AFRICAN AMERICAN REVIEW最新文献

{"title":"\"I dreamt that the world was on fire\": Boston King's Memoirs, Visionary Discourse, and Colonial Salvation","authors":"Joe Lockard","doi":"10.1353/afa.2023.a920496","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/afa.2023.a920496","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>Abstract:</p><p><i>Memoirs of Boston King, a Black Preacher</i> appeared in serial form in <i>The Methodist Magazine</i> between March and June 1798. King escaped slavery in South Carolina, joined the British army to fight in the Revolutionary War, eventually resettled in Nova Scotia, and emigrated to Sierra Leone. This essay argues that readings of King’s <i>Memoirs</i> solely as a historical document are inadequate. The essay first summarizes King’s biography and contextualizes it within early Methodist history; a second section reads epiphanic visionary moments in King’s narrative; and a third section considers how colonial and white supremacist thought in the early Methodist church employed King’s narrative as a conversionary instrument.</p></p>","PeriodicalId":44779,"journal":{"name":"AFRICAN AMERICAN REVIEW","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2024-02-28","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"140002712","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"In and Out of This World: Material and Extraterrestrial Bodies in the Nation of Islam by Stephen C. Finley (review)","authors":"Leonard C. McKinnis","doi":"10.1353/afa.2023.a920503","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/afa.2023.a920503","url":null,"abstract":"<span><span>In lieu of</span> an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:</span>\u0000<p> <span>Reviewed by:</span> <ul> <li><!-- html_title --> <em>In and Out of This World: Material and Extraterrestrial Bodies in the Nation of Islam</em> by Stephen C. Finley <!-- /html_title --></li> <li> Leonard C. McKinnis </li> </ul> Stephen C. Finley. <em>In and Out of This World: Material and Extraterrestrial Bodies in the Nation of Islam</em>. Durham: Duke UP, 2023. 252 pp. $30.00. <p><strong>I</strong>n <em>In and Out of This World</em>, Stephen Finley offers a granular look at conceptions of the body in the Nation of Islam (NOI, or “The Nation”), and how these formations provide a portal of analysis for understanding the theological anthropology of the NOI. Finley is concerned with the body as a site of theological analysis. His work is crucial in understanding the sophistication of the body, its centrality to the theology of the NOI, and how the Nation’s theology of the body—specifically, the racialized body— is at the core of many of the Nation’s most consequential beliefs, particularly <em>vis-à-vis</em> the status of Blacks as the chosen and original people. Finley goes at length to demonstrate how ideas about the body in the NOI complicate narratives of science, history, and race while also providing a closer examination of how race and embodiment are both theorized and woven into a set of ideas that constitutes the belief-world of the Nation of Islam.</p> <p>The Nation of Islam remains one of the most misunderstood Black religions in the world. In fact, its classification as a religion remains a contested category. Finley, for his part, prefers a hybridized read of the NOI, one characterized under the category of “religious nationalism.” For him, this designation “challenges existing scholarship that defines it as primarily— if not exclusively—black nationalist” (2). Indeed, the very first academic text on the Nation of Islam, C. Eric Lincoln’s <em>The Black Muslims in America</em> (1961), insisted on a Black nationalist lens as the hermeneutical category for an interpretation of the NOI. While Lincoln’s posture toward the NOI is helpful in terms of understanding the intersection of race, religion, and social resistance, Finley’s <em>In and Out of This World</em> asks readers to position their engagement with the NOI squarely within the realm of religious studies. While Finley is not alone in this regard, his work expands our understanding of the religious cosmology within the NOI and its relationship to the body, to race, and to salvation—all important themes for a rigorous understanding of the NOI.</p> <p>Finley’s text is grounded in a theory that describes Black bodies as being <em>in-</em> and <em>out-of-place</em>. This novel concept of embodiment is derived from the thinking of social anthropologist Mary Douglas, who employs the metaphor of “dirt” to describe cultural notions of purity and contagion. Dirt is out of place and contaminates","PeriodicalId":44779,"journal":{"name":"AFRICAN AMERICAN REVIEW","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2024-02-28","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"140011208","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Enslavement, Freedom, and Marronage in N. K. Jemisin's Broken Earth Trilogy","authors":"Lisa M. Anderson","doi":"10.1353/afa.2023.a920497","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/afa.2023.a920497","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>Abstract:</p><p>This essay argues that N. K. Jemisin’s award-winning <i>Broken Earth</i> science fiction trilogy engages the concepts of freedom, enslavement, and <i>marronage</i> through the stories of her orogene narrators Essun and Nessun. Through the complexity of the trilogy, Jemisin challenges her readers to consider the nature of enslavement and freedom, and the challenges and necessity of radical transformation to create new ways of being.</p></p>","PeriodicalId":44779,"journal":{"name":"AFRICAN AMERICAN REVIEW","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2024-02-28","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"140011431","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"The Classical Tradition in Modern American Fiction by Tessa Roynon (review)","authors":"Patrice Rankine","doi":"10.1353/afa.2023.a920505","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/afa.2023.a920505","url":null,"abstract":"<span><span>In lieu of</span> an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:</span>\u0000<p> <span>Reviewed by:</span> <ul> <li><!-- html_title --> <em>The Classical Tradition in Modern American Fiction</em> by Tessa Roynon <!-- /html_title --></li> <li> Patrice Rankine </li> </ul> Tessa Roynon. <em>The Classical Tradition in Modern American Fiction</em>. Edinburgh: Edinburgh UP, 2021. 296 pp. $35.95. <p><strong>T</strong>he quest for the Great American Novel was a constant literary trope and a heroic personal pursuit for many writers across the twentieth century. In the twenty-first century, perhaps only avid readers of fiction wonder about the novel’s galvanizing role in culture, its ability to make a nation, as Benedict Anderson (1983) had it. The imagined community now consumes on the big screen literary masterpieces of our own and bygone eras, like Homer’s <em>Iliad</em> or Toni Morrison’s <em>Beloved</em>. Titles like <em>The Great Gatsby</em> become blockbuster movies or television miniseries. For the more perspicacious student and scholar willing to diverge from the beaten path to understand points of origination and particular nuances, Tessa Roynon offers a roadmap, a comprehensive treatment of classics and classical reception in some of the most important American novels of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. The study navigates through nineteen Great Books (a category the author dates to 1943 and the <em>Britannica</em> series), the one outlier being the unfinished, posthumous work of Ralph Ellison, <em>Three Days Before the Shooting. .</em>., which Roynon rightly hesitates to call a novel. The seven Great American writers included in the study (a chapter dedicated to each) are: Willa Cather, F. Scott Fitzgerald, William Faulkner, Ralph Ellison, Toni Morrison, Philip Roth, and Marilynne Robinson.</p> <p>Classical myth, literature (preferably in the Greek and Latin original), and the artifacts of ancient Greece and Rome amount to a kind of Holy Grail on the journey to the Great American Novel, promised ends for readers and writers alike. Roynon asks “why so much modern, postmodern, and/or contemporary US fiction, occupying every position on the realist-toexperimentalist spectrum, makes such varied and extensive use of classical Greek and Roman tradition” (1-2). Since the writers hold fast to the classics and their reception—Greek and Roman, and secondarily, those within the broader Great Books framework—Roynon does as well. Her approach, however, is in notable ways different from her forebears’. One of the new and improved sensibilities in Roynon’s book is her heightened attention to efforts within the United States and across the professional field of Classical <strong>[End Page 248]</strong> Reception studies, globally, to diversify the canon of literary authors. For example, alongside the well-trodden theoretical study of classics and classical reception, owing to decades of research in the field, Roynon can now conscript into","PeriodicalId":44779,"journal":{"name":"AFRICAN AMERICAN REVIEW","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2024-02-28","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"140011432","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Fighting for the Higher Law: Black and White Transcendentalists against Slavery by Peter Wirzbicki (review)","authors":"Lawrence Buell","doi":"10.1353/afa.2023.a920504","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/afa.2023.a920504","url":null,"abstract":"<span><span>In lieu of</span> an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:</span>\u0000<p> <span>Reviewed by:</span> <ul> <li><!-- html_title --> <em>Fighting for the Higher Law: Black and White Transcendentalists against Slavery</em> by Peter Wirzbicki <!-- /html_title --></li> <li> Lawrence Buell </li> </ul> Peter Wirzbicki. <em>Fighting for the Higher Law: Black and White Transcendentalists against Slavery</em>. Philadelphia: U of Pennsylvania P, 2021. 325 pp. $39.95. <p><strong>T</strong>his thoughtfully argued book makes an unusual and rather counterintuitive contribution to nineteenth-century US intellectual history by <strong>[End Page 245]</strong> concentrating on the relationship between two arenas of thought and action usually discussed separately and often presumed to have relatively little to do with each other.</p> <p>Since it is well known that the American Transcendentalist movement was fomented by a group of white Northern progressives, writing from within and largely for fellow members of the New England intelligentsia, the implication that a cadre of Black Transcendentalists also existed is certain to raise eyebrows. Readers are likely to approach this book supposing that any similarities between the priorities of Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, Margaret Fuller, and Theodore Parker and those of Black abolitionists would have been a fortuitous convergence arising from the [white] Transcendentalists’ somewhat belated but increasingly zealous commitment to abolitionism and Black activists’ pragmatic enlistment of Transcendentalist rhetoric for strategic purposes. Against this view, Wirzbicki argues resourcefully and for the most part persuasively that the interactions between the two groups and, more important, the cross-pollinations of thought, were far deeper and more extensive than that—indeed, more so than anyone has yet realized.</p> <p>Although none of this book’s Black protagonists—Frederick Douglass, William C. Nell, Lewis Hayden, Charlotte Forten, and others—seem to have self-described as a Transcendentalist, Wirzbicki demonstrates a pattern of significant and increasing mutual awareness, cross-communication, and periodic collaboration from the late 1830s through the Civil War years. In his account, the initial epicenters for both personal and intellectual exchange were the Northampton Community, the antebellum socialist venture most receptive to African Americans, and the Boston Adelphi Society, which Wirzbicki characterizes as a forum for Black intellectuals equivalent to the Transcendental Club of the 1830s and early 1840s, before which several of the latter were invited to speak. The more consequential—and controversial— part of his argument, however, is that northeastern Black activists looked to the Transcendentalists not merely or even primarily for tactical and financial support for the abolition of slavery and the assistance of fugitive slaves, in which the African American community had already take","PeriodicalId":44779,"journal":{"name":"AFRICAN AMERICAN REVIEW","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2024-02-28","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"140002581","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Prospect.5 New Orleans: Yesterday We Said Tomorrow by Naima J. Keith and Diana Nawi (review)","authors":"T. R. Johnson","doi":"10.1353/afa.2023.a920511","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/afa.2023.a920511","url":null,"abstract":"<span><span>In lieu of</span> an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:</span>\u0000<p> <span>Reviewed by:</span> <ul> <li><!-- html_title --> <em>Prospect.5 New Orleans: Yesterday We Said Tomorrow</em> by Naima J. Keith and Diana Nawi <!-- /html_title --></li> <li> T. R. Johnson </li> </ul> Naima J. Keith and Diana Nawi. <em>Prospect.5 New Orleans: Yesterday We Said Tomorrow</em>. New York: Rizzoli Electra, 2021. 272 pp. $60.00. <p><strong>P</strong><em>rospect New Orleans</em>, the art triennial that began in the years immediately after Hurricane Katrina, is now in its fifth iteration, and the circumstances surrounding the 2021 exhibition are in many ways closer to those of first one than the other three that have been mounted since the series’ inception. Originally slated to open in the fall of 2020, the event was postponed by a year as the world reeled from the COVID-19 pandemic; just weeks before the exhibition’s rescheduled opening in the fall of 2021, Hurricane Ida, the most destructive weather event to strike the New Orleans area since <strong>[End Page 266]</strong> Katrina, forced another delay. <em>Prospect.5</em> finally opened in a series of three waves later in the fall of 2021, with its grand gala pushed back to January 2022. As with so many major cultural institutions, its return to something like its original, public life in the fall of 2021 seemed tinged with a sense of the miraculous—that is, in such circumstances, sheer wonder at how much work, how much perseverance, imagination, time, energy, and will were required to bring it off. Unique, however, among the countless institutions trying to reboot themselves in what we hope is the winding down of the pandemic, <em>Prospect.5</em> has situated itself self-consciously in its very particular setting in New Orleans and can be thought of as a kind of microcosm of the vast cultural legacy of Black people in the surrounding region—a city that served for generations as the central node in the interstate trafficking of the enslaved, a city where floods, epidemics, and hurricanes have regularly challenged, at its core, the dream of stable, functional institutions.</p> <p>“The catalog came together over the course of 2019, 2020, and early 2021,” write <em>Prospect.5</em> artistic directors Naima J. Keith and Diana Nawi. Keith and Nawi chose to keep unchanged what was written at early stages in this arc of impossible tumult so that the catalog—and the exhibition as a whole—could serve as “a document of passing through and being in.” Near the middle of this interval, in the spring of 2020, when they assumed that the exhibition’s opening was only seven months away, their original timeline was upended and the organizations’ future became uncertain. Circumstances around them grew yet more dire; that July, <em>Prospect</em> ’s entire staff had been furloughed. Meanwhile, the largest demonstrations for racial justice in the history of the United States were rocking the streets of many do","PeriodicalId":44779,"journal":{"name":"AFRICAN AMERICAN REVIEW","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2024-02-28","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"140002677","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"True Crime: An Interview with George Elliott Clarke","authors":"Nathan L. Grant","doi":"10.1353/afa.2023.a920494","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/afa.2023.a920494","url":null,"abstract":"<span><span>In lieu of</span> an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:</span>\u0000<p> <ul> <li><!-- html_title --> True Crime: <span>An Interview with George Elliott Clarke</span> <!-- /html_title --></li> <li> Nathan L. Grant (bio) </li> </ul> <p><strong>G</strong>eorge Elliott Clarke, OC ONS^* is one of Canada’s most important literary artists, distinguished in poetry, prose, and drama. An internationally known figure of letters, he has lectured, taught, and read across Canada, in the United States, and Europe. From 2012 to 2015, he was Poet Laureate of Toronto, and for 2016–17, he was the Canadian Parliamentary Poet Laureate. He is also widely known for his writings about the history of the African Canadian communities of Nova Scotia and New Brunswick, which he calls “Africadia”; he graced <strong><em>AAR</em></strong> ’s pages as guest editor of a critical and poetical special issue on the Africadian experience, or African Canadianité.</p> <p>In our catching up, I learned of this latest episode of his career, and we corresponded for this interview via email this past November.</p> <strong>Nathan L. Grant:</strong> <p>Just for the sake of background, we first met briefly in the mid-1990s, when you were part of an MLA panel of African Canadian writers; you were there with Cecil Foster, Afua Cooper, and a fourth, another woman writer, whom I regret I don’t now remember—could it have been Dionne Brand, perhaps? Your then-most recent collection of poetry, <em>W</em> <em>hylah Falls</em>, had just been released.</p> <strong>George Elliott Clarke:</strong> <p>Nathan, your recollection is better than mine. I believe that you are thinking of an MLA panel that occurred in Toronto in December 1993. My second book of poetry—<em>Whylah Falls</em> (Polestar, 1990)— was still young (yet, I’m thankful that, a Jesus-age—thirty-three years—later, it remains in print), and I do remember sharing the recitation stage with Cecil Foster and Afua Cooper. I don’t recall Dionne’s presence. No matter: If she was absent, her corpus—her work—would still have resonated.</p> <strong>NLG:</strong> <p>Anyway, years later you came to guest-edit an <strong><em>AAR</em></strong> special issue on African Canadianité in volume 51.3 (Fall 2018). That was our second intellectual venture beyond the United States, and you were also guest-editing from various points across Europe, I believe. That was a big issue for us, and also a lot of fun—but also a lot of work for you, so I hope it was also fun!—once again, many thanks.</p> <strong>GEC:</strong> <p>I don’t say this to curry favor, but <strong><em>African American Review</em></strong> —along with <em>Callaloo</em> —was a dynamic factor in my (race) consciousness and on my moral conscience when I began to articulate the distinct existence of African Canadian literature within the larger frame of African diasporic literature while I was a junior professor at Duke from 1994 to 1999. I remain also very <strong>[End Pa","PeriodicalId":44779,"journal":{"name":"AFRICAN AMERICAN REVIEW","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2024-02-28","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"140002752","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Editing the Harlem Renaissance ed. by Joshua M. Murray and Ross K. Tangedal (review)","authors":"Mark Whalan","doi":"10.1353/afa.2023.a920502","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/afa.2023.a920502","url":null,"abstract":"<span><span>In lieu of</span> an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:</span>\u0000<p> <span>Reviewed by:</span> <ul> <li><!-- html_title --> <em>Editing the Harlem Renaissance</em> ed. by Joshua M. Murray and Ross K. Tangedal <!-- /html_title --></li> <li> Mark Whalan </li> </ul> Joshua M. Murray and Ross K. Tangedal, eds. <em>Editing the Harlem Renaissance</em>. Clemson: Clemson UP, 2021. 312 pp. $143.00. <p><strong>I</strong>n 1951, in <em>The Crisis</em> ’ fortieth anniversary number, W. E. B. Du Bois reminisced, in an essay titled “Editing the Crisis,” on his experience of editing the magazine between 1910 and 1934. He recalled that “[w]e condensed more news about Negroes and their problems in a month than most colored papers before this had published in a year. Then we had four pages of editorials, which talked turkey. The articles were at first short and negligible but gradually increased in number, length, and importance; but we were never able to pay contributors. Pictures of colored people were an innovation.” Du Bois’s swagger here in part reflected how <em>The Crisis</em> had led the way for a golden age of African American periodicals (and editing) in the Harlem, or New Negro, Renaissance. <em>The Messenger</em>, <em>Opportunity</em>, <em>The Negro World</em>, <em>The Crusader</em>, and <em>Fire!!</em> (among others) would follow in the next sixteen years, all equally keen to “talk turkey” and some to pursue <em>The Crisis</em> ’ goal of leveraging Black literary achievement into national cultural politics. Anthologies like Alain Locke’s <em>The New Negro</em> (1925), Countee Cullen’s <em>Caroling Dusk</em> (1927) and James Weldon Johnson’s <em>Book of American Negro Poetry</em> (1922, rev. ed. 1931) did the work of Black canon consolidation in unprecedented ways, and figures in the public library system (especially in New York) and at HBCUs (especially Howard) did invaluable work in building the archives that still constitute the backbone of Black collections in the US. <em>Editing the Harlem Renaissance</em> takes a bracingly capacious definition of editing to account for such multiplicity—a definition that ranges from the self-editing that informed Langston Hughes’s work on his three autobiographies to the labor of librarians—to explore how editorial work shaped and mediated African American culture at this pivotal moment. The collection often recurs to the issues Du Bois flags here—the frequent precariousness of the Harlem Renaissance’s cultural economy; how the movement looks if we privilege how it “happened in (some of) the magazines,” as John K. Young puts it; and the constraints imposed by a Jim Crow media ecology. Equally important in <em>Editing the Harlem Renaissance</em>, however, is its exploration of how the Harlem Renaissance is reproduced for contemporary audiences through modern editorial practices—ranging from the racial imbalances stratifying the digital humanities (DH) to how trade editions have shaped unde","PeriodicalId":44779,"journal":{"name":"AFRICAN AMERICAN REVIEW","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2024-02-28","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"140011457","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Toward \"a more complete . . . corpus\": Recovering Two Lost Pieces by Marita Bonner","authors":"M. Genevieve West","doi":"10.1353/afa.2023.a920495","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/afa.2023.a920495","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>Abstract:</p><p>This “Forgotten Manuscripts” includes two pieces—one entirely undocumented—that were not included in Marita Bonner’s <i>Frye Street and Environs</i> (1987). The first is a modernist essay, “—And I Passed By,” which appeared under a pseudonym in the landmark volume <i>Ebony and Topaz</i> (1927). The second is an undocumented short story, “A Crown of Paste,” which appeared in the <i>Pittsburgh Courier</i> near the end of Bonner’s career. Both texts return to the issues of religion and faith that weave throughout the body of Bonner’s creative endeavors. I situate “—And I Passed By” biographically and theologically within the Social Gospel. “A Crown of Paste” continues Bonner’s treatments of religion more than twelve years later in a spare, realistic mode, illustrating the perils of the Great Migration as well as the failures of the storefront church and government relief efforts to alleviate suffering. The quality of Bonner’s work rivals that of her better-known contemporaries. These two pieces serve as markers of an accomplished career and a beautiful body of work that deserves additional scholarly and popular attention.</p></p>","PeriodicalId":44779,"journal":{"name":"AFRICAN AMERICAN REVIEW","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2024-02-28","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"140011262","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Cross-Racial Class Protest in Antebellum American Literature by Timothy Helwig (review)","authors":"Gero Guttzeit","doi":"10.1353/afa.2023.a903614","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/afa.2023.a903614","url":null,"abstract":"The cumulative effect of this book is disquieting. The very power of the primary texts and photographs calls for more careful and sensitive framing if we are meant to read the book as an argument and not a catalog. In fact, the publication may have been more useful if it had been formulated as a source book or catalog. Willis could have summarized historical events to introduce sections comprised of fully documented texts and images. Either format would have called for an expanded bibliography inclusive of recent scholarship by other, often younger writers. Instead, Willis’s bibliography is lean and relies heavily on a few secondary sources, especially Edwin S. Redkey’s A Grand Army of Black Men: Letters from African-American Soldiers in the Union Army, 1861-65 (1992). Most helpful are her citations of lesser-known online collections such as the Freedmen and Southern Society Project at the University of Maryland and the National Library of Medicine. The Black Civil War Soldier: A Visual History of Conflict and Citizenship compiles a riveting archive of the Civil War’s volatile, disparate utterances and images. As a linear narrative, however, the book is disturbing because so many dissimilar texts and photographs are placed side by side without explanation. Further work is required to address the many issues raised both by these primary documents and the gap between what words and images can do. We urgently need books about these African Americans who courageously fought for a justice that has yet to be attained. This publication makes us want to see more, but this fact is both its weakness and also its strength. As always, Willis highlights a corpus that will inspire further, crucial work.","PeriodicalId":44779,"journal":{"name":"AFRICAN AMERICAN REVIEW","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2023-03-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"49482914","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}