micheaux's novel The Homesteader (1917), first appears in the narrative struggling against a howling blizzard on the plains of frontier South Dakota. (1) Micheaux's depiction of this storm, which...

In my flesh shall I see God: ritual violence and racial redemption in "The Black Christ".(Critical Essay)
September 22, 2004... My mother, Job's dark sister, sits Now in a corner, prays, and knits. Often across her face there flits Remembered pain, to mar her joy, At Whose death gave her back her boy. ("The Black Christ") The frontispiece of...

National socialism and blood-sacrifice in Zora Neale Hurston's Moses, Man of the Mountain.(Critical Essay)
September 22, 2004... In Zora Neale Hurston's Moses, Man of the Mountain (1939), Pharaoh establishes his new rule of law by penetrating the Hebrew womb with his "rod of state," which is intent upon genocide: Pharaoh had entered the bedrooms of Israel. The...

"That commonality of feeling": Hurston, hybridity, and ethnography.(Zora Neale Hurston)(Critical Essay)
September 22, 2004... Preparing the manuscript of Mules and Men, Zora Neale Hurston wrote to her mentor, anthropologist Franz Boas, "full of tremors, lest you decide that you do not want to write the introduction." She knew that the book contained much "unscientific...

"It ain't your color, it's your scabbing": literary depictions of African American strikebreakers.
September 22, 2004... I wonder why They are so shortsighted As not to realize That every time They keep any worker, man or woman, White, yellow, or black, OUT of a UNION, They are forcing a worker To be a SCAB, To be used AGAINST THEM? --from...

Not entirely strange, but not entirely friendly either: images of Jews in African American passing novels through the Harlem renaissance.(Critical Essay)
September 22, 2004... "The problem of the twentieth century is the problem of the color line," W. E. B Du Bois famously asserted in the "Forethought" to his classic The Souls of Black Folk a full century ago now (209). Events proved his prophecy to have been all too...

"Like a violin for the wind to play": lyrical approaches to lynching by Hughes, Du Bois, and Toomer.(Critical Essay)
September 22, 2004... Langston Hughes, W. E. B. Du Bois, and Jean Toomer experiment stylistically in their representations of lynching. The event of lynching can be understood both as an act existing within a symbolic system created by white people and as a moment...

Inverting history in Octavia Butler's postmodern slave narrative.(Critical Essay)
September 22, 2004... Beyond of the historical slave narrative, Octavia Butler's 1988 Kindred may also be deemed a contemporary science fiction novel, though the author herself claims that "Kindred is fantasy.... There is no science in Kindred" (Kenan 495). (1)...

William Branch: (a conversation) reminiscence.(Interview)
September 22, 2004... William Branch (actor, playwright, educator, screenwriter, and producer) earned the B.A. at Northwestern University (1949) and the M.F.A. at Columbia University (1958). As an actor, he was a cast member of the national company of Anna Lucasta,...

Hard-boiled black easy: genre conventions in A Red Death.(Critical Essay)
September 22, 2004... Few mystery aficionados would quarrel with Stephen F. Soitos's ranking of Walter Mosley as that genre's preeminent African American writer ("Black Detective" 1003). Mosley's reputation derives mainly from five L. A. novels that appeared between...

Fashioning the body [as] politic in Julie Dash's Daughters of the Dust.(Critical Essay)
September 22, 2004... Set at the turn of the twentieth century in a mythical port village on a sea island off the South Carolina and Georgia coasts, Julie Dash's 1991 film Daughters of the Dust features four generations of Peazant women. On the surface, the film's...

"Passing on" death: stealing life in Toni Morrison's Paradise.(Critical Essay)
September 22, 2004... And it is upon these women in flight from death and despair that nine male citizens of Ruby will lay their pain, their terror, and their murderous rage.... (Barnes & Noble Paradise website; my emphasis) Many reviews and critical analyses of...

Reflections in church ceilings (excerpt from the unpublished novel: A Casualty of the Peace).(Excerpt)
September 22, 2004... I hear the Lieutenant and the Sergeant banging on the Crypto Room door but I cannot shake myself out of the alcoholic grip that has me chained to a dungeon wall. I am the character that Poe never imagined. I try to move but can't. I hear them...

The Warnings in a Mad Dog's Eyes.(Poem)
September 22, 2004... The Warnings in a Mad Dog's Eyes for Sascha Feinstein our hero smacked those liverlips and stared, took the blues dare imperiously for there were no bitch eyes so rabid--so strangely stridently...

Jesse S. Crisler, Robert C. Leitz III, and Joseph R. McElrath, Jr. An Exemplary Citizen: Letters of Charles W. Chesnutt, 1906-1932.(Book Review)
September 22, 2004... Jesse S. Crisler, Robert C. Leitz III, and Joseph R. McElrath, Jr. An Exemplary Citizen: Letters of Charles W. Chesnutt, 1906-1932. Palo Alto: Stanford UP, 2002. 368 pp. $65.00. This volume complements the 1997 collection of Chesnutt's...

Jean Humez. Harriet Tubman: the Life and the Life Story.(Book Review)
September 22, 2004... Jean Humez. Harriet Tubman: The Life and the Life Story. Madison: U of Wisconsin P, 2003. 471 pp. $45.00. Harriet Tubman (1820-1913) is arguably the most famous historical African American heroine. A "larger-than-life figure," she is among...

Langston Hughes. Autobiography: I Wonder as I Wander.(Book Review)
September 22, 2004... Langston Hughes. Autobiography: I Wonder as I Wander. Vol. 14. The Collected Works of Langston Hughes. Columbia: U of Missouri P, 2003.426 pp. $39.95. This volume is among the last to appear in the University of Missouri Press s laudatory...

David Brion Davis. Challenging the Boundaries of Slavery.(Book Review)
September 22, 2004... David Brion Davis. Challenging the Boundaries of Slavery. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 2003. 115 pp. $18.95. This small book, a series of mutually engaging essays that are based on the Nathan I. Huggins lectures, is bold in its method and large...

Carla Kaplan, ed. Zora Neale Hurston: a Life in Letters.(Book Review)
September 22, 2004... Carla Kaplan, ed. Zora Neale Hurston: A Life in Letters. New York: Doubleday, 2002. 880 pp. $19.95. At the heart of Carla Kaplan's Zora Neale Hurston: A Life in Letters (2002) is a nexus of Hurston correspondence deeply rooted in African...

Mitch Kachun. Festivals of Freedom: Memory and Meaning in African American Emancipation Celebrations, 1808-1915.(Book Review)
September 22, 2004... Mitch Kachun. Festivals of Freedom: Memory and Meaning in African American Emancipation Celebrations, 1808-1915. Amherst: U of Massachusetts P, 2003.360 pp. 15 illustrations. $39.95. Available now is an abundance of critical works and...

Catherine Prendergast. Literacy and Racial Justice: the Politics of Learning after Brown v. Board of Education.(Book Review)
September 22, 2004... Catherine Prendergast. Literacy and Racial Justice: The Politics of Learning after Brown v. Board of Education. Carbondale: Southern Illinois UP, 2003. 205 pp. $25.00. For the almost 30 years that I've been educator--first as a public...

Eva Illouz. Oprah Winfrey and the Glamour of Misery: an Essay on Popular Culture.(Book Review)
September 22, 2004... Eva Illouz. Oprah Winfrey and the Glamour of Misery: An Essay on Popular Culture. New York: Columbia UP, 2003. 300 pp. $59.50 cloth/$22.50 paper. Eva Illouz's book, Oprah Winfrey and the Glamour of Misery, examines the Winfrey talk show in...

Robert Fanuzzi. Abolition's Public Sphere.(Book Review)
September 22, 2004... Robert Fanuzzi. Abolition's Public Sphere. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 2003. 331 pp. $22.95. Dr. Chancellor Williams, author and historian, used a story about the Black people of Sumer to show that a people die when they forget their...

Woodie King, Jr. The Impact of Race: Theatre and Culture.(Book Review)
September 22, 2004... Woodie King, Jr. The Impact of Race: Theatre and Culture. Applause Theatre and Cinema Books, 2003. 273 pp. $26.95. Woodie King Jr. is one of those often under-appreciated figures who make culture possible. Like Al Bell of Stax Records, or...