African American Research Center, Library, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
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247 p., Describes how black Cubans experience racism on two levels. Cuban racism might result in less access for black Cubans to their group's resources, including protection within Cuban enclaves from society-wide discrimination. In society at large, black Cubans are below white Cubans on every socioeconomic indicator. Rejected by their white co-ethnics, black Cubans are welcomed by other groups of African descent. Many hold similar political views as African Americans. Identifying with African Americans neither negatively affects social mobility nor leads to a rejection of mainstream values and norms.
85 p., This thesis examines the practice of Obeah--an Afro-Caribbean system of healing, harming, and divination through the use of spiritual powers--within two slave communities in Berbice and Demerara (British Guiana). This study is based primarily on legal documents--including testimony from more than a dozen slaves--generated during the criminal trials of two men accused of practicing Obeah in 1819 and 1821-22. In contrast to most previous studies of Obeah, which have been based largely on descriptions provided by British observers, this project takes advantage of this complex, overlapping body of evidence to explore the social dynamics of Obeah as experienced by enslaved men and women themselves, including Obeah practitioners, their clients, and other witnesses. This study reveals that Obeah rituals could be extremely violent, that Obeah practitioners were feared as well as respected among their contemporaries, that the authority of Obeah practitioners was based on demonstrable success, and that slave communities in general were complex social worlds characterized by conflict and division as well as by support and unity--conclusions that combine to produce a fresh, humane vision of Afro-diasporan culture and community under slavery.
African American Research Center, Library, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Notes:
135 p., Examines Caribbean cultural identities along the lines of race, class, nationalism, and history. Contents include: Remembering Toussaint, rethinking postcolonial: the Haitian revolution and the writing of historical trauma in the Caribbean / Li-Chun Hsiao --
Unveiling the mask: race, nationhood, and caribeñidad in "La tierra y el cielo" / Sheree Henlon -- The music, the artist, and the aficionado: tracing the role of race and class in Caribbean popular music through literature / Kathleen Costello -- Negrismo and négritude in the reshaping of Caribbean cultural identity / Mamadou Badiane.
"The voice of Miss Lou, the honourable [Louise Bennett-Coverley], helped to shape the psyche of the resilient people in Jamaica. People are conscious of the diverse roots of our heritage, but mindful that the African presence was as valued as any other. And people must come to realise that the linguistic roots of that melding of cultures in Jamaica, our patwa, however we write it or spell it, is a worthy and necessary instrument of self expression". "She [Miss Lou] made me understand what it really means to be a Jamaican and how to appreciate and embrace all the various facets of our culture and heritage... No longer is it shameful to express the way we feel in the true Jamaican way... There that you cannot translate into english to give the same impact. Miss Lou made it OK not to nice it up".
268 p., This study used a Black feminist critical framework to examine the conditions that influence the production of black women's fiction during the postwar era (1945-60). The novels of Ann Petry, Dorothy West and Paule Marshall were studied as artifacts that were shaped by the cultural and political climate of this crucial period in American history. A survey was also conducted of their associations with members and organizations in the American Left to determine what impact their social activism had on their lives and art. It was determined that these writers' political engagement played a significant role in the creation of transformative narratives about the power of black women to resist oppression in all of its forms. As a consequence of their contribution to a rich black feminist literary tradition, these postwar black women fiction writers serve as important foremothers to later generations of black women artists.
270 p., Juxtaposes the novels written by Merle Collins (Grenada) and Lakshmi Persaud (Trinidad and Tobago), which are classified as Caribbean-based novels in which the characters do not leave the island of their birth until they have attained womanhood, against those of Edwidge Danticat (Haiti) and Paule Marshall (Barbados) which depict their protagonists' emotional and geographical displacement between the United States and the Caribbean.
"In this paper the process of creolisation will be considered through analysis of the wills and testaments of African, black and mixed-race women in nineteenth-century Salvador da Bahia, Brazil. As primary sources these will and testaments provide evidence concerning material, social and cultural markers of creolisation." [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR];
African American Research Center, Library, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
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311 p., Focuses on conflict and convergence among African Americans, Cuban exiles, and Afro-Cubans in the United States. Argues that the racializing discourses found in the Miami Times, which painted Cuban immigrants as an economic threat, and discourses in the Herald, which affirmed the presumed inferiority of blackness and superiority of whiteness, reproduce the centrality of ideologies of exclusivity and white supremacy in the construction of the U.S. nation.
The disruptions and transformations caused by the slave trade are largely demographic and cultural. It was through this extended and traumatic forced population transfer that Caribbean colonies across the board became dominantly black communities. For these island nations and territories, the inescapable fact of their blackness had always marked a tangible and material link with their origins in Africa. Jamaica was home to more rebellions than all of the other British islands combined, proof positive of the continuing identitarian role of African culture in the Caribbean during the period of slavery. Colonization's phenomenon of ethnocultural creolization marked an interpenetration of populations and practices originating both from the colonial metropole and from the African continent, such that long-held notions of race and social stratification would be have to be revised as independence approached, posing a set of complex tensions effectively articulated in Michelle Cliff's novel Abeng.
African American Research Center, Library, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Notes:
10 p., At the G20, world leaders agreed on the need of a concerted and coordinated response to the financial crisis, and at the same time committed to lay the foundations to move beyond the crisis to a sustainable recovery. However, Latin America and the Caribbean still lack adequate and efficient institutional mechanisms and instruments to tackle long-term common development challenges at the regional level. The Annual Meeting of the Finance Ministers of the Americas and the Caribbean provides an opportunity to fill this gap.
