Project MUSE®: African American Review - Latest Articles
https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/434
Project MUSE®: Latest articles in African American Review.daily12026-05-15T00:00:00-05:00text/htmlen-USVol. 43 (2009) through current issueLatest Articles: African American ReviewTWOProject MUSE®African American Review1945-61821062-4783Latest articles in African American Review. Feed provided by Project MUSE®Blurring Borders and the Journey into Disability Writing: An Interview with Anand Prahlad
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/984286
<p></p>
Anand Prahlad grew up in a cross-generational family and community of slave descendants from Hickory Hill plantation in Virginia. For the first four years of his life Prahlad did not speak, but his silence did not stop him from communicating with the world around him. Ordinary household objects came to life; the spirits of long-dead slave children were his best friends. In his magical interior world, sensory experiences blurred, time disappeared, and memory was fluid. As art, music, and poetry found welcome and capacious homes in that world and through his travels across its wide horizons, Prahlad eventually became an artist and educator. His extraordinary sensitivity aided him in these endeavors as well as it
... <a href="https://muse.jhu.edu/article/984305">Read More</a>
Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-15T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/434/image/coversmallBlurring Borders and the Journey into Disability Writing: An Interview with Anand Prahlad2026-03-03text/htmlen-USBlurring Borders and the Journey into Disability Writing: An Interview with Anand Prahlad2026-03-032026TWOProject MUSE®452082026-05-15T00:00:00-05:002026-03-03Family Homes, Inverted: Illicit Occupations and Black Intimacies in and beyond the Loophole of Retreat
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/984287
<p></p>
About halfway through Joe Talbot's 2019 film The Last Black Man in San Francisco, three men in boxers sit in a sauna. They occupy plastic lawn chairs, although the sauna is either inside or adjacent to the Victorian mansion that once belonged to the family of the main character, Jimmie Fails. Jimmie and his friend Mont are squatters, playing host to their friend Kofi. Through the haze of the sauna, Kofi settles into his chair and says to Jimmie, "I wish I had a grampa like you to leave me some shit like this. This shit is enjoyable." The audience knows already that Jimmie's grandfather did not in fact leave the house to Jimmie, whose mythology of the house's history unravels over the course of the film. Jimmie's
... <a href="https://muse.jhu.edu/article/984305">Read More</a>
Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-15T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/434/image/coversmallFamily Homes, Inverted: Illicit Occupations and Black Intimacies in and beyond the Loophole of Retreat2026-03-03text/htmlen-USFamily Homes, Inverted: Illicit Occupations and Black Intimacies in and beyond the Loophole of Retreat2026-03-032026TWOProject MUSE®897452026-05-15T00:00:00-05:002026-03-03Nella Larsen's Paperwork: Reading to Black Children in the Harlem Branch Library
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/984288
<p></p>
Like Irene and Brian Redfield in Nella Larsen's novel Passing (1929), African American writers and educators of the 1920s disagreed about whether Black children should be prepared for racism, or temporarily protected from knowledge of slavery, discrimination, and lynching.1 When Ted Redfield asks his father, "why is it that they only lynch coloured people?" Irene tries to prevent Brian from answering. Later, she tells him that there will be "time enough for [the children] to learn about such horrible things when they're older." On the contrary, Brian counters, "they'd better find out what sort of thing they're up against as soon as possible" (231). Four years before writing this exchange, Nella Larsen Imes was head
... <a href="https://muse.jhu.edu/article/984305">Read More</a>
Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-15T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/434/image/coversmallNella Larsen's Paperwork: Reading to Black Children in the Harlem Branch Library2026-03-03text/htmlen-USNella Larsen's Paperwork: Reading to Black Children in the Harlem Branch Library2026-03-032026TWOProject MUSE®1368042026-05-15T00:00:00-05:002026-03-03Ursa Corregidora's "New World Song" and the (Im)possibilities of a Blues Aesthetics
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/984289
<p></p>
Being in the Diaspora braces itself in virtuosity or despair.In a very real sense, every writing as revision makes the discovery all over again.Music is wounded kinship's last resort.Among its astonishing achievements, Gayl Jones's novel Corregidora (1975) textually insists on the blues as one mode for figuring the intensely paradoxical and ongoing effects of a traumatic wound. By paradoxical, I refer to how a wound, whatever tragedy or brutality is at its source, can give rise to the highest beauty. Within the African diasporic tradition of expressive culture, the Jamaican American writer Michelle Cliff summarizes this paradox strikingly: "Captive people have a need for song." Jones's novel stages how a
... <a href="https://muse.jhu.edu/article/984305">Read More</a>
Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-15T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/434/image/coversmallUrsa Corregidora's "New World Song" and the (Im)possibilities of a Blues Aesthetics2026-03-03text/htmlen-USUrsa Corregidora's "New World Song" and the (Im)possibilities of a Blues Aesthetics2026-03-032026TWOProject MUSE®762512026-05-15T00:00:00-05:002026-03-03Teaching Masculinity in A Lesson Before Dying
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/984290
<p></p>
Ernest Gaines's 1993 novel, A Lesson Before Dying, has been hailed as a modern classic of African American literature. Although the text takes the work of teaching and learning as a central concern, its implications for educators in particular remain largely underexplored. In this essay, I discuss how the novel might serve as a resource for the theory and practice of pedagogy. Specifically, I am interested in how the main character's changing understanding of his own manhood affects his work as an educator. In its depiction of Grant's transformation, A Lesson Before Dying explores the implications of Black male teachers' conceptions of masculinity for classroom praxis in ways that have important implications for
... <a href="https://muse.jhu.edu/article/984305">Read More</a>
Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-15T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/434/image/coversmallTeaching Masculinity in A Lesson Before Dying2026-03-03text/htmlen-USTeaching Masculinity in A Lesson Before Dying2026-03-032026TWOProject MUSE®570282026-05-15T00:00:00-05:002026-03-03Answers in Progress: Amiri Baraka's Black Communications Archive and the Massification of Call and Response
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/984291
<p></p>
Communications systems / must be seized, or subverted.What time is it? Nation time.In the autumn of 1966, the year that would conclude with the release of the film version of his play Dutchman, Amiri Baraka (then LeRoi Jones) gave an interview for the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation's public affairs television program, The New Generation.1 The interview, which can be viewed in its entirety at the archives of Columbia University thanks to recent digitization efforts (the transcript published in a 1994 collection of Baraka interviews is missing important elements), is notable for several reasons.2 Among them is that it is here for the first time on public record that we find Baraka issuing pronouncements about the
... <a href="https://muse.jhu.edu/article/984305">Read More</a>
Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-15T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/434/image/coversmallAnswers in Progress: Amiri Baraka's Black Communications Archive and the Massification of Call and Response2026-03-03text/htmlen-USAnswers in Progress: Amiri Baraka's Black Communications Archive and the Massification of Call and Response2026-03-032026TWOProject MUSE®1782762026-05-15T00:00:00-05:002026-03-03Queer and Crip Caregiving in Rivers Solomon's An Unkindness of Ghosts
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/984292
<p></p>
"Cli-fi," or literature about climate fiction, has been widely recognized for its role in helping audiences grapple with the enormity of anthropogenic climate change—the nearly inarticulable experiences of anxiety, depression, rage, and grief that attend such slow yet catastrophic devastation of the only living world we know.1 Rob Nixon, for instance, makes a compelling case for the critical role that narrative can play in revealing the "slow violence" of this global crisis by vivifiying—by "bring[ing] emotionally to life"—the slowly accelerating deterioration of a habitable planet (14). Rivers Solomon's spacefaring debut novel, An Unkindness of Ghosts (2017), is a recent example of cli-fi that articulates the
... <a href="https://muse.jhu.edu/article/984305">Read More</a>
Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-15T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/434/image/coversmallQueer and Crip Caregiving in Rivers Solomon's An Unkindness of Ghosts2026-03-03text/htmlen-USQueer and Crip Caregiving in Rivers Solomon's An Unkindness of Ghosts2026-03-032026TWOProject MUSE®720202026-05-15T00:00:00-05:002026-03-03Found in a Connecticut Used Book Store: Africa Section (Farthest from the Door) and: Marabou and: The Island and: Found in the African Art Collection of a New Haven Gallery after the Guard Asks Whether My Son Knows the Rules
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/984296
<p></p>
A cut-up spine poemA cut-up poem made with exhibit
... <a href="https://muse.jhu.edu/article/984305">Read More</a>
Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-15T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/434/image/coversmallFound in a Connecticut Used Book Store: Africa Section (Farthest from the Door) and: Marabou and: The Island and: Found in the African Art Collection of a New Haven Gallery after the Guard Asks Whether My Son Knows the Rules2026-03-03text/htmlen-USFound in a Connecticut Used Book Store: Africa Section (Farthest from the Door) and: Marabou and: The Island and: Found in the African Art Collection of a New Haven Gallery after the Guard Asks Whether My Son Knows the Rules2026-03-032026TWOProject MUSE®88152026-05-15T00:00:00-05:002026-03-03King June
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/984297
<p></p>
King June felt his mother's eyes burning into the back of his head as he packed. A million things said and unsaid in that starfire stare of hers. He'd heard it all before and wanted to hear none of it now, though he couldn't tell her that. Despite his mother's previous protestations, he was determined to board that three o'clock northbound train, even if it meant she would never forgive him.A thick haze hung over the three-room clapboard shack, promising rain despite the lack of clouds. Beneath the shade of a walnut tree, a yard dog yawned lazily. Except for those out in the fields or fishing the lake, no one in that rural backwater could be bothered by the heat or the mosquitoes that stalked the steamy air like
... <a href="https://muse.jhu.edu/article/984305">Read More</a>
Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-15T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/434/image/coversmallKing June2026-03-03text/htmlen-USKing June2026-03-032026TWOProject MUSE®142532026-05-15T00:00:00-05:002026-03-03Ain't I An Anthropologist: Zora Neale Hurston Beyond the Literary Icon by Jennifer L. Freeman Marshall (review)
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/984298
<p></p>
The subtitle of Jennifer L. Freeman Marshall's Ain't I An Anthropologist: Zora Neale Hurston Beyond the Literary Icon hints at the challenge any author must confront when writing about the celebrated novelist-folklorist, Zora Neale Hurston. What new insights and ideas are there to be found in a figure whose status as a literary genius and innovator in the discipline of anthropology has been so firmly established since her "rediscovery" by Black feminists in the 1970s and '80s? As Marshall herself recounts, Black women scholars and activists—Alice Walker, most famously—played a pivotal role in Hurston's canonization within fields of study as wide-ranging as American literature, anthropology, Africana studies, and
... <a href="https://muse.jhu.edu/article/984305">Read More</a>
Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-15T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/434/image/coversmallAin't I An Anthropologist: Zora Neale Hurston Beyond the Literary Icon by Jennifer L. Freeman Marshall (review)2026-03-03text/htmlen-USAin't I An Anthropologist: Zora Neale Hurston Beyond the Literary Icon by Jennifer L. Freeman Marshall (review)2026-03-032026TWOProject MUSE®157342026-05-15T00:00:00-05:002026-03-03King's Vibrato: Modernism, Blackness, and the Sonic Life of Martin Luther King Jr. by Maurice O. Wallace (review)
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/984299
<p></p>
Martin Luther King Jr.'s voice is among the twentieth century's most recognizable. In King's Vibrato: Modernism, Blackness, and the Sonic Life of Martin Luther King Jr., Maurice O. Wallace interweaves Black studies, sound studies, and modernist studies to attune his reader to how that voice, however singular, also makes King "a figure for the aural exorbitance of black cultural history itself" (6). Whereas existing scholarship has framed King's oratory as part of family tradition (7) or the mark of genius (70), King's Vibrato instead traces how the late civil rights leader's voice emerges from the cultural and technological milieu of Black modernism (14-15). With interdisciplinary adroitness, Wallace shows how
... <a href="https://muse.jhu.edu/article/984305">Read More</a>
Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-15T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/434/image/coversmallKing's Vibrato: Modernism, Blackness, and the Sonic Life of Martin Luther King Jr. by Maurice O. Wallace (review)2026-03-03text/htmlen-USKing's Vibrato: Modernism, Blackness, and the Sonic Life of Martin Luther King Jr. by Maurice O. Wallace (review)2026-03-032026TWOProject MUSE®150792026-05-15T00:00:00-05:002026-03-03Stumbling Blocks and Other Unfinished Work by Delores Phillips (review)
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/984300
<p></p>
The unpublished work of Delores Phillips (1950-2014)—best known as the author of the novel The Darkest Child—has now been brought to light by Delia Steverson. Of the many contributions Steverson makes as editor of Phillips's poems, short stories, and novels is her emphasis on the processual. Steverson demonstrates that we are still in the process of recuperating who Phillips was, as well as the value to be gleaned from her life and writing. Part of how Steverson underscores the processual is by naming her own painstaking editorial method and ethic of recovery, which she aligns with previous projects by Maryemma Graham and Alice Walker. Embracing uncertainty, even contradiction, Steverson foregrounds editorial
... <a href="https://muse.jhu.edu/article/984305">Read More</a>
Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-15T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/434/image/coversmallStumbling Blocks and Other Unfinished Work by Delores Phillips (review)2026-03-03text/htmlen-USStumbling Blocks and Other Unfinished Work by Delores Phillips (review)2026-03-032026TWOProject MUSE®132712026-05-15T00:00:00-05:002026-03-03Impermanent Blackness: The Making and Unmaking of Interracial Literary Culture in Modern America by Korey Garibaldi, and: Rewriting America: New Essays on the Federal Writers' Project ed. by Sara Rutkowski (review)
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/984301
<p></p>
Korey Garibaldi's Impermanent Blackness: The Making and Unmaking of Interracial Literary Culture in Modern America and Sara Rutkowski's edited collection Rewriting America: New Essays on the Federal Writer's Project provide accounts of the role of African American literature in the literary mythmaking (and myth-busting) of American literature in the first half of the twentieth century. As such, Garibaldi and the essay authors in Rewriting America grapple with difficult political questions as illustrated by early twentieth-century literary history and culture: What is the relationship between opportunity and assimilation? How do writers and their institutions reconcile bourgeois liberalism with radical leftism? What
... <a href="https://muse.jhu.edu/article/984305">Read More</a>
Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-15T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/434/image/coversmallImpermanent Blackness: The Making and Unmaking of Interracial Literary Culture in Modern America by Korey Garibaldi, and: Rewriting America: New Essays on the Federal Writers' Project ed. by Sara Rutkowski (review)2026-03-03text/htmlen-USImpermanent Blackness: The Making and Unmaking of Interracial Literary Culture in Modern America by Korey Garibaldi, and: Rewriting America: New Essays on the Federal Writers' Project ed. by Sara Rutkowski (review)2026-03-032026TWOProject MUSE®189682026-05-15T00:00:00-05:002026-03-03We Pursue Our Magic: A Spiritual History of Black Feminism by Marina Magloire (review)
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/984302
<p></p>
Although it may seem like a niche entrance for a review of a spiritual history of Black feminism, I've been wondering: What is the relationship between Black feminism and astrology? This question emerged when I was sitting between two Black women in an Ivy League university's seminar room discovering their mutual knowledge of astrology. Their conversation was too expert for me to follow (having grown up and been educated "against a sharp white background," immersions in color are often revelatory moments of "inadequate" blackness), but since then I have met many more academics trained in Black feminism who have thorough knowledge of astrology. Although I still only inconsistently remember my Moon sign, I do
... <a href="https://muse.jhu.edu/article/984305">Read More</a>
Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-15T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/434/image/coversmallWe Pursue Our Magic: A Spiritual History of Black Feminism by Marina Magloire (review)2026-03-03text/htmlen-USWe Pursue Our Magic: A Spiritual History of Black Feminism by Marina Magloire (review)2026-03-032026TWOProject MUSE®144702026-05-15T00:00:00-05:002026-03-03On Becoming an American Writer: Essays and Nonfiction by James Alan McPherson (review)
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/984303
<p></p>
James Alan McPherson (1943-2016) was a writer who received many prestigious honors, including the 1978 Pulitzer Prize in Fiction for Elbow Room, his second collection of short stories. He received a MacArthur Foundation "Genius" Award in 1981 and in 1995 was inducted into the American Academy of Arts and Letters. He was a master of the short form—both essays and short stories—and his work is still widely anthologized.Anthony Walton's collection offers ten of McPherson's essays, including key essays from A Region Not Home: Reflections from Exile (2000): "Disneyland," "Ukiyo," "On Becoming an American Writer," and "Gravitas," which is McPherson's tribute to Ralph Ellison and their relationship. The essay "Crabcakes"
... <a href="https://muse.jhu.edu/article/984305">Read More</a>
Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-15T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/434/image/coversmallOn Becoming an American Writer: Essays and Nonfiction by James Alan McPherson (review)2026-03-03text/htmlen-USOn Becoming an American Writer: Essays and Nonfiction by James Alan McPherson (review)2026-03-032026TWOProject MUSE®153062026-05-15T00:00:00-05:002026-03-03A Literary Life of Sutton E. Griggs: The Man on the Firing Line by John Cullen Gruesser (review)
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/984304
<p></p>
The impact of the digital revolution on scholarly research in the humanities can hardly be overestimated. In particular, the digitization of newspapers and magazines has opened new possibilities not only to recover and explore print culture in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries but also to appreciate more fully the literary relevance of individual authors.This is certainly the case for Sutton E. Griggs (1872-1933), as evidenced by John Cullen Gruesser's groundbreaking A Literary Life of Sutton E. Griggs: The Man on the Firing Line. A prolific writer who published five novels by age thirty-six, Griggs is best known among scholars and readers as the author of Imperium in Imperio (1899). Because of its
... <a href="https://muse.jhu.edu/article/984305">Read More</a>
Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-15T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/434/image/coversmallA Literary Life of Sutton E. Griggs: The Man on the Firing Line by John Cullen Gruesser (review)2026-03-03text/htmlen-USA Literary Life of Sutton E. Griggs: The Man on the Firing Line by John Cullen Gruesser (review)2026-03-032026TWOProject MUSE®130062026-05-15T00:00:00-05:002026-03-03Going Underground: Race, Space, and the Subterranean in the Nineteenth-Century United States by Lara Langer Cohen, and: Slavery, Surveillance, and Genre in Antebellum United States Literature by Kelly Ross (review)
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/984305
<p></p>
Lara Langer Cohen's Going Underground and Kelly Ross's Slavery, Surveillance, and Genre are both rich explorations of the relationship of Black literature and art to larger developments in nineteenth-century culture. Both texts are important for detailing the influence of Black agency on the American imagination in fascinating new ways. Ross connects several slave narratives after 1820 to detective fiction, drawing thoughtful connections between practices of slave countersurveillance (or sousveillance) to American fictions of detection—in short, she argues that slave narratives helped shape Poe's most lasting detective fiction.Working from a far larger archive of evidence, Cohen's Going Underground is among the
... <a href="https://muse.jhu.edu/article/984305">Read More</a>
Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-15T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/434/image/coversmallGoing Underground: Race, Space, and the Subterranean in the Nineteenth-Century United States by Lara Langer Cohen, and: Slavery, Surveillance, and Genre in Antebellum United States Literature by Kelly Ross (review)2026-03-03text/htmlen-USGoing Underground: Race, Space, and the Subterranean in the Nineteenth-Century United States by Lara Langer Cohen, and: Slavery, Surveillance, and Genre in Antebellum United States Literature by Kelly Ross (review)2026-03-032026TWOProject MUSE®230462026-05-15T00:00:00-05:002026-03-03