Stories Collection

  1. "No matter what you did," muses the unhappy Jadine in Tar Baby, "the diaspora mothers...
  2. "My final prayer: O my body, make of me always a man who questions!" (Frantz Fanon, B...
  3. Reviewed by R. Baird Shuman University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign Carol Lee's ai...
  4. "How can he not love your hair? . . . It's his hair too. He got to love it." "He don'...
  5. In a recent article, Ashraf Rushdy laments that the Allmuseri tribe and its god in Jo...
  6. Reviewed by Heather Hathaway Marquette University Kelvin Christopher James's first co...
  7. On March 31, 1995, Jewell Parker Rhodes arrived in Warrensburg, Missouri, for a speak...
  8. Reviewed by Houston A. Baker, Jr. University of Pennsylvania One of the most bizarre ...
  9. Reviewed by Karla F. C. Holloway Duke University As the second volume of a promised t...
  10. In awarding the 1993 Nobel Prize for literature to African American novelist Toni Mor...
  11. Reviewed by Merton L. Dillon Ohio State University Readers of a certain age will reco...
  12. Reviewed by Lorenzo Thomas University of Houston-Downtown Poetry is, first of all, so...
  13. The living newspaper, a favorite genre of Hallie Flanagan, the Director of the Federa...
  14. Reviewed by Nick Salvatore Comell University When Alexis de Tocqueville visited the U...
  15. The title of a literary work may be leading or misleading, but it is often a good pla...
  16. An important juncture in Alice Walker's The Color Purple is reached when Celie first ...
  17. One of the blurbs on the cover of Michele Wallace's Black Popular Culture claims that...
  18. Several scholars who have in recent years investigated the formation of our current c...
  19. This collection of thirteen original essays by some of our best critics of early Amer...
  20. In every sentence of their novels Divine Days and Free Enterprise Leon Forrest, nativ...
  21. Bailey's Cafe, Gloria Naylor's latest and most ambitious novel to date, is a haunting...
  22. . . . for a black person, history is a challenge because a black person is supposed n...
  23. Challenging what he imagines to be a "resistance to theory where Afro-American women'...
  24. Several scholars who have in recent years investigated the formation of our current c...
  25. African American scholarship is well served by Jeffrey C. Stewart's rescue of this gr...
  26. In every sentence of their novels Divine Days and Free Enterprise Leon Forrest, nativ...
  27. In Gloria Naylor's novel Mama Day, Reema's boy comes from the university to conduct a...
  28. The point is not that acts of racial violence are only words but rather that they hav...
  29. About halfway through her amazing book Was Huck Black? - I'll soon come to why it's a...
  30. When asked about the recent studio interest in black films, black independent filmmak...
  31. The initial volume of The Papers of Martin Luther King, Jr. covers the first two deca...
  32. Andrea Lee's 1984 book Sarah Phillips, brilliantly introduced in its new incarnation ...
  33. Again? Seems like we were just out there. To Deacon's house. Why do we have to go eve...
  34. One of the blurbs on the cover of Michele Wallace's Black Popular Culture claims that...
  35. Scanning the title of this book, I mused to myself, "What conversations with Richard ...
  36. Carl Van Vechten (1880-1964) had an early career as an influential critic and a lucra...
  37. Virginia C. Fowler's edited collection Conversations with Nikki Giovanni is a remarka...
  38. If you are looking for an imaginative mind that gives an added force to experience, t...
  39. One of the first scenes in Julie Dash's Daughters of the Dust shows a woman looking t...
  40. Toni Morrison's published work is infused with postmodern themes. For example, Sula i...
  41. One of the blurbs on the cover of Michele Wallace's Black Popular Culture claims that...
  42. Archibald Grimke (1849-1930) has at last received the scholarly attention he deserves...
  43. In the closing paragraph of her 1955 autobiography, Ellen Tarry anticipates a day whe...
  44. For those who had the good fortune to grow up in an Afro-American community - whether...
  45. Ours is an age, in Russia as in the United States, which revels in ethnic revivals an...
  46. Marian had waited until Sunday morning at breakfast to tell him, putting it off all w...
  47. Although the English building on my campus is not at all prepossessing, it is served ...
  48. A Lesson Before Dying, Ernest J. Gaines's fifth adult novel, is the Louisiana writer'...
  49. In his writings, Langston Hughes explores the convergence of race and gender in Black...
  50. A man, standing high above a toilet peeing, stares in the wall-to-wall bathroom mirro...
  51. The project of cultural materialism is to examine the political implications of cultu...
  52. Although the English building on my campus is not at all prepossessing, it is served ...
  53. Edith Blicksilver's multicultural anthology first appeared in 1978. Despite the proli...
  54. Utopias afford consolation: although they have no real locality there is nevertheless...
  55. When I finished reading Nathan C. Heard's novel Howard Street for the first time, I f...
  56. The remarkable life of Ira Aldridge has been faithfully reconstructed in Herbert Mars...
  57. Although the English building on my campus is not at all prepossessing, it is served ...
  58. "I remember this river," the old man began most of his stories. His hand, blackened b...
  59. A blues singer known as "Shug" Avery sweeps through Alice Walker's novel The Color Pu...
  60. Although the English building on my campus is not at all prepossessing, it is served ...
  61. In the early 1980s, when I was at Hollins College, Nikki Giovanni canceled a poetry r...
  62. Harvey Graff has argued convincingly that faith in the grand promises of literacy has...
  63. In our efforts to consider the structure of "rememory" in Beloved, we should call to ...
  64. Although the English building on my campus is not at all prepossessing, it is served ...
  65. Readers who are familiar with the first edition of Black American Music will be pleas...
  66. In every era the attempt must be made anew to wrest tradition away from a conformism ...
  67. Consistent critical attention focuses on Janie's voice because, as Michael Awkward ha...
  68. Like Pinkie Gordon Lane and Gerald Barrax, Michael S. Weaver is a good poet. He doesn...
  69. "There are just too many sides to the whole story," Cocoa tells George near the concl...
  70. When Mother got close to talk, I moved away. There wasn't anything wrong with Mother....
  71. A drienne Kennedy's recent play She Talks to Beethoven first appeared in Antaeus in t...
  72. Midway between the recent explosion of New Jack, Hollywood, "home-boy" potboilers suc...
  73. Let's face it: Toni Morrison's Beloved can only be re-read. But the challenges posed ...
  74. Although they have been featured in a number of newspaper articles, feminist rappers ...
  75. As the Critical Interpretations series of the 1960s aged with the advent of literary ...
  76. In recent years, the centrality of Ralph Ellison's place in African American literatu...
  77. Every summer she and her husband drive down to the country to spend time with her mot...
  78. "Did you use the rifle to shoot the achti?" "Yes." "And do you mean to use it to ...
  79. History, family, and place are very important to the poet, especially if he or she is...
  80. In the introduction to the section of his Black Theater USA anthology entitled "Early...
  81. Among the subjects Jamaican born writer Michelle Cliff explores in her writings are a...
  82. Precision and effectiveness also characterize the work of Gerald Barrax, whose Leanin...
  83. Studies of the Harlem Renaissance have so far paid insufficient attention to American...
  84. The True Story of Jesse James is still playing downtown; up on Market at the Manor, T...
  85. They called him Dizzy but the man had plenty sense. Pumping that trumpet like he had ...
  86. Minstrelsy before 1865 was a largely white-owned and white-performed phenomenon. Ther...
  87. It is by now a commonplace to note the wide variety -- the depth and breadth -- of vo...
  88. Nearly thirty years have passed since Nancy Larrick's article "The All-White World of...
  89. Almost a year ago, just before my dad died, when his bladder cancer had already sprea...
  90. God writes long letters and mails them postage due to come early one morning in the M...
  91. In their discussions of the period in Langston Hughes's life during which he composed...
  92. In "Blueprint for Black Studies and Multiculturalism," Manning Marable declares that ...
  93. It is by now a commonplace to note the wide variety - the depth and breadth - of voic...
  94. Gayl Jones's Corregidora (1975) painfully, often brutally, explores rigid definitiona...
  95. Break - heart, in your madness - rejoice in nothing that is - tomorrow's the day Ethe...
  96. Chester Himes, an American author who in his lifetime never found a "place" in the Am...
  97. Donna Haisty Wincholl. Alice Walker. New York: Twayne, 1992. 152 pp. $21-95. Jacqueli...
  98. In 1991 Lenard D. Moore won the Third Black Writers Competition and as part of his pr...
  99. From her earliest fictional work The Bluest Eye (1970) to her latest, Jazz (1992), To...
  100. It is the endless nightmare of the mind in continuous waking with no forest of green ...
  101. When I remember that house, I see it through a cloud of smoke. Our house was just an ...
  102. Although neither Jacqueline de Weever's Mythmaking and Metaphor in Black Women's Fict...
  103. Nearly thirty years have passed since Nancy Larrick's article "The All-White World of...
  104. Hide the outcast. Bury not him that wandereth. Let mine outcasts dwell with thee. Be ...
  105. Bobby Jo loved my sister Sarah deep in the woods behind our house and I pretended not...
  106. In the wild zone, we wait and watch and pray. A small, golden voice, delicate as a fa...
  107. The art of digital sampling in (primarily) African American hip hop is intricately co...
  108. What engages one right off is the quality of the language of Komunyakaa's poetry, a f...
  109. Nearly thirty years have passed since Nancy Larrick's article "The All-White World of...
  110. I I am Mfu, not a bit romantic, a water spirit, a voice from deep in the Atlantic: ...
  111. Hello? Mother? It's me, Floyce. I just got back from the courthouse, me and Russell. ...
  112. If double consciousness is a factor in the fiction of African Americans, then it make...
  113. It was during the period of turmoil and transformation of the 1960s that Clarence Maj...
  114. As one might deduce from its title, From Trickster to Badman: The Black Folk Hero in ...
  115. On Watching a Caterpillar Become a Butterfly It's a slow, slow process sitting...
  116. Morning on the terrace. Can hear Jean Baptiste Quenin crooning "Veilleur de toutes le...
  117. If you were to cut away the frame from Clarence Major's My Amputations - lopping off ...
  118. The checklist that follows lists the editions of Major's published book-length works....
  119. To identify African American literature for youth one has had to pry endlessly throug...
  120. On Trying to imagine the Kiwi Pregnant Having never been to New Zealand's green for...
  121. People have a tendency to ask a writer, Why did you become a writer? How did you beco...
  122. "Unlike his previous fiction, which was unstintingly experimental Such Was the Season...
  123. Gayl Jones is one of the most forceful voices in contemporary African American litera...
  124. The tiny beady-eyed rat bird with tiny teeth like a shark's flies against the blue ni...
  125. [NO TEXT CAPTURED] COPYRIGHT 1994 African American Review COPYRIGHT 2004 Gale Group...
  126. Readers who have followed Clarence Major's career and know his work RUM that as his c...
  127. Gayl Jones is one of the most forceful voices in contemporary African American litera...
  128. While driving north, lost through Wyoming along a river on a sun-dappled day alongsid...
  129. "In a novel,"Clarence Major told interviewer John O'Brien "the only thing you really ...
  130. Not too far gone are the days when any county museum served the naively colonial role...
  131. In his moving preface to Praisesong of Survival: Lectures and Essay, 1957-1989, Dolan...
  132. More than ten years before Rodney King was beaten by members of the Los Angeles Polic...
  133. The shade pull grazed liniment bottles on the window ledge. Moonflowers blossomed on ...
  134. She was looking in my mouth and I knowed no matter what words come to my mind the son...
  135. In the beginning was not only the word but the contradiction of the word In this lies...
  136. Let's start on the day I learn it's not a joke not some childish desire fulfilled not...
  137. "I know That care has iron crowns for many brows; That Calvaries are everywhere, wher...
  138. Grimke's Rachel is a play that is frequently credited with historical significance bu...
  139. Choices were being tossed into the street like dice, like shells, like kola nuts, lik...
  140. In Mama Day Naylor narrates the love story of two black people from strikingly differ...
  141. Color struck him like lightning and he went down with a thud, blinded to her blacknes...
  142. Shocking, convulsive, and enigmatic, Adrienne Kennedy's intense, one-act, surrealist ...
  143. In Toni Morrison's The Bluest Eye, the Breedloves' storefront apartment is graced ove...
  144. I been many things to many people but mostly I been fractured. I been a mother to my ...
  145. A work of jazz-prose, Gayle Pemberton's The Hottest Water in Chicago eclectically rum...
  146. Well you asked me, so I'll tell you. I'm a hustler. Nothing big-time or anything like...
  147. Perched atop the pine stump just off the curve of Duels Road, Renaldo swallowed a bel...
  148. The Disdain of Duality This discussion cannot be advanced without an initial and im...
  149. Zora Neale Hurston writes in Their Eyes Were Watching God (1973) from the interiority...
  150. Arna Wendell Bontemps (1902-1973) had a longer, more prolific career in humane letter...
  151. Wandalyn wears glances like a shawl. And if in the beer and smoke of this place a pai...
  152. It is, I strongly feel, important for blacks to write fiction about the South. I say ...
  153. Spike Lee prefaced She's Gotta Have It with the famous opening of Zora Neale Hurston'...
  154. Malcolm let his thoughts return to Paulie. And he found that he had already made a de...
  155. It was Saturday, April 2, 1988: Makin' Groceries Day at the Lavizzo house. Peggy turn...
  156. Robel Resez, guilty (AP) Durham - Resez screamed, when the verdict was read, and char...
  157. Central to the work of Ernest J. Gaines is the question of the place of religion in t...
  158. In "The Black Writer and the Southern Experience," Alice Walker defines her response ...
  159. It was hot. The heat had transformed the atmosphere from the inconspicuous gaseous ma...
  160. John Scott was born in New Orleans, Louisiana, on June 30, 1940. He has a B.A. from X...
  161. Margaret Walker is the prize-winning author of For My People, the first collection by...
  162. Albert Murray may well be African America's undiscovered national treasure, for in hi...
  163. Founded by SNCC (Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee) workers, the Free Souther...
  164. August Wilson granted me the following interview while he was in Washington, DC, for ...
  165. Physically, as a cohesive, functioning group, Umbra existed for only couple of years....
  166. Sascha Feinstein and Yusef Kommunyakaa, eds. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1991. 256 pp; $...
  167. A. LaVonne Brown Ruoff and Jerry W. Ward, Jr., eds. New York: MLA, 1990. 410 pp. $45 ...
  168. we thought it would always be whoever woulda dreamed it wouldnt huh? whoever woulda t...
  169. For many people, the Lower East Side of New York City has been a place of of historic...
  170. that delirious summer in africa we met in dakar senegal o black pearl of africa...
  171. I can feel it sometimes inside the harmonies of a dozen sister cousins aunts & womenf...
  172. Charles O. Hartman. Princeton: Princeton UP, 1991. 2D8 pp. $29.95. Feinstein and Ko...
  173. Ed. Robert A. Hill and R. Kent Rasmussen. Boston: Northeastern UP, 1991. 348 pp. $24....
  174. A century ago the area known as New York's Lower East Aside was among the most depres...
  175. they changed curtains waxed floors aired out the front company room sent for camphor ...
  176. Ed. Arnold Rampersand. New York: Library of America, 1991. 925 pp. $35.00. Richard ...
  177. In his three book-form editions of Clotel (1853, 1864, and 1867), William Wells Brown...
  178. Le film noir est noir pour nous, c'est-a-dire pour le public occidental et americain ...
  179. In The Mark of Cain, Ruth Mellinkoff rejects the single modern image of Cain she exam...
  180. You stand in white light. The rhinestones dripping like a million tears from your dre...
  181. Wallace Thurman. Intro. by Amritjit Singh. Boston: Northeastern UP, 1992. 314 pp. $12...
  182. 'Twas mercy brought me from my Pagan land, Taught my benighted soul to understand ...
  183. August Wilson's dramatic project is comprised of a cycle of plays that explore some o...
  184. The Lower East Side of New York has little relation to the mid-upper (but not too far...
  185. The air on that mid-September night was filled with a heavy and sullen wetness. Light...
  186. When Norma Rogers first mentioned the idea of a reunion of sixties Lower East Side ar...
  187. In 1925, when Josephine Baker went to Paris to perform in the Revenue Negre, she drew...
  188. Grandma mumbles a lot, it sounds like a foreign language. Sometimes she sits with her...
  189. Critics as diverse as Hodding Carter and Thadious M. Davis have asserted that the Sou...
  190. In an interview in the journal Callaloo, Yusef Komunyakaa, author of seven collection...
  191. To every jazz aficionado or would-be who has wondered what Professor Longhair was doi...
  192. You are not an endangered species; You will not die from an overdose of drugs Or be m...
  193. Mildred It's been years since Our mad telephone romance But I think of you still Ou...
  194. Every day, as we lugged tobacco down rows brightly lit with sun, the hot sand kept st...
  195. One day a famous white guy photographer came over to take Greta Garbo's picture, but ...
  196. Cast Henry Highsmith Mr. Highsmith Mrs. Highsmith Al Cohall Mary Wana Henrietta Herro...
  197. Sarah Webster Fabio published a considerable amount of her poetty in seven volumes un...
  198. Open your legs gal ain't gonna tell you no mo - now step right up you fine Virginia m...