233 p., Analyzes three contemporary novels by Black women authors to argue that their daughter-protagonists gain a sense of their own subjectivities as women of African descent through their imaginative and creative responses to their respective muted paternal histories and legacies. These responses motivate the creation of ritualistic art forms rooted in communal practices such as storytelling, sculpting, music, dance-drama, folk medicine, and traditional cuisine. Maps the centrality of family, community, rituals, and art to the development of female subjectivity as represented in Marilene Felinto's As mulheres de Tijucopapo / The Women of Tijucopapo , Edwidge Danticat's The Dew Breaker , and Gayl Jones's Corregidora.
232 p., Calls attention to the renewed popularity of the epistolary novel among Africana contemporary women writers. This work investigates why, since the late nineteen-seventies, there has been a resurgence of this classic form among women writers across the Black Atlantic. The adoption of this genre among women writers in post-colonial contexts is especially significant because the classic epistolary novel was a medium that often endorsed notions of female submission and imperialist ambition. At the same time, the epistolary tradition connotes a revolutionary history. With this idea in mind, the author argues that an examination of how contemporary women revise the epistolary novel offers a crucial perspective regarding the struggles of women throughout various geographic locations and social strata in relation to nation, citizenship, and selfhood. This project focuses on how Sindiwe Magona, Nozipo Maraire, and Paulette Ramsay "reinvent epistolarity," using the epistolary genre to make interventions in the public sphere by depicting Africana women's experiences of education, marriage, inheritance, and health.
241 p., Examines the experiences of Panamanian Afro-Caribbean women and their membership in STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics) training and careers. The shortage of Science and Math teachers in 48 of 50 States heightens the need for those trained in STEM. Females of African phenotype have persistently been underrepresented in STEM. However, this trend does not appear to have held for Panamanian Afro-Caribbean women. The current study explores issues related to STEM participation for these women by addressing the overarching question: What key factors from the lived experiences of Panamanian Afro-Caribbean women in STEM careers can be used to inform work with females of African phenotype in their pursuit of STEM education and STEM careers?
250 p., This dissertation has focused on the intertextual relationship between Tituba in I, Tituba...Black Witch of Salem and Veronica in Waiting for Happiness by Maryse Condé, primarily around different figures of otherness such as birth, race, sexuality, and space in which Tituba and Veronica are victims, according to their respective reference groups. Tituba is a child born out of wedlock because Abena, her mother, was raped by an English sailor on the Atlantic coast. This would rightfully translate into the hatred her mother has for her. Veronica was born into a family of two girls when her parents were in fact expecting a boy. Race and space are also lacking elements with the protagonists. This would explain their spatial instability depending on the course of the novels. Enslaved in different families, Tituba was imprisoned for witchcraft in Salem and was later hanged in her native Barbados due to lack of real space. Veronica on the other hand sought asylum in France where she returns after her disappointment of wanting ancestral roots in Africa.
107 p., Stephanie St Clair was born in 1897 on the island of Guadeloupe. In 1923 she created and ran a highly-lucrative policy bank in Harlem. By 1926, the operation earned a quarter of a million dollars To this day, she remains the only black female gangster to run a numbers bank of that size St Clair also contributed generously to the community and advocated for racial uplift. This thesis explores some of the factors that influenced her decision to become an entrepreneur who would create and run her own enterprise; and, paradoxically, become an activist within her community. Also implicit, and therefore a component of the inquiry, was St. Clair's decision to describe herself as a lady when the definition would not have applied to her in that era.
239 p., Undertakes a critical task of "writing to" and "writing back to" Frantz Fanon on the issues of violence, masculinity, and nation-formation. The author deploys Brian Keith Axel's formulations of "national interruption" to position African diasporic women's novels--specifically Gayl Jones's Corregidora, Tsitsi Dangarembga's Nervous Conditions, and Edwidge Danticat's Breath, Eyes, Memory --as critical interruptions to Fanon's formulations.
295 p., Focuses on the function of black vernacular myths and rituals in three primary women's texts of the Americas: Toni Morrison's Song of Solomon (1977), Simone Schwartz-Bart's Pluie et Vent sur Telumee Miracle (1972) and Paule Marshall's Praisesong for the Widow (1983). My project codifies how the black vernacular expressions of mythology and ritual are used to negotiate power between the individual and their community. The author traces how the women in these texts used resources of the black vernacular tradition as social and cultural collateral to empower themselves within an alternative system of values that simultaneously validates self and communal worth.
363 p., investigates the pre- and post- migratory experiences of working-class African-Caribbean women from the English-speaking Caribbean who left their children in their home countries while pursuing better economic opportunities in Canada from the 1970s to the early 1990s. The author problematizes the intersectional relationship between female migrant labor, transnationality and motherhood within the rubric of globalized gender, race and class relations. Given the centrality of African-Caribbean women's worker-mother role in their societies, further exploration of this role within global migration is important in order to recognize its significant gendered impact on women's labor and familial relations on a transnational level.
95 p., While Pan-Africanism is largely understood as Black men's fight for colonial liberation and state independence, women played an important and often unheralded role. This thesis challenges the masculinist history of Pan-Africanism using Amy Ashwood Garvey's life to highlight women's intellectual and political contributions to the movement. The author discusses Ashwood Garvey's role in co-founding the Universal Negro Improvement Association (UNIA) and her work with the International African Friends of Abyssinia (IAFA), the International African Service Bureau (IASB), the Council of African Affairs, and the Fifth Pan-African Congress held in 1945. In addition to being an ardent Pan-Africanist, Ashwood Garvey was also a feminist who fought for women's equality through a wide range of anti-imperialist activities. Using her life as a lens through which to examine feminism's intersection with antiracist and anti-imperialist activism, this thesis underscores the fact that, for women throughout the African diaspora, struggles around race, gender, and colonialism operate in a symbiotic relationship to one another.
