369 p., Reconstructs the process of migration, assimilation, and the realization of full sociopolitical participation in the United States in terms of the relationship between peoples of African descent--who were compelled to migrate as slaves across the Middle Passage, and who also voluntarily immigrated from various localities within the Black Atlantic--and select groups of immigrants from other locations around the globe. The author concentrates on novels by William Faulkner, Paule Marshall, James Baldwin, and cartoonist Chris Ware, and examine closely how these authors, in their respective texts, work to restructure, reimagine, and thereby challenge the enshrined American narratives of national belonging and acculturation through literary constructions of the identities and experiences of peoples of African descent, as migrants themselves, in tandem with their social, political, economic, sexual, racial, and cultural engagements with other immigrants to the nation-state.
How do people respond to the news that they are HIV positive? To date, there have been few published qualitative studies of HIV diagnosis experiences, and none focusing on Caribbean people. Twenty-five HIV-positive Caribbean people in London, UK, related their diagnosis experience and its immediate aftermath in semi-structured interviews. Diagnosis with HIV caused profound shock and distress to participants, as they associated the disease with immediate death and stigmatisation. The respondents struggled with "biographical disruption", the radical disjuncture between life before and after diagnosis, which led them into a state of liminality, as they found themselves "betwixt and between" established structural and social identities. Respondents were faced with multifaceted loss: of their known self, their present life, their envisioned future and the partner they had expected to play a role in each of these. A minority of accounts suggest that the way in which healthcare practitioners delivered the diagnosis intensified the participants' distress. This research suggests that healthcare practitioners should educate patients in specific aspects of HIV transmission and treatment, and engage closely with them in order to understand their needs and potential reactions to a positive diagnosis. Adapted from the source document.
59 p., Investigates the demands made in negotiations between white colonists, gens de couleurs, and insurgents in the opening months of the Haitian Revolution. Argues that, at least initially, demands for general emancipation were not made, but instead that insurgents sought the amelioration of working conditions on plantations and gens de couleur asked for political rights.
169 p., Examines entanglements of race, place, gender, and class in Puerto Rican reggaetón. Based on ethnographic and archival research in San Juan, Puerto Rico, and in New York, New York, I argue that Puerto Rican youth engage with an African diasporic space via their participation in the popular music reggaetón. By African diasporic space, the author refers to the process by which local groups incorporate diasporic resources such as cultural practices or icons from other sites in the African diaspora into new expressions of blackness that respond to their localized experiences of racial exclusion. Participation in African diasporic space not only facilitates cultural exchange across different African diasporic sites, but it also exposes local communities in these sites to new understandings and expressions of blackness from other places. As one manifestation of these processes in Puerto Rico, reggaetón refutes the hegemonic construction of Puerto Rican national identity as a "racial democracy."
African Consciences is a Parisian based initiative of artistes from the `Black Atlantic' and Africa. They use music to shape a discourse on their identity in relation to Africa, strongly bound to consciousness. The musical itinerary provided by reggae and hip hop constitutes what they see as a means for action to bring alive a "global African network". In this chapter I will reconsider the practice of repatriation, and the meanings it conveys now. I will try to analyse it through African Consciences' "Door of no Return" where they intend to travel back the road of the trans Atlantic trade in Africans. African Consciences has a mediated relation to Africa through roads that join their musical practice to their understanding of African history and tradition. It also carries an ideological intent to bring forth a global Africa through the articulation of routes and roots. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR].
195 p., Paule Marshall's The Chosen Place, The Timeless People (1969), Gayl Jones' Corregidora (1975), and Octavia Butler's Kindred (1979) enhance our conceptualization of black aestheticism and black nationalism as cultural and political movements. The writers use the novel as genre to question the ideological paradigm of a black nationalist aesthetic by providing alternative definitions of community, black women's sexuality, and race relations. Because of the ways in which these writers respond to black aestheticism and black nationalism, they transform our understanding of movements often perceived as sexist, racist, homophobic, and anti-Semitic.
Reads Carnival-related performances in relationship to the colonial and national histories of the circulation of Indian and black women's bodies in Trinidad and Tobago, asking what is at stake in these occupations of genre, form, and performative presence in the latest global scenes of late capitalism (where image and sound, as cultural productions, are always in circulation beyond the scope of the nation, and their own "original" referents).
In 2006, the Peruvian government passed a law that made racial discrimination a crime punishable by incarceration. This law, part of a multicultural reform in Peru, can be seen as an effective recognition of the reality of racism in Peruvian society. Such recognition, however, contrasts with official depictions of Peru as a country without racism, and of Peruvians as people who deny the existence of racism in their society.
This essay analyzes representations and imaginaries of blackness in contemporary Puerto Rico, by focusing on the debates raised by 'Raices'/(Roots) (2001), the Banco Popular video special about traditional Afro-Puerto Rican rhythms of bomba and plena. These debates divided public opinion in Puerto Rico and included members of academia, musicologists, bomba and plena groups, and the San Anton (Ponce) community residents. They refer to the ways Puerto Ricans 'speak the unspoken,' that is, the ways Puerto Ricans talk about race and its intersectionalities on the island and in the diaspora.
African American Research Center, Library, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Notes:
Focuses on cultural manifestations of pan-Americanism through the development of Haitian folkloric dance by the Haitian-born dance director Jean-Léon Destiné and the U.S. African American dance educator Lavinia Williams. As early as the mid-1930s, the Haitian government began to support the advancement and consumption of Haitian cultural arts to increase tourism to the country. In fact, many Caribbean administrations encouraged similar investments in tourism during this time to complement industrialization and to answer the dilemmas of debt, unemployment, and failing economies. The work of Destiné and Williams sought to modernize Haitian dance or, rather, to discipline it, classify it, and theatricalize it so Haiti’s original art form could be exhibited on the world stage and educate audiences about Haitian history and culture. The establishment of cultural institutions and the training of Haitian dancers by a U.S. African American choreographer affirmed not only the spirit of pan-Americanism’s cultural exchange programs, but also the creation of an alternative world by black dancers in which African-based art forms were celebrated and in consistent dialogue with Western culture.
Grassroots Haitian movements for social justice have set themselves a formidable task: not only addressing the ongoing humanitarian crisis, but also challenging the reconstruction effort to include their leadership and avoid reproducing the conditions that helped make the earthquake so disastrous.
Objective: To explore the maternity care experiences and expectations of United Kingdom (UK)-born ethnic minority women. Methods: Qualitative in-depth interviews with 34 UK-born mothers of Black Caribbean, Black African, Indian, Pakistani, Bangladeshi and Irish descent, recruited mainly from nine National Health Service (NHS) maternity units in England. Results: Overall, women felt that their ethnic background did not matter at all with respect to the care they received. UK-born women's familiarity with the system and the absence of language barriers were felt to be influential in getting treated the same as White women. Women stressed the need for professionals to be 'sensitive' and 'delicate' in their interactions and wanted 'continuity of care'. In general, they were positive about the adequacy of the information given during their antenatal appointments, but some women found it difficult to get access to antenatal classes. Women valued good communication and consistent information, with their views acknowledged and their questions answered consistently. They also expressed the need for better physical environments in maternity units. Conclusions: Our findings contribute to the growing evidence about the need to improve maternity and postnatal care, and to develop more sensitive and women-centred care for all women irrespective of ethnic background.
Focuses on discourses of queer subjectivity, Maroon identity, and their relationship to Caribbean nationalism. A key aspect of the argumentis the idea that both queerness and marronage are marked by complex insider/outsider identity positions that resist and complicate binarist discourses of belonging and unbelonging.
(NNPA) - Brazil has long been the best kept secret of the Black Diaspora. Its population of more than 100 million Blacks (51 percent of the total population) makes it at least the second largest Black population in the world. This nation has been a sleeping giant in the global arena but is taking big steps to enter into the distinction of a First World Nation. Right now it is a leader of the emerging Second World nations and takes the leadership role with India at all global and United Nations conferences and summits. Brazil's President Lula da Silva proudly considers himself the leader of "People of Color". On the other hand, Brazil's bid via Rio de Janeiro was a super winner. It vowed to rebuild the slums of Rio and empower the masses. The infrastructure, job opportunities and contractual bidding would be thoroughly diverse and would make the Olympics Committee proud. It was a slam dunk! In the end it was Rio de Janeiro in first place, Madrid in second, Tokyo is third and the stinky Chicago bid dead last.
The article reviews the book “'New Negroes from Africa': Slave Trade Abolition and Free African Settlement in the Nineteenth-Century Caribbean," by Rosanne Marion Adderley.
Part of a special journal issue dedicated to strategies for societal renewal in Haiti., Fonkoze, "the bank the poor can call their own," is a bank that provides more than just loans. It also sees access to reasonably priced savings, remittance transfer, and currency conversion as a right of even the poorest. This article tells the story of how -- after the devastation of the 2010 earthquake -- Fonkoze found itself positioned to serve Haiti's rural population before other banks were back on their feet.
