Open Access. Powered by Scholars. Published by Universities.®

Social and Behavioral Sciences Commons

Open Access. Powered by Scholars. Published by Universities.®

Virginia Commonwealth University

Journal

African American

2009

Articles 1 - 2 of 2

Full-Text Articles in Social and Behavioral Sciences

Trey Ellis's Platitudes: Redefining Black Voices, Quan Manh Ha Jan 2009

Trey Ellis's Platitudes: Redefining Black Voices, Quan Manh Ha

Ethnic Studies Review

Trey Ellis has emerged as a prominent African American writer of the late-twentieth century, despite the small number of his published works. "The New Black Aesthetic," an essay that he first published in CaUaloo in 1989, one year after the publication of his first novel, Platitudes, stands as a manifesto that defines and articulates his perspective on the emerging black literary voices and culture of the time, and on "the future of African American artistic expression" in the postmodern era.1 According to Eric Lott, Ellis's novel parodies the literary and cultural conflict between such male experimental writers as lshmael Reed …


Black Mayors In Non-Majority Black (Medium Sized) Cities: Universalizing The Interests Of Blacks, Ravi K. Perry Jan 2009

Black Mayors In Non-Majority Black (Medium Sized) Cities: Universalizing The Interests Of Blacks, Ravi K. Perry

Ethnic Studies Review

The nature of political representation of Black constituents' interests from their elected Black representatives is changing in the twentyfirst century. Increasingly, African Americans are being elected to political offices where the majority of their constituents are not African American. Previous research on this question tended to characterize Black politicians' efforts to represent their Black constituents' interests in two frames: deracialized or racialized (McCormick and Jones 1993; Cruse 1990). However, the advent of the twenty-first century has exhausted the utility ofthat polarization. Black politicians no longer find explicit racial appeals appropriate for their electoral goals, given the changing demographic environment, and …