270 p., This dissertation focuses on women voices in Black British Literature between the period 1980 and 2005 - specifically in the works of Monica Ali, Zadie Smith, Joan Riley, Ravinder Randhawa, Meera Syal and Gurinder Chadha - and seeks to understand how women who are of Caribbean and South Asian descent form and reform their identities in their new home as immigrants or first-generation Britons and why their stories make a valuable and essential contribution to Black British Literature.
76 p., This preliminary Belizean racial project connects how Black identity was used as a political platform through a Pan-African framework to overthrow colonialism and neo-colonial aspects of what developed into a contemporary nationalist outlook. This project utilized a subjective outlook derived from historiographical materials, memoirs, periodicals and journal articles to show how Black collectivity as a tool for liberation (Pan-Africanism) was used as a racial project and later developed into a national project in Belize.
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.
96 p., Recent research indicates that among the different ethnic groups in the United States, African Americans report the highest level of self-esteem (Twenge & Crocker, 2002). However, the literature offers a monolithic categorization of African Americans. Black individuals from countries where Blacks are the majority are socialized to think differently about matters of race compared with the thinking of African Americans. Likewise, membership in the minority group will have different implications for Black Caribbeans. The current study examined the effects of racial socialization and resilience on the self-esteem of two groups of Black girls: African Americans and Black Caribbeans. Because of the theorized difference in racial socialization, it was hypothesized that the two groups would differ in their levels of self-esteem and that resilience would moderate the relationship between racial socialization and self-esteem. Participants consisted of 25 African American and 26 Black Caribbean high school students.
295 p., In the Bahamas, racism disguises itself under nationalism, education,language, and immigrant status. This study describes the racial dynamics (within African- Diasporic populations) rooted in European colonialism. The Bay Street elite represented European colonialism in the Bahamas as late as the 1970s and transformed the Bahamas into a liberalized economy that relies primarily on tourism. The tourist industry began in the late 1950s, when the Bay Street elite recruited Haitian workers as Cuba denounced tourism at the beginning of the Castro regime. As the profits from the tourist industry declined during the 1970s, Bahamians accused Haitian migrants of being a threat to national security rather than a necessary source of cheap labor. Bahamian print media is the main vehicle for the practices of discrimination against Haitians. This study examines editorials, articles, letters to the editors, and cartoon images from 1959 to 2012 to understand how Bahamians marginalize Haitians and their descendants.
220 p., Employs a black feminist diaspora literary lens to identify, define, trace, and speak to the African Diaspora as it functions in black women's diaspora fiction and informs our understanding of black women's diaspora identity. Considers three authors and novels by women of, in, and across the African Diaspora. The study centers on Sandra Jackson-Opoku's The River Where Blood Is Born as a primary site of analysis of diaspora formation and theorization, Dionne Brand's At the Full and Change of the Moon and Maryse Condé's Desirada as comparative textual and theoretical sites.
196 p., Argues that practitioners of Palo Monte/Mayombe in the city of Santiago de Cuba construct a religious genealogy inclusive of spirits to affirm their sense of an "African" identity in contemporary Cuba. Demonstrates that these practitioners' sense of being African includes an understanding that they are the ritual descendants and stewards of the blended spiritual knowledge created by sixteenth and seventeenth century AmerIndian Taíno and Kongolese inhabitants of eastern/Oriente, Cuba.
203 p., This research sterns from twelve months of ethnographic research with Haitian migrant women who reside in Batey Sol , a former sugar-company labor camp located along the Línea Noroeste (northwest line) linking the Dominican Rebulic's border town of Dajabón with the urban center of Santiago. The multi-sited study considers the larger network of political, social, and economic structures and relations of power in which these women are positioned in their daily lives and through their livelihoods as market women.
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.
