African American Research Center, Library, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Notes:
68 p, Traditional Caribbean history has been directed by and focused upon the conquerors who came to the region to colonize and seek profitable resources. Native Caribbean peoples and African slaves used to work the land have been silenced by traditional history so that it has become necessary for modern Caribbean thinkers to challenge that history and recreate it. Alejo Carpentier and Michelle Cliff challenge traditional Caribbean history in their texts, The Kingdom of This World and Abeng, respectively. Each of these texts rewrites traditional history to include the perspectives of natives and the slaves of Haiti and Jamaica. Traditional history is challenged by the inclusion of these perspectives, thus providing a rewritten, revised history.
African American Research Center, Library, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Notes:
92 p, Investigates the power of stories told within Caribbean dancehall music and culture that present “good reasons” that are adopted by members of that culture. Shows that dancehall stories reveal powerful ideological frames that “naturalize” ways of being within Caribbean dancehall culture. Various relationships between “good reasons” presented in lyrical stories and the adoption of these “good reasons” by participants in their own stories emerged as well.
African American Research Center, Library, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Notes:
52 p., Gottschalk traveled extensively. A sojourn in Cuba during 1854 was the beginning of a series of trips to Central and South America. He also traveled to Puerto Rico after his Havana debut and at the start of his Caribbean period. Taken with the music he heard on the island, he composed a work entitled Souvenir de Porto Rico; Marche des gibaros, Op. 31 (RO250).
191 p., How does recent black migration impact Atlanta's geographies of black life? Since 1990, the Atlanta metropolitan region has become a major destination for three groups of black migrants from disparate origins: native-born "return south" blacks from other U.S. regions, Afro-Caribbean immigrants, and sub-Saharan African immigrants. These migrants' ethnic diversity dismantles existing notions of "black" culture, politics, and place. Black Migration to Atlanta revises scholarship by demonstrating that we cannot understand the complexity of black lives in Atlanta without investigating the complex relationship between space, migration, and popular culture. Atlanta emerges not just as an urban core, but as a region --a multiplicity of metropolitan sites--imagined and contested through residential patterns, commercial geographies, and popular culture's attempts to accommodate cultural and geographic shifts brought by recent black migration.
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.
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.
