..., and as these memoirs occasionally make manifest, guilt can all too easily trump action. Tara L. McPherson, University of Southern California Leaving Pipe Shop: Memories of Kin. By Deborah McDowell. New York: Norton. 1996. 364 pp. Paper, $13.00. Blue as the Lake: A Personal Geography. By Robert B. Stepto...

...Mendi Lewis Obadike Duke University Press 2007 Phonographies: Grooves in Sonic Afro-Modernity . By Alexander G. Weheliye. Durham, N.C.: Duke Univ. Press. 2005. xii, 286 pp. $22.95. Kinds of Blue: The Jazz Aesthetic in African American Narrative. By Jurgen E. Grandt. Columbus...

...Martyn Bone Darker than Blue: On the Moral Economies of Black Atlantic Culture . By Gilroy Paul . Cambridge : Belknap Press of Harvard Univ. Press . 2010 . 207 pp. $22.95 . Romance, Diaspora, and Black Atlantic Literature . By Goyal Yogita . New York : Cambridge Univ...

...Elisabeth Anker Out of the Blue: September 11 and the Novel . By Kristiaan Versluys. New York: Columbia Univ. Press. 2009. x, 226 pp. Cloth, $79.50; paper, $24.50. American Multiculturalism after 9/11: Transatlantic Perspectives . Ed. Derek Rubin and Jaap Verheul. Amsterdam: Amsterdam Univ...

... of California, Los Angeles Stephen Crane’s Blue Badge of Courage. By George Monteiro. Baton Rouge: Louisi- ana State Univ. Press. 2000. 224 pp. Cloth, $65.00; paper, $24.95. The Material Unconscious: American Amusement, Stephen Crane, and the Econo- mies of Play. By Bill Brown. Cambridge: Harvard Univ...

... than sound, makes perfect sense. Beyond the Crossroads also resembles Kaufman’s book in its less successful qualities. For instance, the book focuses almost entirely on blues lyrics, offering little formal analysis of voice or music, which is especially disappointing given that Gussow...

...D. Quentin Miller Duke University Press 2005 D. Quentin Deeper Blues, or the Posthuman Prometheus: Miller Cybernetic Renewal and the Late-Twentieth- Century American Novel ‘‘In a Battle of Wits, Your Computer Will Always Win...

... Literature Seems like Murder Here: Southern Violence and the Blues Tradition. By Adam Gus- sow. Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press. 2002. xiv, 341 pp. Cloth $55.00; paper, $22.00. Good with Their Hands: Boxers, Bluesmen, and Other Characters from the Rust Belt. By Carlo Rotella. Berkeley and Los...

...: Modern Blues Lives from Faulkner's Mississippi to Post-9/11 New York . By Adam Gussow. Knoxville: Univ. of Tennessee Press. 2007. xix, pp. $30.00. Book Reviews By Birth or Consent: Children, Law, and the Anglo-American Revolution in Authority. By Holly Brewer. Chapel Hill: Univ...

...Alexis Pauline Gumbs Backwater Blues: The Mississippi Flood of 1927 in the African American Imagination . By Mizelle Richard M. Jr. Minneapolis : Univ. of Minnesota Press . 2014 . xii, 209 pp. Cloth , $75.00 ; paper, $25.00 . Ain’t Got No Home: America’s Great Migrations...

.... Read it if you can. Sharon L. Dean, Rivier College Book Reviews 645 Preacher Woman Sings the Blues: The Autobiographies of Nineteenth-Century Afri- can American Evangelists. By Richard J. Douglass-Chin. Columbia: Univ. of Mis- souri Press...

... Country: Ralph Ellison in America. By Horace Porter. Iowa City: Univ. of Iowa Press. 2001. 168 pp. $29.95. Spiritual, Blues, and Jazz People in African American Fiction: Living in Paradox. By A. Yemisi...

... to a commentary of a Québécois rewriting of Kerouac, Jacques Poulin’s 1984 Volkswagen Blues , Melehy demonstrates this novel’s exploration of North American identities in connection with Quebec and the role of literature in mapping them. The conclusion assesses Kerouac’s contribution to American literature...

...Timo Müller The essay offers a new perspective on the resurgence of Afro-modernism in the 1940s, arguing that the vernacular sonnet—specifically Langston Hughes’s “Seven Moments of Love: An Un-Sonnet Sequence in Blues” and the sonnets of Gwendolyn Brooks and Robert Hayden—played a crucial role...

... into a range of aesthetic experiences. This can be observed in the Beethovenian ekphrasis featured in prose works by James Weldon Johnson, Langston Hughes, James Baldwin, and Ralph Ellison—four writers whose works have also been considered indebted to blues and jazz musical influences and who approach...

...J. Peter Moore Abstract The present essay grows out of an engagement with a single line from Amiri Baraka’s 1964 book, The Dead Lecturer . In the poem “Rhythm and Blues,” Baraka writes, “The people of my life / caressed with a silence that only they understand.” The line appears amid a long...

... and controllable effects on human minds and bodies. In stories such as “The Blue Hotel” and “The Broken-Down Van” and in the novels The Red Badge of Courage and The Third Violet , Crane draws from and contributes to these experiments with abstract or “pure” color. He uses color to explore the networks of sensation...

... Invisible Man grows from uncritically admiring traditional images of power to understanding complicated visual presentations of blackness, he learns to value the complexity of African American cultural existence. Like Ellison's investment in jazz and blues, his deployment of visual art infuses his writing...

... Literature Seems like Murder Here: Southern Violence and the Blues Tradition. By Adam Gus- sow. Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press. 2002. xiv, 341 pp. Cloth $55.00; paper, $22.00. Good with Their Hands: Boxers, Bluesmen, and Other Characters from the Rust Belt. By Carlo Rotella. Berkeley and Los...

... form to the literary and cinematic rhetoric of race. Philip Joseph, University of Colorado-Denver 642 American Literature Seems like Murder Here: Southern Violence and the Blues Tradition. By Adam Gus- sow. Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press. 2002. xiv, 341 pp. Cloth $55.00; paper, $22.00...