{"title":"The Content of Our Caricature: African American Comic Art and Political Belonging by Rebecca Wanzo (review)","authors":"H. B. Wonham","doi":"10.1353/afa.2023.a903617","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/afa.2023.a903617","url":null,"abstract":"leaders in the nation during the FDR presidential era that situates her distinctly within the annals of African American and American history. In particular, Bethune’s relationship with First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt positions her as an intermediary between nation and community, slavery’s imprint, and the Jim Crow era, and makes legible countervailing representations of Black women during the 1920s and ’30s. These racialized social scripts cause Richardson to say of Bethune and of Rosa Parks that there is efficacy in considering the fascinating interconnectedness of their noted legacies. This connection is particularly significant when considering the Black maternal motif and its interrelatedness to the pivotal public journeys of Beyoncé Knowles Carter and Michelle Obama. That Carter engages her complex positionalities as wife, mother, businesswoman, and strategic collaborative partner with Black queer and trans women foregrounds the tensions Richardson notes in the performativity of blackness (here, she frames her discussion around Beyoncé’s “formation” during the halftime show at Super Bowl L and her singing of Etta James’s classic At Last as a backdrop to the inaugural dance of the Obamas, among other noteworthy public moments), and the reflexiveness of a supposedly colorblind and postracial moment ushered in by the Obamas’ White House. As Richardson delineates with acute clarity, however, Michelle Obama’s very presence as First Lady of this country—and indeed of the world, given the global importance of the US—disrupts the interpretative frameworks of national and global feminism, motherhood, and beauty as inherently white. Michelle Obama’s very body became a canvas for racist and stereotypical caricature (as did her husband’s). Such primitive musings make legible the caustic and vile underbelly of a national imagery intent on activating and reengaging the symbols of hatred and white supremacy whose roots lead back to a nostalgic longing for days of old. Michelle Obama’s references to her daughters playing on the lawn of a White House built with the labor of enslaved people—and her ability to trace her ancestral background to a great-great-grandfather enslaved on the Friendfield Plantation in Georgetown, South Carolina) allow her to control this American script in ways that reinstitute her personhood along the very rift that is meant to disempower her. The phrase “when and where I enter” takes on renewed meaning in Richardson’s work as Bethune, Parks, Obama, and Carter become emblems of change— unapologetically Black, unabashedly human, unmistakably complex.","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":"48792205","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":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":"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":"Homage to Alejo Carpentier, and: Skin, and: Cuban Triolet, and: Parable of the Seeds","authors":"O. Menes","doi":"10.1353/afa.2023.a903605","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/afa.2023.a903605","url":null,"abstract":"","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":"43547237","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":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":"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":"“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":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":"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":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":"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":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":"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":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":"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}
{"title":"Agneu","authors":"Shelonda Montgomery","doi":"10.1353/afa.2023.a903601","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/afa.2023.a903601","url":null,"abstract":"","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":"48531498","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}