168 p., Explores Caribbean literature that contests the privileging of nation and diaspora community models, and instead presents the spontaneous and productive formation of communities through praxis. Conceptualizing community through this lens challenges systemic emphases on unity, shared history, and shared identity, while it simultaneously incorporates difference at its very foundation. The author draws on Caribbean and postcolonial theory, subaltern studies historiography, and feminist theory in my analysis of Caryl Phillips's The Atlantic Sound , Erna Brodber's Louisiana, Zee Edgell's Beka Lamb , and Maryse Condé's I, Tituba, Black Witch of Salem.
271 p., Uses W.E.B. Du Bois' reference to the worlds 'within and without the veil' as the narrative setting for presenting the case of an African-Bahamian urban cemetery in use from the early 18th century to the early 20th century. The author argues that people of African descent lived what Du Bois termed a 'double consciousness.' Thus, the ways in which they shaped and changed this cemetery landscape reflect the complexities of their lives. Since the material expressions of this cemetery landscape represent the cultural perspectives of the affiliated communities so changes in its maintenance constitute archaeologically visible evidence of this process. Evidence in this study includes analysis of human remains; the cultural preference for cemetery space near water; certain trees planted as a living grave site memorial; butchered animal remains as evidence of food offerings; and placement of personal dishes on top of graves.
Ottawa, Ontario: Library and Archives Canada = Bibliothèque et Archives Canada
Location:
African American Research Center, Library, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Notes:
Reprint of the author's 2010 M.A. thesis (Carleton University, 2010), 252 p., 3 microfiches + 1 CD-ROM., In 1970s Bahamas, a radio serial cum soap opera called The Fergusons of Farm Road that ran for almost 190 episodes over a five year period became a cultural phenomenon. Ironically, it was originally a part of a courtesy campaign designed to teach Bahamians the importance of being friendly to tourists. This thesis is the first significant study of the Fergusons , basing its insights on original episode scripts, interviews and recently discovered archival audio recordings. It situates the show within the historical and cultural context of the ongoing Bahamian tourism courtesy campaigns to better understand how it transcended the limitations of its pedagogical role into the realm of abiding popular culture.
335 p., A central premise of this project is that individuals and communities perceive the significance of history differently depending on their historical conditions. Indeed, much of the emphasis on memory studies in the last two decades has been informed by an awareness of changing perspectives on the past. Thus, given its focus on black peoples in the United States and the Caribbean, this dissertation aims to illuminate an emergent historical consciousness in the African Diaspora in the late 20th century. This dissertation is divided into two sections. In Part I, "Ancestors: Exploring Historical Inheritances," I analyze Maryse Conde's Les derniers rois mages (1993) and Patrick Chamoiseau's Texaco (1993) as they interrogate the concept of familial lineage and query the significance of the past imagined as an inheritance. Whereas Chamoiseau questions the ability of written history to represent memory and experience, Conde empties the idea of heritage of all significance as new relationships to the past come to the fore. In Part II, "New Birth: Exploring Discourses of Reproduction," I focus on Gayl Jones' Corregidora (1975) and Audre Lorde's Zami: A New Spelling of My Name (1982) as they reveal the limitations of genealogical discourse. By creating their pasts and imagining their heritage, the characters in these texts challenge the primacy of lineage as they point toward other, more viable networks of community and belonging.
African American Research Center, Library, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Notes:
203 p., Argues for grounding the concept of global subaltern resistance in the legacy of the 1966 Tricontinental in which delegates from the liberation movements of 82 nations came together in Havana, Cuba to form an alliance against imperialism. This alliance, called the Organization of Solidarity of the Peoples of Africa, Asia and Latin America (OSPAAAL) quickly became the driving force of international political radicalism and the primary engine of its cultural production. Because the Tricontinental represents the extension into the Americas of the anti-imperialist union of Afro-Asian nations begun at the 1955 Bandung Conference, it points to a moment in which a diverse range of radicalist writers and artists in the Americas began interacting with its discourse. By tracing the circulation of the Tricontinental's ideology in its cultural production and in related texts from Third Cinema, Cuban Revolutionary film, the Nuyorican Movement, and writings by Young Lords and Black Power activists, Beyond the Color Curtain outlines how tricontinentalists laid the groundwork for a theory of power and resistance that is resurfacing in the contemporary notion of the Global South.
400 p., This dissertation explores the spread and articulation of Garveyism--the political movement spearheaded by Jamaican activist Marcus Garvey--across Africa, the greater Caribbean, and the United States in the years following the First World War. Scholarship on Garveyism has remained fixed within a conceptual framework that views the movement synonymously with the rise and fall of Garvey's organization, the Universal Negro Improvement Association (UNIA), and which focuses predominantly on the activities of the organization in the United States. This study argues that Garveyism is more fully rendered as a global endeavor of network-building, consciousness-raising, and activism that extended beyond the operational parameters of the UNIA, influenced a diverse array of regionally-constituted political projects, and nurtured the flowering of a profoundly "Garveyist" period in the history of the African diaspora.
234 p., This dissertation examines the various discursive expressions of black agency that formed the stereotypical representations of African descendants found in Victorian racial discourse. It is, therefore, an analysis of the discursive practices of peoples of African descent and not of the actual stereotypes frequently associated with Victorian racial discourse. A close reading and analysis of the discursive practices of peoples of African descent subject to British rule will generate more focused critical narratives about the fantasies that plagued the British imagination well into the 20sth century. This study also suggest that contemporary scholars should look at Victorian racial discourse as an active dialogue and conversation with the Other, rather than a description of the psychology of power.
