African American Review back issues from June 2002:
"The hierarchy itself": Hurston's Their Eyes Were Watching God and the sacrifice of narrative authority.(Critical Essay)
Jun 22, 2002; ... The authoritarian relation between the one who commands and the one who obeys rests neither on common reason nor on the power of the one who commands; what they have in common is the hierarchy itself, whose rightness and legitimacy both recognize and where both have their predetermined ...
"When the pear blossoms / cast their pale faces on / the darker face of the earth": miscegenation, the primal scene, and the incest motif in Rita Dove's work.(Critical Essay)
Jun 22, 2002; ... Rita Dove's verse drama The Darker Face of the Earth is a curiously important text in her oeuvre. Curious, because while its initial publication date is 1994, it originates, according to Dove, in the late 1970s and was first drafted in the early 1980s, thus placing it with her earliest ...
Performing "truth": Black speech acts.
Jun 22, 2002; ... Wai' a minit, wai' a minit. Hol' up! Speak one at a time. This is not The Jerry Springer Show. (Oprah Winfrey, The Oprah Winfrey Show [1998]) Let a Black sistah break it down fo' ya. (RuPaul, Foxy Lady [1996]) Introduction: Dialogic, Dialect, and "truth" ...
Plunging (outside of) history: naming and self-possession in Invisible Man.(Critical Essay)
Jun 22, 2002; ... Prologue In several interviews, Ralph Ellison joins many of his readers in resolving Invisible Man into a declaration of coherent identity. Effectively interpreting Invisible Man as a modem Bildungsroman, Ellison says: "In my novel the narrator's development is one through ...
Masquerade, magic, and carnival in Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man.(Critical Essay)
Jun 22, 2002; ... The element of carnival-masquerade offers a wide lens through which to view black-white race relations by mirroring and magnifying racial practices in the United States. Perhaps no work of African American literature exemplifies this point more sharply than Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man ...
Rootwork: Arthur Flowers, Zora Neale Hurston, and the "literary hoodoo" tradition.
Jun 22, 2002; ... Midway through Arthur Flowers' 1993 novel Another Good Loving Blues, Zora Neale Hurston appears in a Memphis drugstore where Beale Street intellectuals gather. The time is the 1920s, and Hurston the character is in town to collect local folklore. Her appearance in the novel is short, ...
Black feminism and queer families: a conversation with Thomas Allen Harris.(Interview)
Jun 22, 2002; ... In Vintage: Families of Value (1995) Anita Jones proclaims, "I have chose to do like my mother and be a warrior ... 'cause I'm a lesbian. My life has evolved around women being sensual, and I rather enjoy it." Speaking forthrightly to the camera, Jones identifies some of the larger ...
Focusing on the wrong front: historical displacement, the Maginot Line, and The Bluest Eye.(Toni Morrison)(Critical Essay)
Jun 22, 2002; ... Recent theoretical work has examined the ways that the abstract idea of the bodiless citizen has marked women and non-white Americans as outside the boundaries of full citizenship, because the attention paid to the various markings of gender or race on their bodies precludes them from ...
Love Jones: a black male feminist critique of Chester Himes's If He Hollers Let Him Go.(Critical Essay)
Jun 22, 2002; ... In his insightful essay "A Black Man's Place(s) in Black Feminist Criticism," Michael Awkward asks an important question: "Can black men like himself--those who are deeply invested in resisting patriarchal power, and for whom black women's lives, art, and literature have been crucial to ...
Drive.(Poem)
Jun 22, 2002; ... <Pre> Drive Cool night, like the snap of peas or dry branches underfoot. Someone's waiting for me: a photograph of my breath. The moon is cropped stingy and my skin is a tethered shadeof heat drawn to outer darkness and the gentle sucking in the thick of it. Looking for the ...
My father's son.(Poem)
Jun 22, 2002; ... <Pre> my father's son four thirty a.m., rushing to the bathroom to pee through the dim light sneaking along the hallway my ears weighing the rustling of his jacket, the sliding glass doors, the truck's engine dinning and pulled by the light, I edge forward to see him ...
Plowing.(Poem)
Jun 22, 2002; ... <Pre> PLOWING Austin Fray (Dec. 8, 1875-Oct. 24, 1924) "What did your mother tell you about our poppa?" (Aunt Edna) My mother said her poppa was a wall of a man was a brick mason, helped build the school at Stony Point had a lap large enough for all of his children and ...
Zora Hurston in the Welfare Hotel.(Poem)
Jun 22, 2002; ... <Pre> Zora Hurston in the Welfare Hotel Out of print, unknown except as a local troublemaker, a crazy woman who told strange folktales to small children, Zora lived alone. Eatonville was behind her, Harlem, too, the days when her name meant something more than an ...
Winter, Spring & Summer.(Poem)
Jun 22, 2002; ... <Pre> Winter Frosted blown-glass trees Mirrored in a misty lake Snow waltzes with wind Spring Topaz blue welkin Tissuepaper clouds below a flying rainbow Summer Verdant willow tree Fields of fuchsia ...
Acid Trip, Age 14, Fool & Player.(Poem)
Jun 22, 2002; ... <Pre> Acid Trip, Age 14 Growling green grass grabs at my sneakers. Roaring morning ocean pummels my eardrums. Friends fence me in, cushion my hallucinations, keep me out of harm's way. Fool You are no reflection and all forward movement. Player ...
Masks: Blackness, Race and the Imagination.
Jun 22, 2002; ... Adam Lively. Masks: Blackness, Race and the Imagination. New York: Oxford UP, 2000. 295 pp. $30.00. It is not a new argument that there is a fundamental black presence at the heart of modernity, whether that modernity be defined as beginning with the Enlightenment philosophers ...
African American Satire: The Sacredly Profane Novel.
Jun 22, 2002; ... Darryl Dickson-Carr. African American Satire: The Sacredly Profane Novel. Columbia: U of Missouri P, 2001. 226 pp. $34.95. The intent of this book is to return "African American satirical novels to the center of our conceptions of black literature and culture." The plurals here ...
The Origins of African American Literature, 1680-1865.
Jun 22, 2002; ... Dickson D. Bruce. The Origins of African American Literature, 1680-1865. Charlottesville: UP of Virginia, 2001. 390 pp. $55.00 cloth/$ 9.50 paper. Dickson D. Bruce's The Origins of African American Literature, 1680-1865, is a throwback--and I mean this as a distinct ...
From Richard Wright to Toni Morrison: Ethics in Modern and Postmodern American Narrative.
Jun 22, 2002; ... Jeffrey J. Folks. From Richard Wright to Toni Morrison: Ethics in Modem and Postmodem American Narrative. New York: Peter Lang, 2001. 199 pp. $29.95. It is telling that nine of the twelve chapters on individual works in Jeffrey Folks's volume have been published previously in ...
Derek Walcott: A Caribbean Life.
Jun 22, 2002; ... Bruce King. Derek Walcott: A Caribbean Life. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2000. 714 pp. $63.95. In Another Life Derek Walcott wrote, "I had entered the house of literature as a houseboy"; Jamaican poet Mervyn Morris signified on this image in his The Pond when he declared, "And these are ...
Charles E. Wilson, Jr. Gloria Naylor: A Critical Companion.
Jun 22, 2002; ... Charles E. Wilson, Jr. Gloria Naylor: A Critical Companion. Westport: Greenwood P, 2001. 170 pp. $29.95. Charles Wilson's volume on Gloria Naylor is one of twenty-five titles in the Critical Companions to Popular Contemporary Writers series. A panel of high school teachers ...
Soulcatcher and Other Stories.
Jun 22, 2002; ... Charles Johnson. Soulcatcher and Other Stories. San Diego: Harvest Original, 2001. 125 pp. $12.00 Charles Johnson's first collection of short stories, The Sorcerer's Apprentice (1986), contains eight "tales and conjurations." The stories had been published in several venues ...
This Waiting for Love: Helene Johnson, Poet of the Harlem Renaissance.
Jun 22, 2002; ... Verner D. Mitchell, ed. This Waiting for Love: Helene Johnson, Poet of the Harlem Renaissance. Amherst: U of Massachusetts P, 2000. 135 pp. $24.95. "You have so many years for writing, so few for love," Helene Johnson advised her cousin Dorothy West in a 1931 letter, ...
Songlines in Michaeltree: New and Selected Poems.
Jun 22, 2002; ... Michael S. Harper. Songlines in Michaeltree: New and Selected Poems. Urbana: U of Illinois P, 2000. 389 pp. $34.95. The well-chosen selections in Michael Harper's Songlines in Michaeltree represent how Harper has successfully combined the social consciousness characteristic of ...
Dawnsong!: The Epic Memory of Askia Toure.
Jun 22, 2002; ... Askia M. Toure. Dawnsong!: The Epic Memory of Askia Toure. Chicago: Third World P, 2000. 105 pp. $12.95. The Black Arts Movement of the 1960s and 1970s profoundly marked culture in the United States. It changed how basic notions of race, ethnicity, nationality, gender, politics, ...
Carver: A Life in Poems.
Jun 22, 2002; ... Marilyn Nelson. Carver: A Life in Poems Asheville, NC: Front Street, 2001. 103 pp. $16.95. When I was a young boy, the triumvirate in music was Marian Anderson, Roland Hayes, and Paul Robeson. In the realm of intellect, sports, and science the kings were, respectively, W. E. B ....
The Shine Poems.
Jun 22, 2002; ... Calvin Forbes. The Shine Poems. Baton Rouge: Louisiana UP, 2001. 64 pp. $22.95 cloth/$15.95 paper. The ghostly rhythms of the blues and the ballad tradition haunt Calvin Forbes's delicately constructed poems. Blues rhythm isn't just a question of beat: It requires syntax that is ...
The Log of the Vigilante.
Jun 22, 2002; ... Herbert Woodward Martin. The Log of the Vigilante. Lewiston: Mellen Poetry P, 2000. 120 pp. $24.95. African American poetry flaunts two dominant traditions: the simple and the sumptuous. The first category sanctifies exhortation, rhetorical plainness, unadorned truth-telling; ...
The Genuine Negro Hero.
Jun 22, 2002; ... Thomas Sayers Ellis. The Genuine Negro Hero. Kent: Kent State UP, 2000. 32 pp. $4.75. Thomas Sayers Ellis lays out his aesthetic treatise in "The Genuine Negro Hero": "Of style," he states, "I can honestly write that I am only interested in mixed congregations--although I began ...
Brown Sugar.(Poem)
Jun 22, 2002; ... <Pre> Brown Sugar I dream about you: raw sugar eyes, skin, hair, fading in waves of spoiled water. Black bubbles rise from your lips, sit hardening, boils on the ocean's skim. Your body fights itself, pulling at the seams, splitting, gorged to spasm, breaking to spume ...
Recess.(Poem)
Jun 22, 2002; ... <Pre> Recess i. leave what cannot be carried ii. this coupling: steam, cool water trickle of sighs press nipple palm arc ask warm wrists grasp press pubespulseneed nestlebreathe breasts yes breaking tracewaking yes waking ...
Seeing the dead lucky seven.(Poem)
Jun 22, 2002; ... <Pre> seeing the dead lucky seven Field-wading like a swoll' gut heifer, she's a mule husk in a sack dress dragging a plough: old hair and cussy eyes. With that skinned burlap strap slung over her shoulder and a trail behind, sprouting knotty tubers and loose teeth. Once ...
Crazy Woman Blues.(Poem)
Jun 22, 2002; ... <Pre> Crazy Woman Blues I ain't never left Chicago But I been around the world Spent every day in dis here city But I'se traveled 'round the world Got me a crazy woman And she done took me fo' a twirl (Usedta picture myself lucky To court a Southside Chi-town girl) Got me ...
Voice of America.(Poem)
Jun 22, 2002; ... <Pre> Voice of America Peckerwood Creek, Alabama (no blacks no jews no gays): Billy Jack Gater is dead forever sissy ("Blinded by Hatred" 20/20) The way he sees it, killer owns the story 'cause he ain't dead Nina's singin in me and ain't no sugar ain't gonna be no sugar ...
Second-class ticket.(Poem)
Jun 22, 2002; ... <Pre> second-class ticket for Joseph Laroche, the only blackman to die on the Titanic when did it hit you, brother? was it when you were forced to change your first-class tickets to the other, the ones that made you second-class, or was it when they saw that Juliette, ...
Prison Cemetery, Angola Farm.(Poem)
Jun 22, 2002; ... <Pre> Prison Cemetery, Angola Farm No names but numbers on plain white stones at the edge of an endless cotton field. Their crimes--murder, arson, rape--mean nothing now that the grave is their cell, the earth their keeper. The other inmates hate to pass this way, ...
Night Golf.(Poem)
Jun 22, 2002; ... <Pre> Night Golf After dusk, on moonlit nights, the caddies returned to play their version of the game. Once more, it was a black and white world, though they owned it now, tamed the course shot by shot. They learned to play by feel, almost like blind men swinging ...