233 p., The experiences of Black females have received little attention in Canadian research on education. As a result, little is known about how Black females experience schooling, and even less is known about the specific challenges they face on account of their gender and its interconnection with race, class, immigrant status and other aspects of their identity. In this dissertation, I examine the schooling experiences of a group of young, Black, females of Caribbean descent. Through the use of anti-racism feminism and immigrant integration theories, the author looks at the relationship between their experiences of school and their understanding of their identity. Argues that the young women's negotiation of schooling is intimately linked to their understanding of their identity - an understanding that is filtered through race and gendered lenses, and is a product of their status as Canadian children of immigrant, Caribbean parents, living in a multicultural society.
270 p., This dissertation focuses on women voices in Black British Literature between the period 1980 and 2005 - specifically in the works of Monica Ali, Zadie Smith, Joan Riley, Ravinder Randhawa, Meera Syal and Gurinder Chadha - and seeks to understand how women who are of Caribbean and South Asian descent form and reform their identities in their new home as immigrants or first-generation Britons and why their stories make a valuable and essential contribution to Black British Literature.
76 p., This preliminary Belizean racial project connects how Black identity was used as a political platform through a Pan-African framework to overthrow colonialism and neo-colonial aspects of what developed into a contemporary nationalist outlook. This project utilized a subjective outlook derived from historiographical materials, memoirs, periodicals and journal articles to show how Black collectivity as a tool for liberation (Pan-Africanism) was used as a racial project and later developed into a national project in Belize.
335 p., A central premise of this project is that individuals and communities perceive the significance of history differently depending on their historical conditions. Indeed, much of the emphasis on memory studies in the last two decades has been informed by an awareness of changing perspectives on the past. Thus, given its focus on black peoples in the United States and the Caribbean, this dissertation aims to illuminate an emergent historical consciousness in the African Diaspora in the late 20th century. This dissertation is divided into two sections. In Part I, "Ancestors: Exploring Historical Inheritances," I analyze Maryse Conde's Les derniers rois mages (1993) and Patrick Chamoiseau's Texaco (1993) as they interrogate the concept of familial lineage and query the significance of the past imagined as an inheritance. Whereas Chamoiseau questions the ability of written history to represent memory and experience, Conde empties the idea of heritage of all significance as new relationships to the past come to the fore. In Part II, "New Birth: Exploring Discourses of Reproduction," I focus on Gayl Jones' Corregidora (1975) and Audre Lorde's Zami: A New Spelling of My Name (1982) as they reveal the limitations of genealogical discourse. By creating their pasts and imagining their heritage, the characters in these texts challenge the primacy of lineage as they point toward other, more viable networks of community and belonging.
African American Research Center, Library, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
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203 p., Argues for grounding the concept of global subaltern resistance in the legacy of the 1966 Tricontinental in which delegates from the liberation movements of 82 nations came together in Havana, Cuba to form an alliance against imperialism. This alliance, called the Organization of Solidarity of the Peoples of Africa, Asia and Latin America (OSPAAAL) quickly became the driving force of international political radicalism and the primary engine of its cultural production. Because the Tricontinental represents the extension into the Americas of the anti-imperialist union of Afro-Asian nations begun at the 1955 Bandung Conference, it points to a moment in which a diverse range of radicalist writers and artists in the Americas began interacting with its discourse. By tracing the circulation of the Tricontinental's ideology in its cultural production and in related texts from Third Cinema, Cuban Revolutionary film, the Nuyorican Movement, and writings by Young Lords and Black Power activists, Beyond the Color Curtain outlines how tricontinentalists laid the groundwork for a theory of power and resistance that is resurfacing in the contemporary notion of the Global South.
African American Research Center, Library, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
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547 p, "Variations in preference convergence and issue evolution explain the impact blacks had on U.S. policy more so than variations in organizational power. An analysis to other ethnic groups is also examined."
209 p., Explores the representation of black masculinities in Claude McKay's novels, Home to Harlem (1928), Banjo (1929) and Banana Bottom (1933). I use the trope of marronage to theorize McKay's representations of black male subjectivities across a range of African diasporan spaces in the Caribbean, the USA and Europe, arguing that McKay's male characters negotiate these diasporan spaces with the complex consciousness and proclivities of maroons. Through the trope of marronage, the project will demonstrate how McKay's male characters use their maroon conditions to map, explore and define a black diasporan experience -- one, moreover, that is shaped by "creolizations"-- the various pushes and pulls of multiple forms of psychological and cultural crossover. The Introduction places marronage in its historical and cultural contexts and defines who the Maroons were and what particular characteristics managed their existence. The trope of marronage, as an organizing frame for McKay's texts, is intricately tied to the understanding of how "creolization," a term that is integrally associated with the Caribbean experience of hybridity, as both an experience and a concept, structures McKay's sensibility and representations.
191 p., How does recent black migration impact Atlanta's geographies of black life? Since 1990, the Atlanta metropolitan region has become a major destination for three groups of black migrants from disparate origins: native-born "return south" blacks from other U.S. regions, Afro-Caribbean immigrants, and sub-Saharan African immigrants. These migrants' ethnic diversity dismantles existing notions of "black" culture, politics, and place. Black Migration to Atlanta revises scholarship by demonstrating that we cannot understand the complexity of black lives in Atlanta without investigating the complex relationship between space, migration, and popular culture. Atlanta emerges not just as an urban core, but as a region --a multiplicity of metropolitan sites--imagined and contested through residential patterns, commercial geographies, and popular culture's attempts to accommodate cultural and geographic shifts brought by recent black migration.
