Number of results to display per page
Search Results
22. 'It will be social': Black women writers and the postwar era 1945--1960
- Collection:
- Black Caribbean Literature (BCL)
- Contributers:
- Caldwell,Katrina Myers (Author)
- Format:
- Dissertation/Thesis
- Publication Date:
- 2009
- Published:
- Illinois: University of Illinois at Chicago
- Location:
- African American Research Center, Library, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
- Journal Title:
- ProQuest Dissertations and Theses
- Notes:
- 268 p., This study used a Black feminist critical framework to examine the conditions that influence the production of black women's fiction during the postwar era (1945-60). The novels of Ann Petry, Dorothy West and Paule Marshall were studied as artifacts that were shaped by the cultural and political climate of this crucial period in American history. A survey was also conducted of their associations with members and organizations in the American Left to determine what impact their social activism had on their lives and art. It was determined that these writers' political engagement played a significant role in the creation of transformative narratives about the power of black women to resist oppression in all of its forms. As a consequence of their contribution to a rich black feminist literary tradition, these postwar black women fiction writers serve as important foremothers to later generations of black women artists.
23. 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.
24. "De Understadin to Go 'Long wid It": W.E.B. Du Bois, Zora Neale Hurston, and the Black Diaspora in the Americas
- Collection:
- Black Caribbean Literature (BCL)
- Contributers:
- Cantave,Sophia (Author)
- Format:
- Dissertation/Thesis
- Publication Date:
- 2011
- Published:
- Massachusetts: Tufts University
- Location:
- African American Research Center, Library, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
- Journal Title:
- ProQuest Dissertations and Theses
- Notes:
- 263 p., Focuses on the writing and thinking of W.E.B. Du Bois and Zora Neale Hurston in order to explore the continuing effects of the legacy of enslavement as well as question the need for entre nous black spaces in the twenty-first century. In pairing Du Bois with Hurston, the author considers the difficulties of entre nous speaking along generational lines, gender differences, and regional affiliations. Though their writing and speaking differed, as scholars and artists they resisted the demands of the minstrel mask to produce a body of work that subverted dominant culture's devaluation of black folk responses to ongoing racial terror and dehumanization. Hurston and Du Bois did this while trying to conceptualize what a black "us" in the United States and in the black diaspora in the Americas entailed and what, if anything, exists between the "us."
25. 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.
26. Revaluing the Dynamics of Orality in the Continental Caribbean Literature of Colombia
- Collection:
- Black Caribbean Literature (BCL)
- Contributers:
- Castillo,Marisol (Author)
- Format:
- Dissertation/Thesis
- Publication Date:
- 2011
- Published:
- California: University of California, Los Angeles
- Location:
- African American Research Center, Library, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
- Journal Title:
- ProQuest Dissertations and Theses
- Notes:
- 152 p., Sheds light on the importance of orality as it is embedded in the cultural traditions of the Colombian Caribbean. Examines the different ways in which orality is manifested and produced in Colombian popular culture and literature. Also explores the dynamics of "primary orality," in which orality compensates for the absence of knowledge or usage of a written alphabet, and "secondary orality," in which orality is sustained by a technological device, in this case the cassette.
27. Queerly straight, racially queer: Constructions of masculinity in Samuel Selvon's "The Lonely Londoners"
- Collection:
- Black Caribbean Literature (BCL)
- Contributers:
- Catalan,Linnea Maureen (Author)
- Format:
- Dissertation/Thesis
- Publication Date:
- 2012
- Published:
- Canada: Trent University
- Location:
- African American Research Center, Library, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
- Journal Title:
- ProQuest Dissertations and Theses
- Notes:
- 116 p., Using Trinidadian writer Samuel Selvon's 1956 novel The Lonely Londoners as a textual example, argues that Selvon's presentation of the experiences of migrant working-class Afro-Caribbean men in post-war London opens up space for an unconventional reading of "queer masculinity" as shaped by the intersections of gender, race, class and sexuality under the influence of the socio-political ideology of the period both in the Caribbean and in Britain. The resulting form of masculine identification for these Afro-Caribbean migrants is constructed through an expression of hypersexuality where the pursuit of pleasure becomes an act of resistance to social marginalization.
28. (Re)membering Revolution, Imagining Blackness: The Haitian Revolution in the Black Cultural Imaginary
- Collection:
- Black Caribbean Literature (BCL)
- Contributers:
- Ceptus,Babara (Author)
- Format:
- Dissertation/Thesis
- Publication Date:
- 2011
- Published:
- California: University of California, Davis
- Location:
- African American Research Center, Library, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
- Journal Title:
- ProQuest Dissertations and Theses
- Notes:
- 180 p., The articles, lectures, popular and professional histories, travelogues, and ethnographies of John B. Russwurm, Samuel M. Cornish, James McCune Smith, Augustus Straker, T.G. Steward, Ana Julia Cooper, James Weldon Johnson, Langston Hughes and Zora Neal Hurston, stakes claims about the capacity of black people for liberty, citizenship, and self-determination. Current historians of Haiti's legacy must contend with the historiographies of early black scholars in order to fully appreciate the way the Haitian revolution was not silenced, but remained intimately present for writers and scholars trying to develop a unified black identity.
29. From the Plantation Zone: The Poetics of a Black Matrilineal Genealogy for the Americas
- Collection:
- Black Caribbean Literature (BCL)
- Contributers:
- Chanza Torres,Eileen S. (Author)
- Format:
- Dissertation/Thesis
- Publication Date:
- 2013
- Published:
- New York: State University of New York at Stony Brook
- Location:
- African American Research Center, Library, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
- Journal Title:
- ProQuest Dissertations and Theses
- Notes:
- 245 p., In the Humanities, studies on the legacy of enslaved Black women are often split along ethnic, cultural, linguistic and national lines. This dissertation brings together literatures and visual arts from Puerto Rico, Martinique, Suriname, the Dominican Republic and the U.S. representing a myriad of linguistic and cultural traditions that turn to the legacy of the historical Black female body as their myth of creation. The author positions these works under the heading of Plantation Zone Literatures and Visual Arts, a term used to indicate the centrality of Black women's genealogy in 20th-century and 21st-century works from the Black Diaspora. Once a geographic space where Africans and their heirs were forced to labor, the Plantation Zone serves as a metaphorical site where the legacy of the historical Black female body--in multifarious forms of triumph and pain--is celebrated in Black Diasporic literatures.
30. Race Fundamentalism: Caribbean Theater and the Challenge to Black Diaspora
- Collection:
- Black Caribbean Literature (BCL)
- Contributers:
- Chetty,Raj (Author)
- Format:
- Dissertation/Thesis
- Publication Date:
- 2013
- Published:
- Washington: University of Washington
- Location:
- African American Research Center, Library, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
- Journal Title:
- ProQuest Dissertations and Theses
- Notes:
- 223 p., This dissertation engages with radical Caribbean theater as a crucial literary archive that is nonetheless underexplored as an expression of political culture and thought. The theoretical grounding of the chapters emerges from the analytically generative thrust of a comment by C. L. R. James in The Black Jacobins: "to neglect the racial factor as merely incidental is an error only less grave than to make it fundamental." While the phrase asserts that race cannot be neglected, it also cautions against ensconcing race as fundamental analytical priority, suggesting a powerfully fluid conceptualization of radical political culture. Argues that radical theater projects in Jamaica and the Dominican Republic share this fluid conceptualization of radical politics with the Trinidadian James's own stage versions of the Haitian Revolution.