« Previous |
1 - 10 of 45
|
Next »
Number of results to display per page
Search Results
2. Surviving slavery: Politics, power, and authority in the British Caribbean, 1807-1834
- Collection:
- Black Caribbean Literature (BCL)
- Contributers:
- Browne,Randy M. (Author)
- Format:
- Dissertation/Thesis
- Publication Date:
- 2012
- Published:
- Chapel Hill, NC: The University of North Carolina
- Location:
- African American Research Center, Library, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
- Notes:
- 274 p., Explores a broad range of power relationships and struggles for authority in the early 19th century British Atlantic, focusing on the Caribbean colony of Berbice. I aim to understand how enslaved people and their enslavers negotiated their relationships and forged their lives within multiple, interconnected networks of power in a notoriously brutal society. Focuses on politics and culture writ large and small, zooming in to see the internal conflicts, practices, and hierarchies that governed individual plantations, communities, and families; and zooming out to explore the various ways that imperial officials, colonial administrators, and metropolitan antislavery activists tried to shape Caribbean area slavery during the era of amelioration-a crucial period of transformation in the Atlantic world. Sources used include travel narratives, trial records, missionary correspondence, and official government documents. Most important are the records of the Berbice fiscals and protectors of slaves, officials charged with hearing enslaved peoples' grievances and enforcing colonial laws.
3. "This bad business": Obeah, violence, and power in a nineteenth-century British Caribbean slave community
- Collection:
- Black Caribbean Literature (BCL)
- Contributers:
- Browne,Randy M. (Author)
- Format:
- Dissertation/Thesis
- Publication Date:
- 2009
- Published:
- Chapel Hill, NC: The University of North Carolina
- Location:
- African American Research Center, Library, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
- Journal Title:
- ProQuest Dissertations and Theses
- Notes:
- 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.
4. Search for a New Land: Imperial Power and Afro-Creole Resistance in the British Leeward Islands 1624--1745
- Collection:
- Black Caribbean Literature (BCL)
- Contributers:
- Dator,James F. (Author)
- Format:
- Dissertation/Thesis
- Publication Date:
- 2011
- Published:
- Michigan: University of Michigan
- Location:
- African American Research Center, Library, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
- Journal Title:
- ProQuest Dissertations and Theses
- Notes:
- 409 p., By exploring how colonists and enslaved folk migrated across island boundaries, manipulated imperial tensions, and organized acts of collective dissent, this dissertation attempts to demonstrate the relationship between space, power, and imperial governance in the British Leeward Islands from the time of transnational colonization through their ascendency as black majorities. It examines the ways British empire makers struggled to turn a series of closely interlinked islands stretching from Guadeloupe to the Virgin Islands into a unified colony and how this effort was challenged by the development of a regional black identity that linked slaves across island and imperial boundaries in the early eighteenth century.
5. Sea of bones: The Middle Passage in contemporary poetry of the black Atlantic
- Collection:
- Black Caribbean Literature (BCL)
- Contributers:
- Elliott,Danielle Georgette (Author)
- Format:
- Dissertation/Thesis
- Publication Date:
- 2009
- Published:
- New Jersey: Princeton University
- Location:
- African American Research Center, Library, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
- Journal Title:
- ProQuest Dissertations and Theses
- Notes:
- 225 p., Drawing attention to poets whose writing on this subject has received little critical attention, this study examines contemporary poetry of the black Atlantic in particular focusing on work by Kwame Dawes, David Dabydeen, Lucille Clifton, and Elizabeth Alexander. In exploring poetic treatment of the Middle Passage, primarily through the lyric, epic, and long poem, the author identifies four interrelated poetics that reveal the dynamism of this legacy: lamentation, retribution, rupture, and re-membering. While critical analysis of texts that rewrite slave experiences has tended to focus on narrative, and that primarily on plantation slavery, "Sea of Bones" advocates attention to the way black Atlantic poetry renders the Middle Passage as a complicated and haunting personal heritage.
6. Christian Slavery: Protestant Missions and Slave Conversion in the Atlantic World, 1660--1760
- Collection:
- Black Caribbean Literature (BCL)
- Contributers:
- Gerbner,Katharine Reid (Author)
- Format:
- Dissertation/Thesis
- Publication Date:
- 2013
- Published:
- Massachusetts: Harvard University
- Location:
- African American Research Center, Library, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
- Journal Title:
- ProQuest Dissertations and Theses
- Notes:
- 257 p., Shows how Protestant missionaries in the early modern Atlantic World developed a new vision for slavery that integrated Christianity with human bondage. Quaker, Anglican, and Moravian missionaries arrived in the Caribbean intending to "convert" enslaved Africans to Christianity, but their actions formed only one part of a dialogue that engaged ideas about family, kinship, sex, and language. Enslaved people perceived these newcomers alternately as advocates, enemies, interlopers, and powerful spiritual practitioners, and they sought to utilize their presence for pragmatic, political, and religious reasons.
7. Representation of people of color in the nineteenth century slavery novel in Cuba and Brazil
- Collection:
- Black Caribbean Literature (BCL)
- Contributers:
- Moore,Kendal (Author)
- Format:
- Dissertation/Thesis
- Publication Date:
- 2009
- Published:
- Florida: Florida International University
- Location:
- African American Research Center, Library, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
- Journal Title:
- ProQuest Dissertations and Theses
- Notes:
- 211 p., Explores the similarities and differences which characterize the depiction of people of color in certain representative 19th century Cuban and Brazilian slavery novels as a function of the authorial approach of each territory's literary tradition toward the issues of slavery, racial prejudice, and people of color. The selected texts, derived from the peak periods in slavery literature of each territory, include Francisco , by Anselmo Snárez y Romero; Sab , by Gertrudis Gómez de Avellaneda; Cecilia Valdés , by Cirilo Villaverde; A escrava Isaura , by Bernardo Guimarães; O mulato , by Aluísio Azevedo; and Bom-Crioulo , by Adolfo Caminha. While the present study explores the enslavement, abuse, and discrimination of people of color as a consequence of a deep-seated discourse of power, privilege and racial superiority, it focuses more extensively on the representation of people of color, particularly in their capacity to constructively appropriate the cultural values of the white dominant group and recognize their identity as ambiguous.
8. Escritura, derecho y esclavitud: Francisco Jose de Jaca ante el nomos colonial
- Collection:
- Black Caribbean Literature (BCL)
- Contributers:
- Moreno-Orama,Rebeca (Author)
- Format:
- Dissertation/Thesis
- Publication Date:
- 2013
- Published:
- College Park, MD: University of Maryland
- Location:
- African American Research Center, Library, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
- Notes:
- 306 p., This dissertation concentrates on the relationship between law, literature, and slavery in the Hispanic Caribbean of the Early Modern Period. The analysis is based on two letters and a treatise, Resolución sobre la libertad de los negros y sus originarios, en estado de paganos y después ya cristianos (1681), that were written by Capuchin friar Francisco José de Jaca, while he was serving as a missionary in the Caribbean region. His writings set the stage for a discussion of how Spanish hegemonic legal thinking is challenged and redefined from an alternative transatlantic narrative.
9. The Sound that Broke the Back of Words: Voice, Aurality, and (Dis)Embodied Subjectivity in Neo-Slave Literature of the Black Atlantic
- Collection:
- Black Caribbean Literature (BCL)
- Contributers:
- Pinuelas,Edward Rudolph (Author)
- Format:
- Dissertation/Thesis
- Publication Date:
- 2013
- Published:
- California: University of California, Irvine
- Location:
- African American Research Center, Library, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
- Journal Title:
- ProQuest Dissertations and Theses
- Notes:
- 203 p., Examines the presence of slave vocality in Black Atlantic literature, placing the North American tradition of slave narrative against works from authors throughout the United States and the Caribbean. Challenges existing approaches to slave narrative by viewing the genre as one based on the fundamental impossibility of expressing black subjectivity under the political, ethical, and psychic conditions of slavery. The slave narrative thus ceases to represent an attempt by former slaves to access freedom and agency through writing, along with its promises of reason and autonomy, but rather signals (or sounds) a process of expression built not upon meaning, but upon signification. In other words, rather than crafting themselves into legible objects for the sake of narration and perception, slave narrators performed their roles as exchangeable units, both discursive and political, in ways that exposed the underlying lacunae of being a slave-narrator, a significative protocol that persists in contemporary black fiction throughout the Atlantic, even in areas in which the slave narrative did not historically emerge.
10. Locating slavery in the modern national imaginary: The legacy of Haiti
- Collection:
- Black Caribbean Literature (BCL)
- Contributers:
- Puente,Lindsay Rae (Author)
- Format:
- Dissertation/Thesis
- Publication Date:
- 2010
- Published:
- California: University of California, Irvine
- Location:
- African American Research Center, Library, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
- Journal Title:
- ProQuest Dissertations and Theses
- Notes:
- 227 p., Considers the often-silenced, tangible traces that the Haitian Revolution and radical anti-slavery have left in the greater Caribbean as they emerge in contemporary cultural productions. The author looks at national trends in the Dominican Republic, Cuba and Jamaica in order to formulate an understanding of the uses of gendered images of slavery and blackness in modern nation-building campaigns. Critically assesses what is left out of these narratives and how these gaps serve specific purposes. Argues for the centrality of the Caribbean in any true understanding of the history of modernity and the contemporary nation-state by investigating the after-shocks of the Haitian Revolution and of radical anti-slavery.