275 p., Racial ideology in Cuba, which negates the importance and effects of race and a racial hierarchy, gained significant legitimacy at the start of the Cuban Revolution due to increased levels of equality and the initial commitment by the Revolution to eradicate racism and racial discrimination. Racism was declared to be solved and race was subsequently erased from the public script two years after its triumph in 1959. This project determines (1) how the ideology of racial harmony and Cuban socialism join to create a racial ideology that often succeeds in reducing the salience of race for Cubans, particularly among the revolution's supporters (2) how this racial ideology affects identity formation, racial consciousness and racial attitudes among blacks as it interacts with visible racial disparities and (3) the trajectory that black politics has taken in Cuba.
276 p., A critical examination of Haitian migration and displacement in North America that engages both a theoretical and literary analysis of exile and diaspora as consequences of migration and displacement. Argues that Haitian writers in North America inscribe migration by troping exile and diaspora to speak of the predicament of displaced migratory subjects and their inevitable crossings of places, landscapes, borders, cultures, and nations. Analyzes three novels by Haitian-American writer Edwidge Danticat: Breath, Eyes, Memory (1994), The Farming of Bones (1998), and the Dew Breaker (2004); and two novels by Haitian Canadian writer Myriam Chancy: Spirit of Haiti (2003) and The Scorpion's Claw (2005).
159 p., Explores the lived experience of a Caribbean American Black woman in search of her racial and authentic ethnic identity. As a result of her research in womanist theology, she is forced to confront truths about herself and how she misappropriated her ethnicity. As a method of discovery, she employs autoethnography to examine her identity experiences using William E. Cross's Black identity development (hereafter referred to as BID) theoretical framework. With the use of meditation and memory sessions, she develops a flashback narrative to determine how her misappropriation occurred during the 1960s Civil Rights Movement. Her awareness is an evolutionary progression to challenge hidden, unexamined memories, uncover personal truths, and integrate alienated aspects of her life.
347 p., Historically, the integration of European immigrants and their children into U.S. society has been signified by their ability to assimilate into White middle-class society and enjoy the advantages of upward mobility. However, similar privileges are not experienced by immigrants of color; most often these groups assume a minority status in the United States, which (i) creates socio-economic impediments in their journey toward upward mobility and (ii) destabilizes their deeply embedded notions of self and identity. Within this social dilemma, 1.5 and second generation U.S.-born children of Caribbean immigrants occupy a distinctive and theoretically-valuable location for researchers. Grounded in critical race theory and the notion that racial hierarchies and racism are inescapable markers of the Black experiences in the U.S., this study explores the ways in which ten children of Caribbean immigrants come to understand themselves and their place in U.S. racial discourses and conventions given the racial and ethnic socialization messages they receive at home and their experiences with institutionalized racism and racial hierarchies in U.S. schools.
Focuses on African American and Afro-Hispanic literature and folklore. Employs Fernando Ortiz's theory of transculturation. Ortiz makes the case that a new Afro-Cuban identity is created with the intermingling of African, Spanish and native inhabitants of Cuba. Using Ortiz's critical framework as the foundation of this study, critiques of Zora Neale Hurston's portrayal of African American identity. Examines the parallel between her work and that of Lydia Cabrera, a Cuban ethnographer whose work represents Afro-Cuban identity as a transcultural one.
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.
351 p., Explores the racial and gender decolonization of New York and Curaçaoan women in a select group of novels, paintings and performance text by women from Curaçao and New York City. The Curaçaoan novels are: Aliefka Bijlsma's Gezandstraald [Sandblasted] (2007); Loeki Morales' Bloedlijn Overzee: Een Familiezoektocht [Overseas Bloodline: A Family Search] (2002); Myra Römer's Het Geheim van Gracia [The Secret of Gracia] (2008). The Curaçaoan painters are: Jean Girigori (1948), Minerva Lauffer (1957) and Viviana (1972). The New York novels and performance text are: Black Artemis' Picture Me Rollin' (2005), Angie Cruz's Soledad (2003) and Nelly Rosario's Song of the Water Saints (2002) and Josefina Báez's Dominicanish (2000). The ways the women characters, figures, images and voices align to subvert gendered delineations as well as the stifling cultural and colonial imprints on their bodies and their selves in Curaçao and New York are central to the decolonizing project explored here.
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.
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.
473 p., Demonstrates that the figure of the trickster is a key trope for the achievement of agency by the narrators of the three slave narratives Autobiografia de un esclavo, "Routes in North Africa by Abú Bekr es[dotbelow] s[dotbelow]iddik" [sic], and Biografia de un cimarrón. Also shows how both the realization of the trickster's role and the achievement of agency to which such a role is oriented are dependent on the use of the four Afro-Caribbean meta-tropes ndoki, nkisi, nganga, and simbi.
