287 p., With a focus on cultural memory, this dissertation investigates French Caribbean women's plays and their performance at Ubu Repertory Theater, a pioneering French-American theatre in New York. After a theoretical introduction and a historical chapter investigating slavery and its remembrance in the Francophone Caribbean, each chapter is divided into two sections, the first examining the play, and the second its production at Ubu. The author relies on theories of collective memory and cultural trauma to read Ina Césaire's Fire's Daughters, Maryse Condé's The Tropical Breeze Hotel, and Gerty Dambury's Crosscurrents as plays that dramatize a link between the past (the Middle Passage, slavery, and sexual relations between enslaved women and white men) and present-day behaviors, attitudes, and pain. It is argued that these plays work to revise problematic practices of remembrance in France and the Antilles. These practices dissociate slavery from its local context; make the trauma of enslaved women's rape a secret; divide Antilleans of different races, ethnicities, genders, and social classes; and associate resistance almost exclusively with Haiti. In a second section of each chapter, the production and reception of these plays at Ubu are examined.
109 p., Examines the local and global tensions which challenge inculturation in Jamaica, including the role African-derived religions play in that context. The history of Christianity in Jamaica, the development of the Roman Catholic Church's teachings with regards to culture, globalization and its impact on the local Church, and the appropriate method for doing inculturation in the Jamaica in an increasingly global context are examined.
129 p., As the numbers of Black second generation immigrants (SGIs) in the United States increase because of increased numbers of immigrants from Africa and the Caribbean, more research is needed to explain how varying Black ethnic groups perceive and interpret illness to address health disparities (Ayalon & Young, 2005). General health locus of control (HLOC) helps to explain how people attribute the sources of control over their health (Masters & Wallston, 2005) and engage in help-seeking behaviors. HLOC has not been examined in SGIs because of a failure to examine group identity to account for within group differences among Black populations and a lack of culturally sensitive measurements of HLOC. The purpose of this study was to utilize a HLOC measure that included conventional and supernatural dimensions to examine the relationship between group identity, HLOC, and help-seeking in a sample of Black African and Caribbean SGIs. 157 second generation Black immigrants (72 West African and 85 Caribbean) were recruited for this study.
199 p., In the last decade, increasing media attention has been given to the rise of delinquency and crime among Black male youth in Canada's urban centres. The dominant explanation offered for this situation is the prevalence of fatherlessness in the Black community. This popular discourse assumes both that Black/Caribbean families must be dysfunctional if fathers are not present, and that single Black mothers do not have the requisite skills or commitment to prepare their young men to become responsible adults.
This dissertation examines the migratory experiences of the protagonists from four African diasporic novels: Fruit of the Lemon by Andrea Levy (1999), Kehinde by Buchi Emecheta (1994), Breath, Eyes, Memory by Edwidge Danticat (1994), and The Color Purple by Alice Walker (1982). When analyzed comparatively these texts demonstrate that a completely integrated identity (that merges two cultures) is contingent upon a return to the protagonist's cultural roots either by the protagonist herself or someone who is closely aligned with her. The protagonist or her representative must travel to her ancestral homeland and in the process develop a value system that reflects the duality of her identity.
160 p., An analytical study of Burundanga or Cantata Antillana by Jack Délano (1914-1997). One of Délano's most ambitious choral-orchestral compositions, Burundanga was completed in 1989 in response to a commission from the Institute of Puerto Rican Culture and is based on Luis Palés Matos's (1898-1959) extravagant and elaborate poem Canción festiva para ser llorada (A Festive Song to be Wept). Burundanga stands at the foreground of Puerto Rican art-music in the twentieth century. With its neoclassical language and integration of Caribbean folkloric material, it emerges as a unique reflection of the highly complex geographical, social, cultural and musical reality of Puerto Rico and the Antilles. Discerns particular methods by which the composer utilized and adapted Afro-Antillean idioms and combined them with art-music components to portray idiosyncratic aspects of Caribbean culture in a universalistic musical language.
African American Research Center, Library, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
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255 p., The collapse and disappearance of the Soviet Union implied many transformations in the Cuban society, which altered the traditional construction of identity within the frame of the nation-state. It is in that context where alternative new discourses on "race", racism and negritude emerged. The representation of the afro-descendent in the novels of the 1990's and 2000's poses enormous interest since the literary text has been one of the spaces where identity markers have been renegotiated. This dissertation explores how social discourses on cubanidad and negritude have an effect on the writers Eliseo Altunaga and Marta Rojas and their literary production.
155 p., The present dissertation examines nativity-status and place-of-birth-differences in locational outcomes among native-born black American, and foreign-born black Caribbean and black African households. The main objective is to evaluate the degree to which the spatial assimilation model, which was formulated to capture the experience of white European ethnic groups arriving to the U.S. during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, can describe the outcomes of black immigrant ethnic groups arriving to the U.S. in the late twentieth century. Using data from the five percent Public Use Microdata Sample (PUMS) of the 2000 Census extracted from the Integrated Public Use Microdata Series (IPUMS), I investigate the degree to which native-born black Americans and foreign-born black Caribbeans and black Africans are able to translate their individual-level socioeconomic status attainments, such as income and educational levels, into residence in suburban versus central-city neighborhoods. In addition I also test to see if black immigrants' returns to their socioeconomic attainments differed from those of native-born blacks. This study contributes to the literature on immigrant socioeconomic and locational attainment in three ways. First, it revisits traditional residential assimilation theories, and attempts to identify the factors that enable black immigrants to reside in qualitatively different neighborhoods compared to those in which native-born black Americans reside. Second, it examines intra-ethnic black locational outcomes by place-of-birth/national origin status. Finally, up-to-date census data will provide an updated snapshot of black immigrants' socioeconomic and residential status attainments, an important endeavor given the large increase in size and diversity for this population.
147 p., Discusses how blackness, femaleness and Puerto Ricanness (national identity) is presented in commercial media in Puerto Rico. National identity, no matter how differently defined, is often constructed through claims to heritage, "roots," tradition, and descent. In the western world, these claims, almost inevitably allude to questions of "race." In Puerto Rico, it is the mixture of the Spanish, the Taino Indian, and the African, which come to epitomize the racial/traditional stock out of which "the nation" is constructed, defended, and naturalized. This mixture is often represented by images, statues, murals across the island that display the three racialized representatives, as the predecessors of the modern, racially mixed Puerto Rican people. In their portrayals of black women, figures as Mama Ines (the mammy) and fritoleras (women who cook and sell codfish fritters), Caribbean Negras (Black Caribbean women) contemporary media draw upon familiar representations to make black women bodies intelligible to Puerto Rican audiences.
75 p., The aim of this project is two-fold: to discuss the limits of Frantz Fanon's postcolonial theories, and to then present a possible model for turning "the `thing' colonized [into] a new man" (Wretched 2) by liberating "him" from Fanon's desire for inclusion. Or, to put this in other terms, this investigation seeks to highlight one of the most limiting factors in Fanonian postcolonial theory: Fanon's grounding in European humanism.
