AFRICAN AMERICAN REVIEW最新文献

• 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.

Abstract:

Memoirs of Boston King, a Black Preacher appeared in serial form in The Methodist Magazine between March and June 1798. King escaped slavery in South Carolina, joined the British army to fight in the Revolutionary War, eventually resettled in Nova Scotia, and emigrated to Sierra Leone. This essay argues that readings of King’s Memoirs solely as a historical document are inadequate. The essay first summarizes King’s biography and contextualizes it within early Methodist history; a second section reads epiphanic visionary moments in King’s narrative; and a third section considers how colonial and white supremacist thought in the early Methodist church employed King’s narrative as a conversionary instrument.