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22. Haunting witnesses: Diasporic consciousness in African American and Caribbean writing
- Collection:
- Black Caribbean Literature (BCL)
- Contributers:
- Kellett,Brandi Bingham (Author)
- Format:
- Dissertation/Thesis
- Publication Date:
- 2010
- Published:
- Florida: University of Miami
- Location:
- African American Research Center, Library, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
- Journal Title:
- ProQuest Dissertations and Theses
- Notes:
- 210 p., This project examines the ways in which several texts written in the late 20th century by African American and Caribbean writers appropriate history and witness trauma. Analyzes the writings of Toni Morrison, Ernest Gaines, Paule Marshall, and Fred D'Aguiar as they offer distinct approaches to history and the resulting effects such reconstituted, discovered, or, in some cases, imagined histories can have on the affirmation of the self as a subject. Explores the values of the African diaspora cross-culturally as manifested in the representational practices of these writers.
23. How eastern Afro-Caribbean women report about their intimate relationships: A descriptive and correlational study
- Collection:
- Black Caribbean Literature (BCL)
- Contributers:
- Brathwaite,Migdalia G. (Author)
- Format:
- Dissertation/Thesis
- Publication Date:
- 2010
- Published:
- Pennsylvania: University of Pittsburgh
- Location:
- African American Research Center, Library, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
- Journal Title:
- ProQuest Dissertations and Theses
- Notes:
- 101 p., Little published research describes views of intimate heterosexual relationships among non-Western samples of women. This study represents a first attempt to document Afro-Caribbean women's views about their intimate relationships. A small sample of 53 Afro-Caribbean women from the island of Barbados were interviewed in their homes for a larger study of body image. Included in the measures were questionnaires about the extent to which women's expectations were or were not met in their current heterosexual relationships and if symptoms of depression were experienced. The women in this study generally reported, like Western women, that their relationships met their expectations (whatever those expectations may have been), that they contributed more positive than negative behaviors to the relationship, and that they experienced mostly mild or infrequent depressive symptoms. Unlike findings for Western samples, however, neither relationship duration, women's level of education, nor the extent to which they reported depressive symptoms covaried with whether they reported that their expectations were met or not. In summary, this study did not shed light on possible sources of Afro-Caribbean women's relationship satisfaction, although it potentially ruled out a few.
24. Improving parental involvement and reading achievement of Caribbean immigrant adolescents through differentiated instruction
- Collection:
- Black Caribbean Literature (BCL)
- Contributers:
- Robert,Joshua (Author)
- Format:
- Dissertation/Thesis
- Publication Date:
- 2010
- Published:
- Florida: Nova Southeastern University
- Location:
- African American Research Center, Library, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
- Journal Title:
- ProQuest Dissertations and Theses
- Notes:
- 96 p., The purpose of this applied dissertation study was to determine the relative impact of parental involvement, parental school perception, student generation status, and Caribbean adolescents' own attitudes and behavior towards academic achievement and reading comprehension skills. For this study, 45 Caribbean parents from Grenadian, Guyanese, Haitian, Jamaican, and Trinidadian backgrounds reported in survey form on their involvement, volunteerism, school perception, student behavior and educational achievements of students at the school of study. Students' course grades were obtained from their official school records and were broken down by generational status.
25. Inscribing African descendant identity in nineteenth century Cuba: The transculturated literature of Juan Francisco Manzano and Gabriel de la Concepcion Valdes
- Collection:
- Black Caribbean Literature (BCL)
- Contributers:
- Pettway,Matthew Joseph (Author)
- Format:
- Dissertation/Thesis
- Publication Date:
- 2010
- Published:
- East Lansing, MI: Michigan State University
- Location:
- African American Research Center, Library, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
- Notes:
- 251 p., Explores how Juan Francisco Manzano and Gabriel de la Concepcion Valdés (also known as Plácido) appropriated Hispanic literature to inscribe an African descendant subjectivity in 19th century proto-nationalist Cuban discourse. Revises Mary Louise Pratt's notion of "intercultural texts" and Angel Rama's "literary transculturation", proposing "transculturated colonial literature" to trace the contradictions, re-significations, silences and shifts in the aesthetic and ideological function of Manzano and Plácido's texts. As such, 19th century Afro-Cuban literature is analyzed as an active space of negotiation and exchange disputing racial and religious hierarchies to inscribe an Afro-Cuban religio-cultural subject. The author concludes that both Manzano and Plácido disrupted the aesthetic and ideological norms of the colonial status quo by producing the first instance of literary transculturation in Cuba.
26. Jolie-laide Sexual Poetics in the Fiction of Gayl Jones, Jamaica Kincaid, and Jackie Kay
- Collection:
- Black Caribbean Literature (BCL)
- Contributers:
- Taylor,Andrene M. (Author)
- Format:
- Dissertation/Thesis
- Publication Date:
- 2010
- Published:
- Washington, DC: Howard University
- Location:
- African American Research Center, Library, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
- Notes:
- 191 p., Conceptualizes the idea of jolie-laide ("the beautiful ugly") as a fully elaborated sexual poetics by three women writers of the African diaspora: Gayl Jones (USA), Jamaica Kincaid (Antigua, Caribbean), and Jackie Kay (Scotland, UK). The introductory chapter situates the study in a critical and cultural context and defines key terms. The chapters that follow analyze the thematic preoccupations and narrative strategies of the three writers' respective novels ( Corregidora and Eva's Man, The Autobiography of My Mother , and Trumpet ) and historicize the novels' explicit and implicit ideologies. With their jolie-laide portrayals of gender, the body and sex and sexuality, these three writers fashion complex representations of black female sexual subjectivity and critique the biased images, exaggerations, distortions, and silences of earlier representations. Recognizing that jolie-laide can be used to problematize racial, gender, and sexual binaries, these novelists exploit the structural possibilities of a jolie-laide sexual poetics to address culturally taboo topics in explicit, graphic, and imaginative language and with inventive jolie-laide tropes. They challenge white supremacist stereotypes of black sexuality as well as the sanitized characterizations of black sex found within the literary traditions of black respectability.
27. Locating cultures, constructing identities: The Caribbean diaspora, Black Britain, and the theatre of Mustapha Matura
- Collection:
- Black Caribbean Literature (BCL)
- Contributers:
- Lantz,Victoria Pettersen (Author)
- Format:
- Dissertation/Thesis
- Publication Date:
- 2010
- Published:
- Wisconsin: The University of Wisconsin - Madison
- Location:
- African American Research Center, Library, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
- Journal Title:
- ProQuest Dissertations and Theses
- Notes:
- 330 p., This dissertation examines the major works of Trinidad-born playwright Mustapha Matura, dealing with plays written from 1970 to the present. By considering the relation of Matura's work to Britain and Trinidad, it explores the complexity of identity performance in postcolonial theatre and the ongoing need for agency among diasporic communities. Postcolonial scholarship fully recognizes the significance of writing in the development of postcolonial identities, yet dominant postcolonial theory largely excludes theatre from discussions of that development. Given its aural and visual presentation and its immediate interaction with an audience, theatre provides a unique postcolonial moment through which audience members can survey issues of race and place in their lives.
28. 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.
29. Negro: Travel and the pan-African imagination during the nineteenth century
- Collection:
- Black Caribbean Literature (BCL)
- Contributers:
- Flemming,Tracy K. (Author)
- Format:
- Dissertation/Thesis
- Publication Date:
- 2010
- Published:
- Michigan: University of Michigan
- Location:
- African American Research Center, Library, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
- Journal Title:
- ProQuest Dissertations and Theses
- Notes:
- 178 p., This dissertation is about the role that conservative religious notions of racial ideology played in the historical origins of black nationalism and pan-Africanism. Focuses on the writings of an African Caribbean, Edward Blyden, as the centerpiece of the study. Blyden, a native of Saint Thomas (Virgin Islands) and considered one of the "fathers" of both pan-Africanism and African nationalism, was a particularly complex diasporic intellectual. Traveling first to the United States in the pre-Civil War period, then to Africa and Britain at the height of the European imperial venture - and Christian missionary efforts - Blyden served as a conduit between the West (the United States and Britain) and both a traditional and a Muslim Africa. He saw his role as one of mediating (critiquing/translating) these divergent voices and ideologies with the object of constituting a "modern," pan-African subject.
30. Negrometraje, Literature and Race in Revolutionary Cuba
- Collection:
- Black Caribbean Literature (BCL)
- Contributers:
- Cort,Aisha Z. (Author)
- Format:
- Dissertation/Thesis
- Publication Date:
- 2010
- Published:
- Georgia: Emory University
- Location:
- African American Research Center, Library, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
- Journal Title:
- ProQuest Dissertations and Theses
- Notes:
- 207 p., Explores the expression of Afro-Cuban identity and its illustration by Afro-Cuban writers and filmmakers within the context of the Cuban Revolution. It answers two questions. First, how does Afro-Cuban artistic expression of Afro-Cuban reality change from the 1970s to the 1990s? and second, how can we reread works from Afro-Cuban writers and filmmakers within the context of the Cuban Revolution in light of the ideological disconnects between Revolution, racial discourse, and artistic expression? To answer these questions the author looks to a diverse group of Afro-Cuban artists who produced groundbreaking works during the 1970s and 1990s. Beginning with Nancy Morejón as an example of a well-known literary figure in Afro-Cuban arts, the dissertation delves deeper into the evolution of Afro-Cuban aesthetics with the cinematic works of Nicolas Guillen Landrian in the 1960s, Sara Gómez and Sergio Giral in the 1970s and finally Gloria Rolando in the 1990s. These are all artists whose work has previously never been considered in concert, but together, their works engage in an interesting dialogue and provide a collective answer to the research questions on which this project is based.