African American Review back issues from December 2002:
"Something patterned, wild, and free": Robert Hayden's angles of descent and the democratic unconscious.
Dec 22, 2002; ... [Interviewer] it is nearly a cliche to say that Robert Hayden has the best underground reputation of any poet in America. How do you respond to that? [Hayden] (Laughs.) I say Hear! Hear! (Hayden, Collected Prose 203) The diver had to admit that he couldn't surface ...
Killing John Cabot and publishing black: Gwendolyn Brooks's Riot.
Dec 22, 2002; ... In the late 1960s, at the height of her career, Gwendolyn Brooks .changed publishers, switching from Harper & Row, a major press that could give her widespread distribution and publicity, to small, new, African American-run Broadside Press. Harper & Row had just published arguably her most ...
Ten Pieces for Rwanda.(Poem)
Dec 22, 2002 ... <Pre> Ten Pieces for Rwanda Rwanda #1 This woman's body is blistered with death. Soon her swollen arms will break her bonds; The heated water of her body will splay The ground where she lies and bless it. Her head lies five feet away from her body Screaming silence. The ...
Kevin's Body.(Poem)
Dec 22, 2002; ... <Pre> Kevin's Body A dark, beautiful furniture. River pulled in every direction. Your knuckles thinly disguised stones on their way back to this earth. Your head alone a remarkable egg. What will come of you, the wind turning ...
Slim's Stride.(Poem)
Dec 22, 2002; ... <Pre> Slim's Stride for Sterling Brown The Death Angel put down his paper, looked at his wife as she sewed, glanced at his baby angels' capers, and commenced to put on his robe. He went over and got his silver wings, pasted them onto his celestial flesh, looked around and ...
A New Beginning.(Poem)
Dec 22, 2002; ... <Pre> A NEW BEGINNING In the end, after hatred has grown drowsy and all the killers have gone to bed, we will have simple things again. We will walk through fields of corn taller than our heads. </Pre> Robert Coles received his Ph.D. from SUNY at Buffalo (1979) and now ...
A Commemoration.(Poem)
Dec 22, 2002; ... <Pre> A Commemoration March 7, 2000 Arm in arm they cross the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma to celebrate thirty-five years of struggle and change. For that earlier march state troopers used tear gas, nightsticks to bloody heads, anything to prevent the fifty-mile ...
Langston.(Poem)
Dec 22, 2002; ... <Pre> Langstonmet him by a bitter river of shadows black with the tears of Scottsboro and the sins of Dixie red with the blood of freedom he sang a chorus of revolution in verse of jazz and blues fifths and thirds weary words of dream delusions from the dark ...
Religious revivalism in the Civil Rights Movement.
Dec 22, 2002 ... Historians, journalists, sociologists, political scientists, and theologians have been picking over the corpse of the Civil Rights Movement for more than thirty years now. Most scholars have given due credit to the black church for giving birth to the Movement, and in recent years many ...
"Illuminating the darkened corridors": an interview with Alexs Pate.(Interview)
Dec 22, 2002; ... The first time I saw Alexs Pate I was startled. I couldn't believe that this man--clad in a loose black shirt, jeans, steel-toed boots, and a head full of chin-length dreadlocks, carrying a black Diesel bag--was a professor. A writer. He wrote Amistad? And even more surprising, after ...
Crossing Western space, or the HooDoo detective on the boundary in Ishmael Reed's Mumbo Jumbo.
Dec 22, 2002; ... Following the publication of Mumbo Jumbo in 1972, Ishmael Reed proclaimed it "the best mystery novel of the year" (Shrovetide 132). Reed's statement, of course, seems out of place given that Mumbo Jumbo looks nothing like a conventional detective novel. A "composite narrative composed of ...
Golden gray and the talking book: identity as a site of artful construction in Toni Morrison's Jazz.
Dec 22, 2002; ... Jazz, the product of slavery, segregation, poverty, and disenfranchisement, is many things: a "complicated anger" Uazz 59); the carefree indulgence of the now; a marginalized population's assertion of selfhood, of cultural vitality and artistic pride; the hope for musical synthesis through ...
Re-imagining agency: Toni Morrison's Paradise.
Dec 22, 2002; ... Toni Morrison's Paradise (1997) seeks to re-imagine agency as a function of coalition processes that are communal and caring in impulse. In so doing, Paradise addresses issues of coalition in ways that complicate and finally gesture away from dominant conceptualizations of coalition in the ...
An abiku-ogbanje Atlas: a pre-text for rereading Soyinka's Ake and Morrison's Beloved.
Dec 22, 2002 ... The idea of reincarnation is not alien or foreign ....The resurgence of spirits and the ability to be possessed by another spirit ...is not outrageous in the early days of the culture as it survived in this country, and it still exists in lots of places in Africa ....In this milieu, with a ...
Slavery and the Romantic Imagination. (Reviews).(Book Review)
Dec 22, 2002; ... Debbie Lee. Slavery and the Romantic Imagination. Philadelphia: U or Pennsylvania P, 2002. 310 pp. $55.00. For most of the twentieth century, the principal writers of British Romanticism (1780-1830 or thereabouts) were viewed as having held themselves aloof from social and ...
Southern History Across the Color Line. (Reviews).(Book Review)
Dec 22, 2002; ... Nell Irvin Painter. Southern History Across the Color Line. Chapel Hill: U of North Carolina P, 2002. 247 pp. $37.50 cloth/$17.95 paper. This collection of six previously published essays by the distinguished historian Nell Irvin Painter charts the shift in her methodology from ...
The Artistry of Anger: Black and White Women's Literature in America, 1820-1860. (Reviews).(Book Review)
Dec 22, 2002; ... Linda M. Grasso. The Artistry of Anger: Black and White Women's Literature in America, 1820-1860. Chapel Hill: U of North Carolina P, 2002. 184 pp. $49.95 cloth/$18.95 paper. In this study of literature by black and white American women writers before the Civil War, Linda Grasso ...
The Price of Dissent: Testimonies to Political Repressions in America. (Reviews).(Book Review)
Dec 22, 2002; ... Bud and Ruth Schultz. The Price of Dissent: Testimonies to Political Repressions in America. Berkeley: U of California P, 2001. 468 pp. $65.00 cloth/$24.95 paper. The authors' earlier book, It Did Happen Here: Recollections of Political Repression in America (U of California P, ...
Literary Legacies, Folklore Foundations: Selfhood and Cultural Tradition in Nineteenth- and Twentieth- Century American Literature. (Reviews).(Book Review)
Dec 22, 2002; ... Karen E. Beardslee. Literary Legacies, Folklore Foundations: Selfhood and Cultural Tradition in Nineteenth- and Twentieth- Century American Literature. Knoxville: U of Tennessee P, 2001. 202 pp. $27.00. Karen Beardslee's Literary Legacies, Folklore Foundations (hereafter ...
Solidarity Blues: Race, Culture, and the American Left. (Reviews).(Book Review)
Dec 22, 2002; ... Richard Iton. Solidarity Blues: Race, Culture, and the American Left. Chapel Hill: U of North Carolina P, 2000. 335 pp. $55.00 cloth/$18.95 paper. Why is there no mighty American left, or at least an American social democratic party, able to squeak out a respectable minority of ...
James Baldwin's Later Fiction: Witness to the Journey. (Reviews).(Book Review)
Dec 22, 2002; ... Lynn Orilla Scott. James Baldwin's Later Fiction: Witness to the Journey. East Lansing: Michigan Sate UP, 2002. 235 pp. $43.95. The latest evidence that there is renewed interest in the writings of James Baldwin is Lynn Orilla Scott's James Baldwin's Later Fiction, the fifth ...
Soul Babies: Black Popular Culture and the Post-Soul Aesthetic. (Reviews).(Book Review)
Dec 22, 2002; ... Mark Anthony Neal. Soul Babies: Black Popular Culture and the Post-Soul Aesthetic. New York: Routledge, 2002. 221 pp. $19.95. The cover design for Mark Anthony Neal's new volume of cultural criticism features a montage of Soul Train dancers awash in vivid, day-glo colors. One is ...
Is It Nation Time? (Reviews).(Book Review)
Dec 22, 2002; ... Eddie S. Glaude, Jr., ed. Is It Nation Time?. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 2002. 269 pp. $49.00 cloth/$19.00 paper. According to a 1990s' national survey of black Americans, approximately two-thirds do not expect to gain racial equality in their lifetime; fifty-two percent believe ...
Mercurochrome. (Reviews).(Book Review)
Dec 22, 2002; ... Wanda Coleman. Mercurochrome. Santa Rosa, Black Sparrow, 2001. 270 pp. $30.00 cloth/$17.00 paper. In How to Read a Poem, Edward Hirsch claims, "The poet wants justice," and few poets want, nay, demand justice so clearly and consistently as Wanda Coleman. Justice, as an answer to ...
Sleeping with the Dictionary. (Reviews).(Book Review)
Dec 22, 2002; ... Harryette Mullen. Sleeping with the Dictionary. Berkeley: U of California P, 2002. 85 pp. $14.95. Harryette Mullen currently enjoys a deserved reputation as a writer who is developing into a major figure in contemporary American poetry. When she first appeared in print, many ...
Claudia Tate: in memoriam.(Obituary)
Dec 22, 2002; ... Claudia Tate, Professor of English at Princeton University and longtime advisory editor to African American Review, succumbed to small-cell lung cancer in Fair Haven, New Jersey, on 29 July 2002. She was fifty-five years old. Tate was a brilliant scholar of American, women's, and ...