African American Research Center, Library, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Notes:
389 p., Thirteen-year-old Hazel leaves her comfortable, if somewhat unconventional, London home in 1913 after her father has a breakdown, and goes to live in the Caribbean on her grandparents' sugar plantation where she discovers some shocking family secrets.
Palmer,Steven Paul (Editor) and Molina Jiménez,Iván (Editor)
Format:
Book, Edited
Publication Date:
2009
Published:
Durham, NC: Duke University Press
Location:
African American Research Center, Library, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Notes:
383 p., Includes more than fifty texts related to the country's history, culture, politics, and natural environment. Most of these newspaper accounts, histories, petitions, memoirs, poems, and essays are written by Costa Ricans. Includes Jose Cubero's "A slave's story"; Cabildo of Cartago's "Free blacks, mulattoes, and mestizos seek legitimacy"; and Clodomiro Picado's "Our blood is blackening."
Quirke,Ellen (Author), Potter,Robert B. (Author), and Conway,Dennis (Author)
Format:
Internet resource
Publication Date:
2009
Published:
Reading, England: Geography, the University of Reading
Location:
African American Research Center, Library, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Notes:
37 p., Whilst research on second-generation return migration to the Caribbean from the UK has identified transnational practices among a cohort of individuals, there is considerable scope for further research examining transnational practices, inter-generational transfers and intention to return among the 1.5-, second- and third-generation Black Caribbean community in situ in the UK.
The author explores themes of Black masculinity using both historic and contemporary examples. He discusses "neoliberal" expectations regarding sexual orientation, family life, and self-fulfillment. He explores alternate definitions of gender as exhibited in the self-portraits by Abdi Osman and Syrus Ware.
West,Michael O. (Editor), Martin,William G. (Editor), and Wilkins,Fanon Che (Editor)
Format:
Book, Edited
Publication Date:
2009
Published:
Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press
Location:
African American Research Center, Library, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Notes:
318 p., Focuses on three moments in global black history: the American and Haitian revolutions, the Garvey movement and the Communist International following World War I, and the Black Power movement of the late twentieth century.
This paper explores the African Diaspora and the psychological, social, political, and economic effects of the Atlantic slave trade on people of African descent in the historical fiction text The Farming of Bones by Edwidge Danticat and the travel narrative The Atlantic Sound by Caryl Phillips. By examining the complex history of the British and French slave trade and its later consequences in the twentieth century, this paper examines the connection between the evidence of displacement and the search for identity coupled with the idea of healing in regards to trauma suffered by the spirits of Danticats' and Phillips' characters symbols of those in the African Diaspora.
261 p., Italian painter Agostino Brunias first traveled to the Caribbean sometime around 1770 in the employ of Sir William Young, First Baronet, a British aristocrat who had been charged with overseeing the sale of lands in the islands won by Britain from France at the end of the Seven Years War. Working primarily on the islands of Dominica and St. Vincent, as Young's official painter, Brunias was ostensibly charged with documenting the exotic bounty and diversity of the islands. For roughly the next quarter century, he painted for plantocrats and the colonial elite, creating romanticized tableaux that featured Caribbeans of color--so called "Red" and "Black" Caribs, dark-skinned Africans and Afro-Creoles, and people of mixed race. Examines how the artist's images reflected and refracted ideas about race commonly held by Britons in the colonial Caribbean during the late 18th century.
85 p., This thesis examines the practice of Obeah--an Afro-Caribbean system of healing, harming, and divination through the use of spiritual powers--within two slave communities in Berbice and Demerara (British Guiana). This study is based primarily on legal documents--including testimony from more than a dozen slaves--generated during the criminal trials of two men accused of practicing Obeah in 1819 and 1821-22. In contrast to most previous studies of Obeah, which have been based largely on descriptions provided by British observers, this project takes advantage of this complex, overlapping body of evidence to explore the social dynamics of Obeah as experienced by enslaved men and women themselves, including Obeah practitioners, their clients, and other witnesses. This study reveals that Obeah rituals could be extremely violent, that Obeah practitioners were feared as well as respected among their contemporaries, that the authority of Obeah practitioners was based on demonstrable success, and that slave communities in general were complex social worlds characterized by conflict and division as well as by support and unity--conclusions that combine to produce a fresh, humane vision of Afro-diasporan culture and community under slavery.
268 p., This study used a Black feminist critical framework to examine the conditions that influence the production of black women's fiction during the postwar era (1945-60). The novels of Ann Petry, Dorothy West and Paule Marshall were studied as artifacts that were shaped by the cultural and political climate of this crucial period in American history. A survey was also conducted of their associations with members and organizations in the American Left to determine what impact their social activism had on their lives and art. It was determined that these writers' political engagement played a significant role in the creation of transformative narratives about the power of black women to resist oppression in all of its forms. As a consequence of their contribution to a rich black feminist literary tradition, these postwar black women fiction writers serve as important foremothers to later generations of black women artists.
276 p., A critical examination of Haitian migration and displacement in North America that engages both a theoretical and literary analysis of exile and diaspora as consequences of migration and displacement. Argues that Haitian writers in North America inscribe migration by troping exile and diaspora to speak of the predicament of displaced migratory subjects and their inevitable crossings of places, landscapes, borders, cultures, and nations. Analyzes three novels by Haitian-American writer Edwidge Danticat: Breath, Eyes, Memory (1994), The Farming of Bones (1998), and the Dew Breaker (2004); and two novels by Haitian Canadian writer Myriam Chancy: Spirit of Haiti (2003) and The Scorpion's Claw (2005).