Recently added articles from African American Review:

"And bid him translate: Langston Hughes's translations of poetry from French," by Alfred Guillaume.(Forgotten Manuscripts)(Critical essay)

Sep 22, 2007; Patterson, Anita ... 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 negative ramifications as a cultural practice ...

Magnitogorsk (Fragments)/Magnitogorsk (Fragments).(Poem)

Sep 22, 2007; Aragon, Louis ... <Pre> MAGNITOGORSK (FRAGMENTS) ... il s'agit maintenant de la transformer.--Karl Marx They have given man back to the earthThey have said You shall devour alland you shall devour all They have thrown sky to earthThey have said The gods shall dieand the ...

Really I Know/Je ne sais rien en verite.(Poem)(Brief article)

Sep 22, 2007; Damas, Leon-Gontran ... <Pre> Really I Know nothing sadderor more hatefulor more frighteningor more lugubrious in the worldthan to hear love at the end of the dayrepeating itself like a low massonce upon a timea woman happened to passwhose arms were full of roses ...

Trite without Doubt/Banalite sans aucun doute.(Poem)(Brief article)

Sep 22, 2007; Damas, Leon-Gontran ... <Pre> Trite without Doubt but before giving overentirely beautiful and blackto the whorl-flowered grasson the path which leadsto the mountainswhere a bamboo flutecries in the nightthe girl with the calabashof indifference on her head...

She Left Herself One Evening/Elle s'en vint.(Poem)(Brief article)

Sep 22, 2007; Damas, Leon-Gontran ... <Pre> She Left Herself One Evening to prowl aroundmy miserylike a mad doglike a naked doglike a doggish dogquite madquite nakedquite doggishlydog thus simplythe drama began Elle s'en vint et elle s'en vint...

When the Tom-Tom Beats .../Quand Bat le tam-tam ...(Poem)(Brief article)

Sep 22, 2007; Roumain, Jacques ... <Pre> When the Tom-Tom Beats ... Your heart trembles in the shadows, like a face reflected in troubled waterThe old mirage rises from the pit of the nightYou sense the sweet sorcery of the past:A river carries you far away from the banks,Carries you ...

Guinea/Guinee.(Poem)(Brief article)

Sep 22, 2007; Roumain, Jacques ... <Pre> Guinea It's the long road to GuineaDeath takes you downHere are the boughs, the trees, the forestListen to the sound of the wind in its long hair of eternal night It's the long road to GuineaWhere your fathers await you without impatience...

"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)

Sep 22, 2007; Kim, Daniel Won-gu ... <Pre>Oh, Congo brotherWith your tribal marks,We, too, emergeFrom ageless darks.We, too, emitA frightening cryFrom body scarred,Soul that won't die.We encarnadine the sky.--Langston Hughes, "We, Too" 11. 1-9 </Pre> In spite of a ...

Richard Wright's 12 Million Black Voices and World War II-era civic nationalism.(Critical essay)

Sep 22, 2007; Shiffman, Dan ... 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" as a "metaphysical obscenity" in light of the ...

"The uses and hazards of expatriation": Richard Wright's cosmopolitanism in process.(Critical essay)

Sep 22, 2007; Weik, Alexa ... "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 himself, and decidedly embraces, the status of ...

"Simply a menaced boy": analogizing color, undoing dominance in James Baldwin's Giovanni's Room.(Critical essay)

Sep 22, 2007; Abur-Rahman, Aliyyah I. ... 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. It was Baldwin who spent 40 years examining ...

Harlem is burning: urban rioting and the "black underclass" in Chester Himes's Blind Man with a Pistol.(Harlem, New York)(Critical essay)

Sep 22, 2007; Heise, Thomas ... 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 Poe's phantasmagoric, falling house of Usher for ...

Exodus and colonization: charting the journey in the journals of Daniel Coker, a descendant of Africa.(Critical essay)

Sep 22, 2007; Thomas, Rhondda R. ... 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 African Church in New York City to ...

William Wells Brown's Narrative & traveling subjectivity.(Critical essay)

Sep 22, 2007; Lucasi, Stephen ... 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 narratives' depictions of slave society: the ...

Object written, written object: slavery, scarring, and complications of authorship in Beloved.(Critical essay)

Sep 22, 2007; Durkin, Anita ... 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 Morrison's use of the African American tradition ...

Bourgeois blackness and autobiographical authenticity in Ellen Tarry's The Third Door.(Critical essay)

Sep 22, 2007; Brown, Stephanie ... 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 postmodern theory, gender theory, queer theory, ...

Somebody Forgot to Tell Somebody Something *.(Poem)

Sep 22, 2007; Vest, Jennifer Lisa ... (Written in response to the referendum passed by the Seminole Nation of Oklahoma to disenfranchise tribal members of African descent) <Pre> Somebody Forgot to Tell Somebody Something Something happened at SeminoleSomething stunning, something sadSomebody forgot ...

Marcy S. Sacks. Before Harlem: The Black Experience in New York City before World War I.(Book review)

Sep 22, 2007; Krasner, David ... 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 black life in New York City. From the ...

Mark Whalan, ed. The Letters of Jean Toomer, 1919-1924.(Book review)

Sep 22, 2007; Pfeiffer, Kathleen ... 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 times, shamefully, revealing evidence ...

George Hutchinson. In Search of Nella Larsen: A Biography of the Color Line.(Book review)

Sep 22, 2007; Butler, Robert ... 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 characterized as "the mystery woman of ...