223 p., Argues that certain iconic poems have shaped the canon of American poetry. Not merely "canonical" in the usual sense, iconic poems enjoy a special cultural sanction and influence; they have become discourses themselves, generating our notions about American poetry. By "iconic" the author means extraordinarily famous works like Henry Wadsworth Longfellow's "Paul Revere's Ride," Walt Whitman's "Song of Myself," and Claude McKay's "If We Must Die," that do not merely reside in the national memory but that have determined each poet's reception and thus have shaped the history of American poetry.
113 p., Jamaican folk songs have become a definitive characteristic of Jamaican culture. They are exemplars of a culture whose music reflects the lifestyle of most of its citizens. In modern times, their beauty has been show cased in local and foreign performances which exposes an element of the country to the world. Additionally, the arrangements of songs by Jamaican composers like Noel Dexter and Peter Ashbourne have aided in their renaissance in modern times. This research analyzes the arrangements by Noel Dexter and Peter Ashbourne. It explores the transition of Jamaican folk songs from the slave fields to the art music stage.
306 p., Investigates the shifts in gender constructions currently taking place in Jamaica, a peripheral nation-state, during a period which is characterized by hegemonic dissolution in the world-system. These shifts are defined by class- and gender-based conflicts over the norms, values and aesthetics associated with the traditional bourgeois classes. The fulcrum for investigation is Jamaica's Dancehall culture, which currently exhibits changes in the field of masculinity, in which clashes over the body occur constantly. These conflicts center around dress, gendered dancing styles and adornment.
205 p., Analyzes the poetry of the African American Langston Hughes and the Jamaican Louise Bennett during the 1940s. Through an examination of the unique similarities of their poetic projects, namely their engagement of performance to build their audiences, their experiments with poetic personae to represent vernacular social voices, their doubleness as national and transnational figures, their circulation of poetry in radio and print journalism and their use of poetry as pedagogy to promote reading, this dissertation establishes a new perspective on the role of poetry in decolonizing language practices. While Hughes and Bennett are often celebrated for their representation of oral language and folk culture, this project reframes these critical discussions by drawing attention to how they engage performance to foster an embodied form of reading that draws on Creole knowledge systems.
68 p., A collection of poems that explores the immigrant experience, detailing three worlds that forge a Caribbean-American voice. All three sections of the manuscript examine an identity that comes directly, almost solely, from her surroundings. In the tradition of Louise Bennett, the use of dialect aside, Section I attempts to comprehend a narrow Caribbean existence by scrutinizing a life that is tied to nature, family, and country. Section II sees the world slightly more broadly, but there the speaker is also acutely aware of her identity and the complexity in bridging the two worlds she now finds herself simultaneously occupying, one immediate, the other existing only through reflection.
