Novel back issues from April 2002:
Crossing borders
Apr 01, 2002; ... Crossing Borders CAROLYN RODY, The Daughter's Return: African-American and Caribbean Women's Fictions of History, (New York: Oxford University Press, 2001), pp. 267, cloth, $49.00. In The Daughter's Return: African-American and Caribbean Women's Fictions of History, Carolyn Rody ...
Postmodern historical narratives
Apr 01, 2002; ... Postmodern Historical Narratives NANCY J. PETERSON, Against Amnesia: Contemporary Women Writers and the Crisis of Historical Memory, (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2001), pp. 242, cloth, $46.50. Beginning in the wake of the Civil Rights movement, African ...
Cosmopolitics of modernism
Apr 01, 2002; ... Cosmopolitics of Modernism JESSICA BERMAN, Modernist Fiction, Cosmopolitanism, and the Politics of Community (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), pp. 242 + x, cloth, $59.95. A powerful project of reevaluation has characterized critical writing on both modernism and ...
The intuition of the future: Utopia and catastrophe in Octavia Butler's Parable of the Sower
Apr 01, 2002; ... In Modernity and the Holocaust, Zygmunt Bauman argues that one strain in "the historical tendency of modernity" was horribly dramatized at Auschwitz (2). Auschwitz showed what "the rationalizing, designing, controlling dreams and efforts of modern civilization are able to accomplish if not ...
Postmodern Morrison
Apr 01, 2002; ... Postmodern Morrison JOHN N. DUVALL, The Identifying Fictions of Toni Morrison: Modernist Authenticity and Postmodern Blackness (New York: Palgrave, 2000), pp. 182, cloth, $45.00. James Joyce said, famously, of Ulysses that he was only "the foolish author of a wise book." Indeed, ...
Forgoten Modernisms
Apr 01, 2002; ... Forgotten Modernisms JANI SCANDURA and MICHAEL THURSTON, eds. Modernism, Inc.: Body, Memory, Capital (New York: New York University Press, 2001), pp. 311, cloth, $55.00, paper, $19.00. What the otherwise diverse essays collected in Modernism, Inc.: Body, Memory, Capital have in ...
Nation, race, and postmodern gestures in Ishmael Reed's Flight to Canada
Apr 01, 2002; ... In his 1976 novel Flight to Canada, Ishmael Reed uses the history of slavery in the United States, as well as the genre of the slave narrative, in order to work out his vision of race and American national identity in an era following the Civil Rights movement and the upsurge of black ...
"You think like you white": Questioning race and racial community through the lens of middle-class desire(s)
Apr 01, 2002; ... Consistently attended to by sociologists, political scientists and historians, black US intra-racial class difference (and conflict) has perhaps enjoyed its most complex ongoing representation in the literary realm, especially in fiction and criticism. These representations, from the proverbial ...
Where the talented tenth meets the model minority: The price of privilege in Wideman's Philadelphia Fire and Lee's Native Speaker
Apr 01, 2002; ... Two years before the publication of Philadelphia Fire (1990), John Edgar Wideman was asked to comment on his oeuvre up to that point, more specifically to reflect on what had become his most well-known and acclaimed work, Brothers and Keepers (1984). This work of non-fiction, which earned him a ...
Postmodernism, traditional cultural forms, and the African American narrative: Major's Reflex, Morrison's Jazz, and Reed's Mumbo Jumbo
Apr 01, 2002; ... African American writers since at least the 1960s have attempted to engage textually the limitations of Enlightenment reason, the violence of what Enrique Dussel calls the "myth of modernity," the representation of the African American as Other than reason, and the postmodern African American ...
Contemporary African American fiction and the politics of postmodernism
Apr 01, 2002; ... Introduction In an essay published in 1995, Wahneema Lubiano asked the question, "What is at stake for positioning a reading of a black American novel within the discourse of postmodernism?" ("Postmodernist" 94). Initial responses to this question followed a fairly consistent logic, ...
Disabling postmodernism: Wideman, Morrison and prosthetic critique
Apr 01, 2002; ... " ... embodiment is significant prosthesis" Donna Haraway John Edgar Wideman acknowledges a disabling difference characteristic of his African American male protagonists-many have "some physical disability or physical strangeness that's a further mask of what is inside" (Baker ...
Postmodern disconnection and the archive of bones: Toni Cade Bambara's last work
Apr 01, 2002; ...... I am not as linguistically nimble as I used to be when interviewing various sectors/strata of the community, for I've just blown a gabfest on identity, belonging, and integration at the dentist's through an inability to bridge the gap between the receptionist, a working-class sister from the ...