African American Review articles from September 2007

African American Review archives from September 2007

"And bid him translate: Langston Hughes's translations of poetry from French," by Alfred Guillaume.(Forgotten Manuscripts)(Critical essay)
September 22, 2007... Translation, in recent years, seems to have suffered a decline in its reputation within scholarly debates. Once revered as a mark of high intellect and transcultural communication, it is now being considered in light of its broader, far more...

Magnitogorsk (Fragments)/Magnitogorsk (Fragments).(Poem)
September 22, 2007... MAGNITOGORSK (FRAGMENTS) ... il s'agit maintenant de la transformer.--Karl Marx They have given man back to the earth They have said You shall devour all and you shall devour all They have thrown sky to earth ...

Really I Know/Je ne sais rien en verite.(Poem)(Brief article)
September 22, 2007... Really I Know nothing sadder or more hateful or more frightening or more lugubrious in the world than to hear love at the end of the day repeating itself like a low mass once upon a time a woman happened...

Trite without Doubt/Banalite sans aucun doute.(Poem)(Brief article)
September 22, 2007... Trite without Doubt but before giving over entirely beautiful and black to the whorl-flowered grass on the path which leads to the mountains where a bamboo flute cries in the night the girl with the...

She Left Herself One Evening/Elle s'en vint.(Poem)(Brief article)
September 22, 2007... She Left Herself One Evening to prowl around my misery like a mad dog like a naked dog like a doggish dog quite mad quite naked quite doggishly dog thus simply the drama began Elle...

When the Tom-Tom Beats .../Quand Bat le tam-tam ...(Poem)(Brief article)
September 22, 2007... When the Tom-Tom Beats... Your heart trembles in the shadows, like a face reflected in troubled water The old mirage rises from the pit of the night You sense the sweet sorcery of the past: A river carries you...

Guinea/Guinee.(Poem)(Brief article)
September 22, 2007... Guinea It's the long road to Guinea Death takes you down Here are the boughs, the trees, the forest Listen to the sound of the wind in its long hair of eternal night It's the long road to Guinea Where...

"We, Too, Rise with You": Recovering Langston Hughes's African (Re)Turn 1954-1960 in An African Treasury, the Chicago Defender, and Black Orpheus.(Critical essay)
September 22, 2007... Oh, Congo brother With your tribal marks, We, too, emerge From ageless darks. We, too, emit A frightening cry From body scarred, Soul that won't die. We encarnadine the sky.--Langston Hughes, "We, Too"...

Richard Wright's 12 Million Black Voices and World War II-era civic nationalism.(Critical essay)
September 22, 2007... Speaking at the Fourth American Writer's Conference in June 1941, Richard Wright denounces the hypocrisy of America's defense of liberty in Europe. His speech, "What We Think of Their War," refers to Franklin Delano Roosevelt's "Four Freedoms"...

"The uses and hazards of expatriation": Richard Wright's cosmopolitanism in process.(Critical essay)
September 22, 2007... "I'm a rootless man," Richard Wright declares boldly in White Man Listen! (1957), "but I m neither psychologically distraught nor in any wise particularly perturbed because of it" (xxix). In this and in many other statements, Wright claims for...

"Simply a menaced boy": analogizing color, undoing dominance in James Baldwin's Giovanni's Room.(Critical essay)
September 22, 2007... The year 2007 marks the twentieth anniversary of the death of novelist, essayist, political spokesperson, philosopher James Baldwin. The significance of Baldwin's contribution to 20th-century American letters and politics cannot be overstated....

Harlem is burning: urban rioting and the "black underclass" in Chester Himes's Blind Man with a Pistol.(Harlem, New York)(Critical essay)
September 22, 2007... Blind Man with a Pistol (1969)--the final installment in a series of detective novels Chester Himes began publishing in 1957 with For Love of Imabelle--opens with a view of one of the darkest houses in American literature, one that updates...

Exodus and colonization: charting the journey in the journals of Daniel Coker, a descendant of Africa.(Critical essay)
September 22, 2007... At Sea, Feb. 24, Thursday May He that was with Moses in the wilderness, be with us; then all will be well. --Daniel Coker, The Journal of Daniel Coker, a descendant of Africa On January 31, 1820, hundreds of well-wishers packed the...

William Wells Brown's Narrative & traveling subjectivity.(Critical essay)
September 22, 2007... William Wells Brown took rather unconventional first step in The Narrative of William W. Brown, A Fugitive Slave (1847-48), the first publication of his long and successful literary career. The text bears many of the marks of 19th-century slave...

Object written, written object: slavery, scarring, and complications of authorship in Beloved.(Critical essay)
September 22, 2007... In the vast wealth of criticism on Toni Morrison's Beloved--and there is an astounding amount of criticism on Beloved given that the novel is still less than 20 years old--many scholars rightfully and fruitfully devote extensive analysis to...

Bourgeois blackness and autobiographical authenticity in Ellen Tarry's The Third Door.(Critical essay)
September 22, 2007... In the past 10 years, "authenticity" has become a watchword in critical race theory, influenced not only by organic developments within the field, but also by convergences among African American studies and ongoing work in areas as diverse as...

Somebody Forgot to Tell Somebody Something *.(Poem)
September 22, 2007... (Written in response to the referendum passed by the Seminole Nation of Oklahoma to disenfranchise tribal members of African descent) Somebody Forgot to Tell Somebody Something Something happened at Seminole Something stunning,...

Marcy S. Sacks. Before Harlem: The Black Experience in New York City before World War I.(Book review)
September 22, 2007... Marcy S. Sacks. Before Harlem: The Black Experience in New York City before World War I. Philadelphia: U of Pennsylvania P, 2006. 231 pp. $49.95. Before Harlem surfaced as the Mecca of black culture, there were three predominant regions of...

Mark Whalan, ed. The Letters of Jean Toomer, 1919-1924.(Book review)
September 22, 2007... Mark Whalan, ed. The Letters of Jean Toomer, 1919-1924. Knoxville: U of Tennessee P, 2005. 296 pp. $38.00 cloth/$20.00 paper. Correspondence, it has often been noted, forms the backbone of biography. Where else do we get such direct, and at...

George Hutchinson. In Search of Nella Larsen: A Biography of the Color Line.(Book review)
September 22, 2007... George Hutchinson. In Search of Nella Larsen: A Biography of the Color Line. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 2006. 611 pp. $39.95. George Hutchinson's intriguing biography is the third in recent years to focus on this elusive figure who is sometimes...

Meredith M. Gadsby. Sucking Sait: Caribbean Women Writers, Migration, and Survival.(Book review)
September 22, 2007... Meredith M. Gadsby. Sucking Sait: Caribbean Women Writers, Migration, and Survival. Columbia: U of Missouri P, 2006. 240 pp. $39.95. The folk will tell you that salt can either save you or destroy you. Toni Cade Bambara's Velma of The...

John Lowe, ed. Bridging Southern Cultures: An Interdisciplinary Approach.(Book review)
September 22, 2007... John Lowe, ed. Bridging Southern Cultures: An Interdisciplinary Approach. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State UP, 2005. 317 pp. $49.95. Bridging Southern Cultures is an interdisciplinary collection of 13 essays that challenges scholars to consider...

Stacey M. Floyd-Thomas, ed. Deeper Shades of Purple: Womanism in Religion and Society.(Book review)
September 22, 2007... Stacey M. Floyd-Thomas, ed. Deeper Shades of Purple: Womanism in Religion and Society. New York: New York UP, 2006. 331 pp. $75.00 cloth/$24.00 paper. During my five-year stay in the US for a PhD a program in English, I did not have the...

Nikhil Pal Singh. Black is a Country: Race and the Unfinished Struggle for Democracy.(Book review)
September 22, 2007... Nikhil Pal Singh. Black is a Country: Race and the Unfinished Struggle for Democracy. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 2005. 285 pp. $16.95. In 2004, several scholars addressed the topics of race, democracy, or a blending of the two: Joel Olson, a...

Robert F. Fleissner. Shakespeare and Africa: The Dark Lady of His Sonnets Revamped and Other Africa Related Associations.(Book review)
September 22, 2007... Robert F. Fleissner. Shakespeare and Africa: The Dark Lady of His Sonnets Revamped and Other Africa Related Associations. Philadelphia: Xlibris, 2005. 130 pp. $30.99 cloth/$20.99 paper. During 10 of the 38 years that Robert Fleissner was an...

Malin Pereira. Rita Dove's Cosmopolitanism.(Book review)
September 22, 2007... Malin Pereira's Rita Dove's Cosmopolitanism. Urbana: U of Illinois P, 2003 pp. $29.95. Malin Pereira's Rita Dove's Cosmopolitanism surveys Dove's career from her first collection of verse, The Yellow House on the Corner (1980), through her...