225 p., This dissertation is a cultural history of Barbados since its 1966 independence. As a pivotal point in the Transatlantic Slave Trade of the 17th and 18th centuries, one of Britain's most prized colonies well into the mid 20th century, and, since 1966, one of the most stable postcolonial nation-states in the Western hemisphere, Barbados offers an extremely important and, yet, understudied site of world history. Barbadian identity stands at a crossroads where ideals of British respectability, African cultural retentions, U.S. commodity markets, and global economic flows meet. Focusing on the rise of Barbadian popular music, performance, and visual culture this dissertation demonstrates how the unique history of Barbados has contributed to complex relations of national, gendered, and sexual identities, and how these identities are represented and interpreted on a global stage. This project examines the relation between the global pop culture market, the Barbadian artists within it, and the goals and desires of Barbadian people over the past fifty years, ultimately positing that the popular culture market is a site for postcolonial identity formation.
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.
243 p., Analyzes three novels by contemporary female Caribbean and Latin American Afro-descendent writers of the diaspora: Peruvian Lucía Charún-Illescas' Malambo (2001), Brazilian Ana Maria Gonçalves' Um defeito de cor (2006), and Puerto Rican Mayra Santos-Febres' Fe en disfraz (2009). In these texts, the old and the new intermingle in the space of the narrative. The colonial past is reexamined and reconstructed out of the need to understand its reminiscences into the present and the necessity to transform the future.
250 p., This dissertation has focused on the intertextual relationship between Tituba in I, Tituba...Black Witch of Salem and Veronica in Waiting for Happiness by Maryse Condé, primarily around different figures of otherness such as birth, race, sexuality, and space in which Tituba and Veronica are victims, according to their respective reference groups. Tituba is a child born out of wedlock because Abena, her mother, was raped by an English sailor on the Atlantic coast. This would rightfully translate into the hatred her mother has for her. Veronica was born into a family of two girls when her parents were in fact expecting a boy. Race and space are also lacking elements with the protagonists. This would explain their spatial instability depending on the course of the novels. Enslaved in different families, Tituba was imprisoned for witchcraft in Salem and was later hanged in her native Barbados due to lack of real space. Veronica on the other hand sought asylum in France where she returns after her disappointment of wanting ancestral roots in Africa.
362 p., This study not only confirms the long presence of same-sex desiring peoples in the twin-island Republic of Trinidad and Tobago, but it focuses in upon the artistry and community-building techniques of these subjects as part of a paradigmatic shift in Caribbean cultural analysis. By foregrounding the work and the perspectives of same-sex desiring Trinbagonians in an analysis of Carnival masquerade, Calypso music and HIV/AIDS activism, this project also proposes a novel theoretical framework for the study of subjectivity.
