If Africans' forced Atlantic passage ushered in a colonial era that violently connected Africa and the Americas to Europe, Africans' travel to and on the Pacific as sailors, soldiers, dockworkers, and curious voyagers traced other kinds of crossings: linkages between black Atlantic subjects and Mexico, Native America, Polynesia, Micronesia, the Philippines, and other sites of flow through the global South. "Water, Shoulders, Into the Black Pacific" looks to innovate discussions of the African diaspora by tracing one possible route of this less-explored oceanography. Where does the black Atlantic meet the black Pacific? What would it mean to chart a story of the African diaspora not through the triangle trade crisscrossing that first ocean but as a continual navigation of many bodies of water -- Atlantic, Caribbean, Gulf of Mexico, Mississippi, Pacific -- and many waves of migration?
274 p., Argues that colonialism, or its impact, as a relation of power is threaded through the related themes of gender/sexuality, the environment, and global capitalism in Jamaica Kincaid's work. The author is interested in how the intersection of these themes enhance Kincaid's critique of the impact of colonialism on the people of Antigua and the Anglophone African Caribbean.
Develops a theoretical framework of biopolitical performance with which to approach the 1957 televised broadcast of Duke Ellington and Billy Strayhorn's A Drum Is a Woman. Presented on the drama anthology program The United States Steel Hour, this theater-music-dance suite fused elements of Afro-Caribbean rhythm with swing and bebop to tell a history of jazz, featuring acclaimed performers such as Carmen de Lavallade, Margaret Tynes, Joya Sherrill, and Talley Beatty. Argues that through their experimentation Ellington and Strayhorn created a hybrid performance in the mode of "calypso theater": a formal and thematic engagement with an Afro-Caribbean performance history.
