448 p., This applied anthropology study, guided by a feminist perspective and in particular, Black Feminist Thought is an outgrowth of an evaluation study of the Partnership for Peace Program (PFP) in Grenada, West Indies. The PFP is a Caribbean-specific model that was built into a sixteen-week cycle program by the United Nations Entity for Gender Equality and Empowerment of Women (UNWomen). Since 2005, the PFP has been geared towards Grenadian men, who have used violence against women to express their masculine identities. PFP focuses exclusively on rehabilitating male perpetrators with a goal to protect the human rights of women. This research evaluated the PFP program, using qualitative and quantitative methods to measure the program's impact based on the behavioral changes that male participants adopted to avoid violence against women.
320 p., Examines the place of difference in black women's writing of the African diaspora. The works of well-known and canonical writers Toni Morrison, Buchi Emecheta, Jamaica Kincaid, and Audre Lorde illustrate key functions of the poetics of difference. The author reads these writers alongside important but underexplored figures, including Ghanaian-born poet Ama Ata Aidoo, Cuban-born novelist Achy Obejas, Trinidadian-born writer Dionne Brand, and South African/Botswanan writer Bessie Head, as well as younger writers such as U.S.-born playwright Suzan-Lori Parks, Nigerian-born fiction writer Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, and St. Thomas-born writer Tiphanie Yanique. These writers reframe identity around radical models of difference by: (1) developing and naming hybrid genres; and (2) destabilizing formal conventions of recognizable genres through multiplicities of voice. By highlighting difference as a core component of black female identity, these writers make crucial interventions in several areas, including Afrodiasporic cultural, feminist, queer, and postcolonial theories of identity, as well as feminist, Afrodiasporic cultural, formalist, and narratological conceptions of voice.
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.
Examines death and barrenness images prevalent in literature produced by black women during the 1970s and 1980s, taking for study the novels Bluest Eye (1970), Praisesong for the Widow (1983), Corregidora (1975), and Mama Day (1988). Argues that images in these narratives represent contemporary manifestations of social death that directly relate to what belief in the American dream, and that these images symbolize the ways in which decisions made had a deadening effect on black communities, primarily experienced as a loss of social sensibility and vitality of relationships.
301 p., In many of the francophone Caribbean's most influential texts, a black messiah conquers his enemies and takes over the land. This man is a superman, who hears the cry of his people and delivers them from slavery and the Code Noir (a black code). He draws strength from Voodoo and Roman Catholicism to set his people free or die trying. Argues that scholars have not studied the extent to which the messiah figure dominates French Caribbean fiction and how this trend colors our perceptions of black leadership. After presenting messianism in the history of Martinique, Guadeloupe, and Haiti, the author considers key messianic passages in francophone literature and highlight where rhetorical devices and figurative language transcribe metaphysical beliefs. These close readings correct the misconception that the French Caribbean and its religions are not messianic.
159 p., Metamorphic literatures is both the identification of a cohesive group of texts, as well as the assertion that these particular texts are part of a global literary movement. The literatures coming out of this movement fundamentally seek to (1) resist colonization and enslavement, (2) re-vision history and resurface figures of redress, and (3) reimagine gender, sexualities, and the queer diasporic body. The tropes of this new literary movement that are expanded upon in the following work will organize the language, characteristics, and outlines of this movement of contemporary diasporic writers.
369 p., Looks at contemporary novels of the anglophone African diaspora through the lens of movement, migration, and dislocation, with particular attention to how the selected authors depict black diasporic identity formation, and how they contribute to it through their writings. Thematically, this dissertation examines literary representations of the social, cultural, and psychological consequences that involuntary and voluntary migrations have had for black communities and individuals in North America, the Caribbean, and Britain. It explores the juncture of history, memory, geography, and diasporic identity, as represented by eight contemporary novelists of African and African-Caribbean descent: Charles Johnson ( Middle Passage ), Lawrence Hill ( The Book of Negroes ), Toni Morrison (Sula and Tar Baby ), George Lamming (The Emigrants ), Caryl Phillips (The Final Passage, A State of Independence, and Crossing the River ), Andrea Levy (Small Island ), Cecil Foster (Sleep on, Beloved ), and Edwidge Danticat ( Breath, Eyes, Memory ).
282 p., Challenges how critical scholarship on race and racism in Latin America has traditionally understood racial subalterns in Cuba and Puerto Rico as people who are prevented from acting as black political subjects because of the hegemonic power of discourses of nationhood premised on ideas of mestizaje and racial fraternity. By providing an intellectual history of several important yet largely ignored Cuban and Puerto Rican activists intellectuals of color who lived and worked between the Caribbean and the U.S. at the turn of the 20th century, the author shows that instead of being tricked by creole elite national narratives, they attempted to redefine ideas of nationhood to challenge racism, colonialism, and imperialism at local, national, and transnational levels.
237 p., Free people of color held an ambiguous place in Caribbean slave societies. On the one hand they were nominally free, but the reality of their daily lives was often something less than free. This work examines how free people of color, or libres de color , in nineteenth-century Cuba attempted to carve out lives for themselves in the face of social, economic, and political constraints imposed on them by white Cubans and Spaniards living in the island. It focuses on how through different Afro-Cuban associations some libres de color used public music and dance performances to self-fashion identities on their own terms.
