{"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":"56 1","pages":"125 - 127"},"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}
{"title":"The Education of Milkman Dead: The Bildungsroman as Aesthetic Cycle in Toni Morrison’s Song of Solomon","authors":"D. Goodhead","doi":"10.1353/afa.2023.a903597","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/afa.2023.a903597","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract:Rational critique of one’s existential condition and questions of why, where, when, who, what dominate Morrison’s Song of Solomon. As she clearly shows in the novel, it is in finding answers to these questions that one is better able to deal with one’s existential condition and, where necessary, to make the transition from fragmentation to wholeness as a subject dealing with the history and experience of a racial formation that renders one either as an object or inferior other. In Song, the site of the exploration of these questions is the familial space and the marginal public constituted by black America, through which their unheard voices are given full play. Straddling the various familial spaces and marginal public is the novel’s protagonist, Milkman Dead, whose growth away from a selfish, materialistic young man Morrison tells magically as a bildungsroman, textual revision, and aesthetic cycle.","PeriodicalId":44779,"journal":{"name":"AFRICAN AMERICAN REVIEW","volume":"56 1","pages":"43 - 56"},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2023-03-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"44188573","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":"Alternate Universe in Which I Am Unfazed by My White High School Classmates, and: Lazarus","authors":"M. Ray","doi":"10.1353/afa.2023.a903606","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/afa.2023.a903606","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":44779,"journal":{"name":"AFRICAN AMERICAN REVIEW","volume":"56 1","pages":"116 - 117"},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2023-03-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"42857578","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":"“Let us look at the immediate background of this young poet”: Langston Hughes and the Sociological Critique of Taste","authors":"Louisa Olufsen Layne","doi":"10.1353/afa.2023.a903596","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/afa.2023.a903596","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract:Langston Hughes’s classic essay “The Negro Artist and the Racial Mountain” is commonly read as a defense of Black racial pride. I argue that it simultaneously performs a subtle but radical sociological critique of the Kantian paradigm of disinterested taste. “The Negro Artist and Racial Mountain” should therefore be read as a proto-sociology of literature that highlights the blind spot in regard to race often found in Bourdieusian frameworks. Hughes’s work can also provide the sociology of literature today with alternative models for thinking about the entanglement of taste, class, and power, and for conceptualizing aesthetic autonomy.","PeriodicalId":44779,"journal":{"name":"AFRICAN AMERICAN REVIEW","volume":"56 1","pages":"27 - 42"},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2023-03-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"45070061","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":"Humans and the Red-Hot Stove: Hurston’s Nature-Caution Theorizing in Their Eyes Were Watching God","authors":"Heather Sharlene Higgs Randall","doi":"10.1353/afa.2023.a903599","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/afa.2023.a903599","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract:This paper gives critical attention to a porch conversation about nature and caution in Zora Neale Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God, identifying the conversation as a tool through which Hurston recasts the traditional anthropological binary of nature and culture. In conversation with Hurston’s literary critics as well as scholars of environmental humanities and multispecies studies, I propose that Hurston employs the porch conversation’s nature-caution epistemology throughout her novel to attain a unified understanding of human and nonhuman.","PeriodicalId":44779,"journal":{"name":"AFRICAN AMERICAN REVIEW","volume":"56 1","pages":"73 - 88"},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2023-03-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"41631415","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":"Mentoring a New Generation of African American Haiku Writers: In Conversation with Lenard D. Moore","authors":"C. Smith","doi":"10.1353/afa.2023.a903594","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/afa.2023.a903594","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract:Lenard D. Moore has published more haiku than any other African American writing in the genre. He has also mentored a new generation of African American haiku writers, including Camille Dungy. This interview details his work as a prolific haiku poet and a mentor.","PeriodicalId":44779,"journal":{"name":"AFRICAN AMERICAN REVIEW","volume":"56 1","pages":"1 - 8"},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2023-03-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"49118319","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":"Afro-Creole Poetry in French from Louisiana’s Radical Civil War-Era Newspapers: A Bilingual Edition by Clint Bruce (review)","authors":"Brian O'keeffe","doi":"10.1353/afa.2023.a903611","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/afa.2023.a903611","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":44779,"journal":{"name":"AFRICAN AMERICAN REVIEW","volume":"56 1","pages":"146 - 150"},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2023-03-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"45805277","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}