AFRICAN AMERICAN REVIEW最新文献

{"title":"Visualizing Equality: African American Rights and Visual Culture in the Nineteenth Century by Aston Gonzalez (review)","authors":"Ryan A. Charlton","doi":"10.1353/afa.2022.0049","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/afa.2022.0049","url":null,"abstract":"for example, detailed discussion of the “scenes of parting” from loved ones represented in several slave narratives (264-65). This chapter in particular is a testament to how much white supremacy enveloped even arguments for personhood and “uplift,” severely circumscribing the kinds of print identities open to Black authors. Andrews is blunt about one of the book’s shortcomings, devoting most of the epilogue to the recognition that time and space prevent more than brief nods to slave narratives published after 1865; he ends the volume saying that “the testimony of this later generation of narrators awaits the hearing it deserves” (321). But the book leaves other questions, too. Certainly we should also study pre-1840 narratives, especially in the frames of the Black Atlantic world and the US’s break from Britain. Further, while Andrews considers the handful of women authors in a maledominated genre (with deep attention to Harriet Jacobs) as well as enslaved women who are discussed by male authors, gender does not often become a category of analysis here. (Andrews’s examples often suggest that enslaved women’s experiences of class may have been both different and more complex than those of many enslaved men.) And while the book is haunted by the recognition that enslaved people were legally chattel, it could say more about how enslaved people fashioned class and status when their commodified bodies served as markers of white enslavers’ class and status—topics raised by scholars from Walter Johnson to Daina Ramey Berry. Andrews is unrelenting in treating the texts as, per his subtitle, “testimony,” and, in this powerful echo of John Blassingame, he rightly reminds of whom we should listen to most when it comes to the historical record of slavery. Occasionally, though, this limits his discussion of slave narratives as built objects. Andrews notes, for example, that he does not follow authors’ class status outside of their narratives, and, beyond rich material in chapter one, he does not fully explore questions of class among nominally free African Americans. Most authors of slave narratives were writing while they were fashioning places for themselves in Northern spaces— and in communities whose class sensibilities have been explored by scholars from Julie Winch and Leslie Harris to Erica Armstrong Dunbar and Carla Peterson. Further, several narratives in Andrews’s study were enmeshed in the material culture and the business of antislavery—richly explored by Teresa Goddu. Apart from brief gestures in chapter four, we don’t learn much about how authors’ risky places as new Northerners may have shaped the kinds of testimony they chose—or were able—to offer. But each of these gaps would need another book—yea, books—to even introduce them adequately. Key among the wonders of Andrews’s volume is the grace with which he draws clear lines around what his single book can do and then gestures beyond those lines. I think we will be returning to Slavery and Cl","PeriodicalId":44779,"journal":{"name":"AFRICAN AMERICAN REVIEW","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2022-12-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"42857655","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":"Baseball and Beloved Community in the Memoirs and Poetry of E. Ethelbert Miller","authors":"E. Rutter","doi":"10.1353/afa.2022.0042","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/afa.2022.0042","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract:Developing what I term a “baseball imaginary,” E. Ethelbert Miller invokes the national pastime in his memoirs and poetry as a vehicle for reckoning with antiblackness on the one hand and realizing the promise of beloved community on the other. Indeed, Miller has contributed more to the Black baseball literature corpus than any other writer, but his renderings of baseball have yet to receive the scholarly consideration they warrant—a critical gap this essay begins to fill.","PeriodicalId":44779,"journal":{"name":"AFRICAN AMERICAN REVIEW","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2022-12-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"45418887","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":"Roots of the Black Chicago Renaissance: New Negro Writers, Artists, and Intellectuals, 1893–1930 ed. by Richard A. Courage and Christopher Robert Reed (review)","authors":"Caroline Gebhard","doi":"10.1353/afa.2022.0053","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/afa.2022.0053","url":null,"abstract":"Judith Butler, recognizes that such cataloguing raises significant questions about the grievability of racialized subjects who just become objects in the archive or the museum (149). One thinks of David Marriott’s recounting of a white man’s meditation on a nearly destroyed Black male lynching victim, “Don’t look human, does it?” The collected pieces may not “add up” to a full person. Yet the realist reproduction haunts, Reckson suggests, as the Ghost Dance creates a reimagining that will not let us forget, that keeps us in the grip of history— that creates a Pepper’s Ghost. Pepper’s Ghost was an illusion, essentially a 3-D hologram, that fascinated Victorian audiences, one produced by placing a piece of glass between the living person and the viewer and using light to make a reflection appear. I was reminded of this as I saw Reckson’s adept use of photographs, marking racialized people as ghosts even as they lived. These digital doubles— and Reckson’s work involves literary, artistic, sonic, and other digital doubles—are both present and absent, alive and dead, true and false, manageable and frightening, dismissible and haunting. In modern productions, at Disney World for example, the ghosts move among living persons, and Reckson suggests that they do so in Jim Crow America, sometimes confronting, sometimes reproducing history. They also sometimes break out to stand beside. Reckson’s analysis and presentation of this kind of absent presence, a product of racist realism, is strong throughout her work, but most haunting, to me, in this Ghost Dance chapter. I cannot do justice to such extensive work in this short review. Reckson is a talented reader of multiple kinds of texts and has a strong capacity for nuanced interdisciplinary interpretation. She uses multiple theoretical tools to demonstrate how violence is built into what Arjun Appadurai calls his multiple “scapes” that make up the social imaginary, imagining us even when we think we are reimagining, talking back effectively, to the metanarrative. I am grateful for her deft use of theories and thinkers of religion, through which and whom she helps us examine how the religion of the “other” in secular culture is still marked by an unmarked, “pure” Protestantism. In short, there are many strands moving through this complex work. I confess that I wished for a stronger concluding chapter to tie it together. But I recognize and nod in appreciation to Reckson’s insistence that neatness is not her project. She is faithful to her intent not to solve the paradox of realist ecstasy, but to let these examples rest in unresolvable tensions and multiple spaces—behind, before, beside; and her faithfulness marks her work as innovative and makes her analyses deft, difficult, unsettling, and informative.","PeriodicalId":44779,"journal":{"name":"AFRICAN AMERICAN REVIEW","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2022-12-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"43866280","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 Memory of Etheridge Knight, and: The Harness","authors":"H. Martin","doi":"10.1353/afa.2022.0045","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/afa.2022.0045","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":44779,"journal":{"name":"AFRICAN AMERICAN REVIEW","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2022-12-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"47719985","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":"Barry Jenkins, Meet D. W. Griffith, and: Portrait of a Lynched Boy","authors":"Murleve Roberts","doi":"10.1353/afa.2022.0046","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/afa.2022.0046","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":44779,"journal":{"name":"AFRICAN AMERICAN REVIEW","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2022-12-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"46845785","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":"“Some Damn Body”: Black Feminist Embodiment in the Spirit Writing of Lucille Clifton","authors":"M. Magloire","doi":"10.1353/afa.2022.0043","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/afa.2022.0043","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract:Despite her fame as a poet, Lucille Clifton’s practice of spirit writing remains little known and understudied. Clifton’s familial practice of automatic writing and spirit communication spanned decades and encompassed everything from past life regressions to conversations with departed spirits as diverse as Langston Hughes, Beethoven, Billie Holiday, and Jesus. This article uses Clifton’s unpublished spirit writing, recorded in the 1970s and ’80s, to shed light on themes of spirit and embodiment in her poetry. I argue that throughout Clifton’s published and archival work, she insists on the primacy and specificity of her Black woman’s body as a site of spiritual encounter, even as she complicates the notion of Black feminist embodiment by presenting the Black woman’s body as one transitory incarnation among many. By contextualizing Clifton’s spirit writing within a longer tradition of Black women’s vernacular mysticism, I outline the moral importance of Black women’s lived experiences on a cosmic timescale that seemingly eclipses race and gender.","PeriodicalId":44779,"journal":{"name":"AFRICAN AMERICAN REVIEW","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2022-12-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"46029053","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":"Carceral Aesthetics Justified","authors":"Michael Kelly","doi":"10.1353/afa.2022.0041","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/afa.2022.0041","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract:Nicole Fleetwood’s recent book, Marking Time: Art in the Age of Mass Incarceration, is distinctive because she engages with “carceral aesthetics,” yet she does not provide a justification for it. I think Herbert Marcuse is right, however, that we must justify aesthetics in relation to any space where human misery reigns. Carceral aesthetics can be justified in four ways: the etymology of aesthetics; its indispensability in prisons because it is denied there; a philosophical genealogy of aesthetics as a response to injustice; and the bond between prison art and carceral aesthetics as seen from the perspective of prison artists. Such justification only strengthens Fleetwood’s case for the importance of prison art.","PeriodicalId":44779,"journal":{"name":"AFRICAN AMERICAN REVIEW","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2022-12-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"43739299","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":"Poem 9, and: Poem 35, and: Poem 219, and: Poem 27","authors":"Dennis Williams","doi":"10.1353/afa.2022.0047","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/afa.2022.0047","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":44779,"journal":{"name":"AFRICAN AMERICAN REVIEW","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2022-12-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"42197479","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":"Realist Ecstasy: Religion, Race, and Performance in American Literature by Lindsay V. Reckson (review)","authors":"Carolyn M. Jones Medine","doi":"10.1353/afa.2022.0052","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/afa.2022.0052","url":null,"abstract":"In Realist Ecstasy: Religion, Race, and Performance in American Literature, Lindsay V. Reckson uses the current scholarship on secularism to examine, as she notes, a period that this theory has ignored: post-Reconstruction America and the emergence of Jim Crow. Reckson argues that this era, with its consolidation of notions of race and its creation of racial segregation, is “central to . . . a regulatory regime of secularism” (5). African American uneasiness with the secular regime, held in place by a predominately Protestant Christian majority culture, is performed in racial, ethnic, artistic, and religious forms. Ecstatic performance of racialized persons, therefore, is multiply located—behind, before, and beside the dominant culture (234)—a formulation that she takes from the “Bacchic performance” (236) in a church in Nella Larsen’s Quicksand (1928). Reckson argues that “realism gives us a sense of how deeply encoded the secular is with structures of white supremacy” (3). As she examines the semiotics of the “frenzied black body,” Reckson argues that even as realism struggles to forget how it is implicated in white supremacy, its effort to leave it behind is haunted by what it tries to contain. For example: “Naturalizing racial and spiritual boundaries as part of its steadfast attention to the material world, realist practice nevertheless remains strikingly animated by ecstasy’s occluded histories of violence” (234), signaling a “very real proximity between ecstasy and terror.” Realism’s autonomy, therefore, is “haunted by what [it] can ever completely forget.” Ecstatic performance, however, happens not just within but also beside these ongoing histories, opening often occluded possibilities of freedom as they both archive the past and present and open “(counter)investments” (235). In Jim Crow America, Reckson writes that secularism is a drama “at or of the skin” (7). Therefore, performance is constrained by a Gordian knot of “racial violence, compulsion, and the ‘religious’ ” (2). Her objects of inquiry are sites of inspiration, contagion, and enthusiasm, religious forms and gestures emerging from the Second Great Awakening, which included emotional, ecstatic, and personal conversion experiences, and which, in its relative openness to people of color, led to reform movements and progressivism. Yet for Reckson, these movements reinscribe rather than transcend racism as they stand within its structures and strictures. Reckson examines the particular fascination in Black spiritual experience with Black and other racialized bodies in ecstasy, while also demonstrating how progressivism is interwoven with racially coded white supremacy. The stability of this secular order is continuously haunted, however, by a Derridean return of what postReconstruction America thought or hoped was dead and buried. This return happens because the material world is structured by this haunting, by the “pervasive systems of racial capital, imperialism, and genocide” t","PeriodicalId":44779,"journal":{"name":"AFRICAN AMERICAN REVIEW","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2022-12-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"46112621","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 Short Stories of Frank Yerby ed. by Veronica T. Watson, and: Rediscovering Frank Yerby: Critical Essays ed. by Matthew Teutsch (review)","authors":"Kinohi Nishikawa","doi":"10.1353/afa.2022.0051","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/afa.2022.0051","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":44779,"journal":{"name":"AFRICAN AMERICAN REVIEW","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2022-12-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"42359924","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}