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2. Afro-Caribbean women teachers recruited for U.S. urban schools: A narrative analysis of experience, change, and perception
- Collection:
- Black Caribbean Literature (BCL)
- Contributers:
- Beck,Makini (Author)
- Format:
- Dissertation/Thesis
- Publication Date:
- 2010
- Published:
- New York: University of Rochester
- Location:
- African American Research Center, Library, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
- Journal Title:
- ProQuest Dissertations and Theses
- Notes:
- Explores the experiences of Caribbean women teachers who are recruited to teach in a mid sized Southern city. Narrative methods were used to analyze four Barbadian women teachers' perspectives on their: initial experiences and challenges; teaching philosophies and approaches to teaching American students; and successful transition into Louisville, Kentucky's public schools after five years of teaching. In an age where school districts across the nation seek educators from overseas to address the well-documented teacher shortage, this study has implications for helping future international teacher candidates transition into U.S. public schools.
3. 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.
4. Authentic performances: The paradox of Black identity
- Collection:
- Black Caribbean Literature (BCL)
- Contributers:
- Callaway,Micheal Antonio (Author)
- Format:
- Dissertation/Thesis
- Publication Date:
- 2010
- Published:
- Arizona: Arizona State University
- Location:
- African American Research Center, Library, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
- Journal Title:
- ProQuest Dissertations and Theses
- Notes:
- 251 p., Argues that there is a difference between biological essentialism and racial authenticity. Essentialism is reactionary, whereas racial authenticity is thoughtful, constructed and aimed at countering common beliefs. Once authenticity is positioned as a means to an end and not an end itself, authenticity can be used as a way of reading social situations, questioning how authentic arguments are used in culture, and understanding why their use is sometimes necessary. Also, using authenticity as a way of reading social situations takes the focus off of the authentic representation of race and places attention on American society by examining how the authentic representation works in dialogue with other arguments about race. This study uses the Harlem Renaissance as a backdrop to view how Afro-Caribbeans inserted themselves into African American discourses on race. The dark skinned immigrants blended in visually, but were far removed from many of the formative racial experiences of their American peers. These people may have come to align with African Americans and fight white racism, but they were in fact taking up new identity positions and learning to perform forms of blackness on the fly. The works that are examined in the various chapters of this dissertation show Black writers as critical agents of change who work hard to balance their own personal needs with the needs of their race and position themselves within a racist society.
5. The Rastafari presence in Toni Morrison's "Tar Baby", "Beloved", and "Song of Solomon"
- Collection:
- Black Caribbean Literature (BCL)
- Contributers:
- Carr,Nicole Racquel (Author)
- Format:
- Dissertation/Thesis
- Publication Date:
- 2010
- Published:
- Florida: Florida Atlantic University
- Location:
- African American Research Center, Library, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
- Journal Title:
- ProQuest Dissertations and Theses
- Notes:
- 117 p., Literary scholars frequently analyze the allusions to Western Christianity apparent in Toni Morrison's novels, but these studies overlook the ways in which some of her novels are informed by a Caribbean presence. This study argues that Rastafari themes, symbols, and ideologies are recurrent in Toni Morrison's Tar Baby, Beloved, and Song of Solomon. Rastafari is a social movement primarily concerned with restoring the image of Africa to a holy place. A Rastafari analysis of these texts broadens the literary spectrum to suggest that these novels highlight Morrison's attempt to write about the multifaceted element of the black community, which remains deeply connected to its American, African, and Caribbean roots.
6. Who is nature?: Yoruba religion and ecology in Cuba
- Collection:
- Black Caribbean Literature (BCL)
- Contributers:
- Concha-Holmes,Amanda D. (Author)
- Format:
- Dissertation/Thesis
- Publication Date:
- 2010
- Published:
- Florida: University of Florida
- Location:
- African American Research Center, Library, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
- Journal Title:
- ProQuest Dissertations and Theses
- Notes:
- 327 p., "This research is in response to the general academic need to examine how black histories have been conceived and written. Instead of folklore, I look to the Osainistas (healers and herbalists initiated into the secrets of Osain) in Cuba as possible partners in a conversation in collaborative conservation. My study of Lucumí (Yorùbá-derived) religion and Osain (deity of the sacred forests, herbs and healings) reveals an embodied understanding of nature through which the boundaries of subject as well as material and spiritual become collapsed and traversed through specialized communication techniques. Ways of knowing through invocations, praise poetry, music and dance are essential to nearly all Yorùbá ritual in which spiritual forces are actualized-evoking and thus invoking spirit into physical form. Yorùbá employ these embodied techniques to transcend boundaries and open communication among spirit, material, temporal and spatial worlds, particularly to understand and work with natural resources. This embodied knowledge is, as Yvonne Daniel argues in her book Dancing Wisdom , "rich and viable and should be referenced among other kinds of knowledge" (2005:4). This intermittently conducted 2003-06 ethnographic study, relies on what I am calling evocative ethnography, which is organized around ethnography using visual and cognitive techniques along with archival research to explore how Lucumí conceptualize nature and how I can translate these embodied perceptions." --The Author.
7. 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.
8. Bodied knowledges (where our blood is born): Maternal narratives and articulations of black women's diaspora identity
- Collection:
- Black Caribbean Literature (BCL)
- Contributers:
- crump,helen j. (Author)
- Format:
- Dissertation/Thesis
- Publication Date:
- 2010
- Published:
- Minnesota: University of Minnesota
- Location:
- African American Research Center, Library, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
- Journal Title:
- ProQuest Dissertations and Theses
- Notes:
- 220 p., Employs a black feminist diaspora literary lens to identify, define, trace, and speak to the African Diaspora as it functions in black women's diaspora fiction and informs our understanding of black women's diaspora identity. Considers three authors and novels by women of, in, and across the African Diaspora. The study centers on Sandra Jackson-Opoku's The River Where Blood Is Born as a primary site of analysis of diaspora formation and theorization, Dionne Brand's At the Full and Change of the Moon and Maryse Condé's Desirada as comparative textual and theoretical sites.
9. "In the same boat now": Peoples of the African diaspora and/as immigrants: The politics of race, migration, and nation in twentieth-century American literature
- Collection:
- Black Caribbean Literature (BCL)
- Contributers:
- Davis-McElligatt,Joanna Christine (Author)
- Format:
- Dissertation/Thesis
- Publication Date:
- 2010
- Published:
- Iowa: The University of Iowa
- Location:
- African American Research Center, Library, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
- Journal Title:
- ProQuest Dissertations and Theses
- Notes:
- 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.
10. Preacher's Cave: Developing a National Heritage Tourism Site in Eleuthera, Bahamas
- Collection:
- Black Caribbean Literature (BCL)
- Contributers:
- Day,Jane S. (Author)
- Format:
- Dissertation/Thesis
- Publication Date:
- 2010
- Published:
- Florida: Florida Atlantic University
- Location:
- African American Research Center, Library, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
- Journal Title:
- ProQuest Dissertations and Theses
- Notes:
- 186 p., Preacher's Cave, an archaeological site in North Eleuthera, Bahamas, is arguably one of the most important historical places in that country. This large cave, isolated in a natural setting, has long been associated in the popular imagination with the first English colonists who shipwrecked in the Bahamas in 1648 and laid the foundation for the modern nation. Before the present work, no systematic scientific archaeological work had ever been conducted at this site. These excavations, in conjunction with the written record, also suggest that the area surrounding the site is the location of the first free black community in the country.