Death Before Sentencing
Making a case for substantial prison reform, this week's review examines the lack of accountability American county and local jail systems take for the avoidable deaths of detainees.
Posted on in Review of the Week
Re-Membering and Surviving
In honor of Veteran's Day, this week's review explores African American fiction of the Vietnam War. What do these works reveal about cultural memory, war ethics, and American war literature?
Posted on November 8, 2021 in Review of the Week
Re-Membering and Surviving: African American Fiction of the Vietnam War
Hanshaw, Shirley A. J. Michigan State, 2021
307p bibl index, 9781611863710 $39.95, 9781609176457 $39.95
With the exception of Bloods: An Oral History of the Vietnam War, ed. by Wallace Terry (CH, Dec’84), scholarship on African American writing on the Vietnam War is in short supply. In Re-membering and Survival Hanshaw (emer., Mississippi State Univ.) unveils a veritable archive of African American writing on the subject and provides a road map of genres from fiction to memoir, from poetry to drama, and from film to music (for the first time). Hanshaw focuses on the thematic patterns and aesthetic strategies of four novels, John Williams’s Captain Blackman (1972), A. R. Flowers’s De Mojo Blues (1986), Wesley Brown’s Tragic Magic (1978), and George Davis’s Coming Home (1972), which deal with, respectively, the reenlisted man, the conscientious objector, the dishonorably discharged veteran, and the deserter. Hanshaw situates these texts in their specific social political contexts and the traditions of (African) American literature. Joining scholarship that is bringing new attention to war ethics, the memory industry, critical refugee studies, and environmental critiques, this work contributes significantly to the expanding field of Vietnam War literature and culture studies globally.
Summing Up: Highly recommended. Upper-division undergraduates through faculty; general readers.
Reviewer: Y. Shu, Texas Tech University
Interdisciplinary Subjects: African and African American Studies
Subject: Humanities – Language & Literature – English & American
Choice Issue: Sep 2021
Enjoy this week’s review? Check out more reviews of related titles:
- Literary Afrofuturism in the Twenty-First Century
- Poetry Unbound: Poems and New Media from the Magic Lantern to Instagram
- Poets & the Peacock Dinner: The Literary History of a Meal
- Furious Flower: Seeding the Future of African American Poetry
- Wounds of War: How the VA Delivers Health, Healing, and Hope to the Nation’s Veterans
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