AFRICAN AMERICAN REVIEW最新文献

Reviewed by:

• Afro-Nostalgia: Feeling Good in Contemporary Black Culture by Badia Ahad-Legardy
• Brittney Michelle Edmonds

In Afro-Nostalgia: Feeling Good in Contemporary Black Culture, Badia Ahad-Legardy disrupts a cultural truism so commonplace as to seem absolute: [End Page 257] that historical nostalgia for Black people is an impossibility. On the monograph’s opening pages, Zadie Smith announces plainly, “I can’t go back to the fifties because life in the fifties for me is not pretty, nor is it pretty in 1320 or 1460 or 1580 or 1820 or even 1960 in [the US], very frankly” (2). Smith’s relatable understanding of nostalgia—as longing for a lost or for-gone era of the past—and her concomitant belief that a timeless antagonism exists between her, a Black woman, and her socioaffective ability to relate to historical memory, extends from a dominant but narrow and racialized conception of the psychological phenomenon.

Ahad-Legardy sets out to marginalize that dominant conception, arguing that it renders agential relation to historical memory the exclusive province of whites. Afro-Nostalgia instead develops a more capacious definition of nostalgia to emphasize how contemporary Black cultural workers engage with historical memory to enact affective transformations, to stage political critiques, and to enact various forms of community. The study departs from the observation that nostalgia is not a “race-neutral mode of positive memory,” but instead extends from scientific histories that presumed Black intellectual and psychological incapacity (5). Ahad-Legardy traces the history of nostalgia back to its seventeenth-century conception, when it was first conceived as a cerebral ailment prompted by the material loss of one’s homeland, to the eighteenth century, when pioneering scientists suggested that Black people were perhaps the most substantially afflicted by the ailment, to the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, when nostalgia was no longer conceived as ailment but as sentiment, as the sometimes overwhelming desire for a lost home or object or symbol of some better, more glorious past.

Against the backdrop of renewed and virulent nostalgic sentiment in contemporary US politics and civic life, Ahad-Legardy turns to Black expressive culture—to literature, music, web media, visual arts, sculpture, and the culinary arts—to situate nostalgic feeling, specifically Afro-nostalgia, beyond conservative frames. Rather than a coping mechanism or maladaptive response to to an undesirable present, rather than a sentiment that eschews progressive politics in favor of fa

• Contributors

Hyacinth L. Andersen writes poetry and short stories in her spare time. Her work has appeared in Black Magnolias Literary Journal, TimBookTu, and Vocal.media.

Lisa M. Anderson is professor in the School of Social Transformation, and associate dean of Academic Affairs in the Graduate College at Arizona State University. Her research interests include African diaspora speculative fiction and representations of blackness (especially Black futures). Her most recent book, Black Women and the Changing Television Landscape, was published in May 2023 by Bloomsbury Academic Press.

Chuck Barrow is an award-winning illustrator and writer of fiction residing in Columbus, Ohio. He writes novels, short stories, essays, and poetry, and is a comics creator and cartoonist.

Nathan L. Grant is the editor of African American Review and associate professor of English at Saint Louis University.

Kassy Lee, a poet and Cave Canem fellow from San Diego, has been supported by the University of Michigan’s Helen Zell Writers’ Program, the Helene Wurlitzer Foundation of New Mexico, and the Vermont Studio Center. She’s grateful to Augusta Savage’s enduring legacy for inspiring this persona poem. She is currently at work on her debut collection, and you can receive updates about her work at kassylee.substack.com.

Joe Lockard is associate professor of English at Arizona State University. He is the author of Watching Slavery: Witness Texts and Travel Reports (Peter Lang, 2008) and coeditor of Prison Pedagogies: Learning and Teaching with Imprisoned Writers (Syracuse UP, 2018).

Ndubuisi Martins is currently a PhD candidate in the Department of Anglophone Literatures and Cultures at Charles University, Prague. His work has appeared or is forthcoming in many poetry magazines and journals, including African Writer Magazine, Ngiga Review, Lunaris Review, Wreaths for a Wayfarer, and Sorosoke. He has published two collections of poems, One Call, Many Answers (Createspace, 2017) and Answers through the Bramble (Grand Touch, 2021), the latter of which was longlisted for the 2022 Pan African Writers’ Association (PAWA) Poetry Prize, English Category.

M. Genevieve West is professor of English and chair of the Department of Language, Culture, and Gender Studies at Texas Woman’s University, the nation’s largest public institution primarily for women, where she teaches African American, American, and women’s literatures. Her scholarship takes intersectional, histori

Reviewed by:

• Ralph Ellison: Photographer by Michal Raz-Russo and John F. Callahan
• Lauren Walsh

Ralph Ellison, who is often characterized as the author of one of the greatest twentieth-century American novels, Invisible Man, spoke these words in a conversation (titled “A Completion of Personality”) with the writer John Hersey: “I might conceive of a thing aurally, but to realize it you have to make it vivid. . . . That is the condition of fiction, I think. Here is where sound becomes sight and sight becomes sound.”

For decades, critics have described Ellison as not only a masterful word-smith but a “thinker-tinker,” the descriptor itself borrowed from Invisible Man, a self-attributed moniker offered in the Prologue by the narrator. Ellison was a thinker who grappled with history, race, sociology, culture, and so much more; and he was also a tinkerer with hi-fi audio, photography, computers, and beyond. In fact, to label him simply a “tinkerer” is an under-statement, as a new book by the Ralph and Fanny Ellison Charitable Trust in partnership with the Gordon Parks Foundation and German publishing house Steidl makes clear. Ralph Ellison: Photographer (copyright 2022, released in April 2023), a lush publication with nearly 150 rarely-before-seen photos by Ellison himself, opens a new way of viewing how this inimitable author perceived the world around, offering insight into Ellison’s literary approach and, more broadly, his artistic vision of American life.

As Peter W. Kunhardt, Jr. explains in the Foreword, Ellison and the vaunted photographer Gordon Parks were friends and sometimes collaborators, each influencing the other’s outlook and output. They joined forces [End Page 251] together on two projects, which became the basis for a 2016 exhibition (with a superb catalog), “Invisible Man: Gordon Parks and Ralph Ellison in Harlem,” at the Art Institute of Chicago. That exhibition was curated by Michal Raz-Russo, the Gordon Parks Foundation programs director, and it paved the way toward Ralph Ellison: Photographer, which was overseen by Raz-Russo with John F. Callahan, Ellison’s literary executor. Both Raz-Russo and Callahan, alongside the Gordon Parks Foundation’s executive director Kunhardt and literary critic Adam Bradley, have meaningful essays in this book.

These four individuals help frame the photographs; their contextualizing texts give background and set-up to understanding the images that appear in the subsequent pages. As Kunhardt writes, “Over careers that spanned more than hal

Reviewed by:

• For a Pragmatics of the Useless by Erin Manning
• Pilar Martínez Benedí

“All black life is neurodiverse life.” Fred Moten’s words, written in a manuscript review of Erin Manning’s The Minor Gesture (2016), admittedly haunt her latest effort. Moten’s equation is provocative but also strangely uncontroversial. If nothing else, the alignment between its opposites—whiteness and neurotypicality, those tokens of normativity—sounds intuitively graspable. Manning refers to the alignment more or less explicitly throughout her previous book, but her ambition in For a Pragmatics of the Useless goes beyond that elementary affinity.

First, Manning turns the equation into an “approximate proximity” (4), recasting it less in terms of likeness than of a “thinking-with” that facilitates an alliance between neurodiversity and blackness “in a way that would not reduce one to the other but generate a complementarity” (2). For a Pragmatics of the Useless presents itself as an investigation into such complementarity. When Manning likens neurotypicality to “structural racism” (2), the idea is not so much to equate two forms of discrimination but rather to pen the attitudes that define (by contrast) neurodiversity and blackness, joining both together in an “undercommonness of sociality” (6). Both decide what is recognized as human and what is excluded, but Manning links the recognition and the exclusion not to skin color or neurologies only. Neurotypicality— “an articulation of whiteness at work” (1)—anchors all (valuable) experience to individual human agency—the “volition-intentionality-agency triad.” The only valuable mode of being is that conforming to the fiction of superior “executive function”: “To do it alone, to do it individually, to do it at the pace of the volition-intentionality-agency triad, is to be truly human” (3). [End Page 254]

Conversely, neurodiversity resists this devotion to individuality and independence to adhere instead to relationality and facilitation. (The earlier equation between neurotypicality and whiteness implies that this applies to Black life, too.) The glue that bonds both groups together—and this is Manning’s most engaging move—lies in their shared penchant for “fugitivity.” Neurotypicality needs “to plan, to count, to organize, to select out, to evaluate” (6) and therefore perceives only that which fits into its reductive standard of executive function. Every mode of existence that falls outside the box that is ambiguous, uncountable, dependent, “otherwise” social, relational, diagonal—those modes simply do not register. Black life and neurodiverse life, then, are mo

Reviewed by:

• Sailing to Freedom: Maritime Dimensions of the Underground Railroad ed. by Timothy D. Walker
• H. Robert Baker

The Underground Railroad is, in the historical imagination, an over-ground affair. Enslaved persons crossed hundreds of miles of tangled [End Page 263] forest along invisible tracks, fleeing from station to station, helped along by conductors, signaled by lights in certain windows, patches on certain quilts, and the like. The metaphorical “railroad” conjures up this image effortlessly, as does a century and a half of mythic history writing, both popular and professional.

Sailing to Freedom stakes the claim that the Underground Railroad should be reimagined as primarily a maritime venture. Although a full quantitative appraisal of freedom seeking is not possible, the available evidence is strongly suggestive. As we learn from editor Timothy D. Walker’s introductory essay, of the 103 pre-emancipation slave narratives, “more than 70 percent recount the use of oceangoing vessels as a means of fleeing slavery” (1). Moreover, the deeper into the cotton kingdom one resided, the less likely was escape overland, unless there was a port nearby with connections to northern ports. And every person escaping from enslavement along the Mississippi or the Ohio would have used water transportation.

The book has an elegant geographical organization, beginning in Charleston, South Carolina and ending in New Bedford, Massachusetts, after stops up the coast in North Carolina, Virginia, New York, and Connecticut. There is remarkable coherency to the essays. They show how escape routes and networks were established, examine trace evidence of freedom seekers, and connect their stories to national politics and economy. This produces something rare in a volume of collected essays: They are worth more than the sum of their parts.

Patterns emerge across these geographies. Labor arrangements provided means for escape. Michael D. Thompson’s essay shows how runaways in Charleston, South Carolina would often seek work on the docks among the enslaved laborers, effectively hiding in plain sight. Access to the docks meant access to the ships, to free Black sailors who might assist them, and to the cargo holds where they might hide amid the bales of cotton (41). David S. Cecelski’s contribution shows how in North Carolina’s Great Dismal Swamp, runaways found work in the forest products industry, where the state’s onerous requirements for registering workers of color were largely ignored. From there, freedom seekers found assistance from Black watermen as they s

• My Girl Is a Trip
• Chuck Barrow (bio)

She plays with matches. That was really the first thing that stuck out about her. She used to burn everything that found its way into her hands. Daffodils, candy wrappers, beach towels, bubble wrap, cotton balls, popsicle sticks.

She was the new girl who came out the sixth row of the school bus— no, not that one—the one where old dude flipped out on his wife and shot himself through the chest after Christmas break when we was in high school. Yeah, she was new then, she had hair like Carrot Top and freckles like a shredded orange peel. She had skin the color of milk in a bowl of Chex that had gone all soggy. We’d always see her with them boys from down the block when she was tryin to see who could let her borrow a X-Men comic book. Every comic book I gave that girl she never gave back and I never asked.

She would always get in a fight with a sista and they always whoop her ass. She would always be bleeding from somewhere because she always had fresh scabs. If she came to your house she’d never leave until your momma asked her if she needed a ride back home, and she only did it because that was usually when it was dark and the drug dealers was out. She was the only white girl who no other white girls hung out with, and she didn’t mind at all.

She would always hang with the boys and roll up her pant legs till that white freckled leg meat showed. She always wore clothes that was two sizes too big. When she laughed she sounded like a cat that got run over by a snowplow, and that sound made you laugh with her too.

One day we up there in that pool, nah, not that one, the one with the busted-ass pool with the janky diving board ain’t nobody in they right mind would jump off of, so who do I see but her and her big red hair and skinny freckled ass about to jump. Teachers hollerin, kids screamin, niggas laughin, “look nigga, look nigga! There go your girl!” My girl, nigga? Like she my girl now? Up and up she went, like somebody threw a broom and it just float in midair. Down she go, kersplattttttt! Niggas fall out, white teacher cryin, janitor sellin loosies, DJ bust a joke, whole pool howlin. She get out, first time I cry laughing. Whole body red like The Red Lobster logo, she lookin at me smiling and ask, “Did I do good?”

She got a face like a gum drop, man. All cheeks and dimples, no chin to be had. Eventually she moved into our living room because her momma was a drunk and her daddy locked up for reselling junk cars that would crash, and all her brothers in the army, and she ain’t have no one to listen to her talk or feed her lemonade and chicken when she was hungry and bored.

Outside she was my little hustling orphan Annie, Pippy Longstockin, lookin like the goddamn Wendy’s burger ma

• Augusta Savage in Paris
• Kassy Lee (bio)

My daddy beat the clayout of me. Saw as sinthe salves savedfrom the mud pitsof the South wherewater chisels through rockand is made readyfor the handsof a lonely Negrogirl. At nineteen,I carved facesinto faces. I namestreet urchin my sculptednephew. Though Parisians,as racist as the half-bakedsun, barred my bloom.Still, I lift voicesfrom my palms and plucka holy harp. Still,I’m just as brokeand redas my pocketed handsand clay, caked onskin, means nothingto whom it meansnothing. But, to childrenof mud, it meansyou arearrested in earth, freeto be remoldedas my nephews. [End Page 239]

Kassy Lee, a poet and Cave Canem fellow from San Diego, has been supported by the University of Michigan’s Helen Zell Writers’ Program, the Helene Wurlitzer Foundation of New Mexico, and the Vermont Studio Center. She’s grateful to Augusta Savage’s enduring legacy for inspiring this persona poem. She is currently at work on her debut collection, and you can receive updates about her work at kassylee.substack.com.

Reviewed by:

• Counterlife: Slavery after Resistance and Social Death by Christopher Freeburg
• Stephen Knadler

Even amid unspeakable grief, there has always been Black joy. Black people just existing, loving, laughing, loafing, not doing anything but pursuing their own personal meaning or spiritual bliss. The persistence of this excessive, uncapturable Black aliveness testifies not only to survival. It prompts reflection as well on the structuring practices that shape African American literary criticism, and it is stirring a growing discomfort with the constraints on what African American studies critics do—what many would say have even an ethical and communal responsibility to do—and what questions they should ask. In his thought-provoking monograph assessing the current state of African American literary criticism, Counterlife: Slavery after Resistance and Social Death, Christopher Freeburg calls for not another [End Page 260] periodic turn in the field based on the latest critical theory but a foundational rethinking of the function of criticism. As scholars, Freeburg contends, we have so learned to impose correct political meanings on a text that we fail to read, or at least read with curiosity and openness, the “living”—the counterlife—that exists outside or alongside African Americans’ political struggles.

In part, this moment of field-reckoning within African American studies taps into a larger conversation within literary studies about whether we are “postcritique,” or about whether it is advisable to temper (or replace) a critical practice grounded in a hermeneutics of suspicion with something more reparative that values other forms of readerly and aesthetic engagement beyond a deep reading for ideological traps or resistance. For Freeburg, African American studies has fallen under the sway not just of a straight-jacketing hermeneutics of suspicion but equally of a hermeneutics of predictability, which is reductive and simplistic in its political agenda. For Black studies programs founded in the locked arms of art, critique, and activism, such a depoliticized move, however, has frequently been seen as naivety, elitism, or a race-betraying selling-out.

How did African American studies come to march lockstep within a preordained dialectic about damage/agency, oppression/resistance, or complicity/counternarratives? According to Freeburg, we can chart this genealogy of critical predictability in the wake of Stanley Elkins’s 1959 Slavery: An Intellectual History. It was not just Elkins’s controversial “Sambo thesis” about the plantation system fostering childlike subser

• The Creed of Grief(after Rasak Malik )
• Ndubuisi Martins (bio)

The war was set even before the cockcrow. We sat in the hedgerow of griefand alternated hopes and sighs.

We had our names as tribes, who knewthe grotto of love; but have lost a common song.

You say, it’s well because you look to things distant—the lostcowry of life.

You say, it would be green off this space,when we witness a rain to replace this damp heat.

You say, it’s well because you think the Ogene would sound againand children will gather to eat from the village bowl.

You say, we will conquer with tobacco teeth and your breath dropsunder too many times, in the foul smell of rotten egg.

You say, life will return to this quiet houseleft to a regime of silence and dust. [End Page 238]

Ndubuisi Martins is currently a PhD candidate in the Department of Anglophone Literatures and Cultures at Charles University, Prague. His work has appeared or is forthcoming in many poetry magazines and journals, including African Writer Magazine, Ngiga Review, Lunaris Review, Wreaths for a Wayfarer, and Sorosoke. He has published two collections of poems, One Call, Many Answers (Createspace, 2017) and Answers through the Bramble (Grand Touch, 2021), the latter of which was longlisted for the 2022 Pan African Writers’ Association (PAWA) Poetry Prize, English Category.

• I remember
• Hyacinth L. Andersen (bio)

I remember feeling poorwhile growing uphaving to use my siblings’ hand-me-downsregardless of sexhow I longed for a banana-seat bikelike the kids in the neighborhoodrode onand parents whodoled out quarters for arcade gamesfrom a porcelain dish on the dresserbut that was not my realitymoney was always tight in our houseit was always explained whyI couldn’t have such thingsbills needed to be paid, money tithed to the churchfor prayers unansweredmy dad returning to collegeto get a degree in the hope of obtaining a promotionthat would never comea promotion that was supposed tolift us out of povertyand make us middle classlike the kids in the neighborhoodwho taunted youabout not having a banana bikeor quarters for the arcadebut on Christmas Day each yearI was allowed to eat as much cakeas I wanted and drink a bellyful of sodawhen extended family would gather togetherat Grandma’s houseand poverty would be forgottenand gifts from aunties would be openedand on that dayI felt like the kids in my neighborhood [End Page 237]

Hyacinth L. Andersen writes poetry and short stories in her spare time. Her work has appeared in Black Magnolias Literary Journal, TimBookTu, and Vocal.media.