195 p., Paule Marshall's The Chosen Place, The Timeless People (1969), Gayl Jones' Corregidora (1975), and Octavia Butler's Kindred (1979) enhance our conceptualization of black aestheticism and black nationalism as cultural and political movements. The writers use the novel as genre to question the ideological paradigm of a black nationalist aesthetic by providing alternative definitions of community, black women's sexuality, and race relations. Because of the ways in which these writers respond to black aestheticism and black nationalism, they transform our understanding of movements often perceived as sexist, racist, homophobic, and anti-Semitic.
Reads Carnival-related performances in relationship to the colonial and national histories of the circulation of Indian and black women's bodies in Trinidad and Tobago, asking what is at stake in these occupations of genre, form, and performative presence in the latest global scenes of late capitalism (where image and sound, as cultural productions, are always in circulation beyond the scope of the nation, and their own "original" referents).
Explores the experiences of Caribbean women teachers who are recruited to teach in a mid sized Southern city. Narrative methods were used to analyze four Barbadian women teachers' perspectives on their: initial experiences and challenges; teaching philosophies and approaches to teaching American students; and successful transition into Louisville, Kentucky's public schools after five years of teaching. In an age where school districts across the nation seek educators from overseas to address the well-documented teacher shortage, this study has implications for helping future international teacher candidates transition into U.S. public schools.
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.
Background. Perinatal depression among Black Caribbean women in the UK remains an intriguingly under-researched topic. Despite high levels of known psychosocial risks, Black Caribbeans remain relatively invisible among those seeking/receiving help for depression during and after pregnancy. Methods. In-depth interviews were undertaken with a purposive sample of twelve Black Caribbean women selected from a larger sample (n=101) to examine prevalence and psychosocial risks for perinatal depression among this ethnic group. The study also sought to explore women's models of help-seeking. During analysis, the context in which help-seeking/giving is mediated emerged as a key issue. We explore the nature of these encounters thereby opening up the possibility of finding common ground between service users and providers for enabling women to receive the care and support they need. Findings. Whether or not women configure depressive feelings as 'symptoms' requiring external validation and intervention is a reflection both of the social embeddedness of those individuals and of how 'help-givers' perceive them and their particular needs. We suggest that the ways in which help-seeking/giving are commonly conceptualised might offer at least a partial explanation for apparently low levels of diagnosed perinatal depression among Black Caribbean women. Conclusions. Popular approaches to health seeking behaviours within health promotion and practice focus on individuals as the fulcrum for change, tending to overlook their embeddedness within 'reflexive communities'. This might serve to reinforce the invisibility of Black Caribbean women both in mainstream mental health services and associated research. Alternative approaches may be required to achieve government targets to reduce inequalities in access, care, and treatment and to deliver more responsive and culturally-appropriate mental health services.
Focuses upon the welfare citizenship experiences of older women who migrated in later life to England, either as refugees or as post-retirement migrants. It reports findings from interviews and focus groups conducted with black Caribbean, Irish, Chinese and Somali older women migrants in Sheffield, Yorkshire, UK, as part of the Older Women's Lives and Voices Study.
Quito, Ecuador: Abya-Yala : Agence canadienne de développement international
Location:
African American Research Center, Library, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Notes:
436 p., Cómo han construido y construyen sus identidades étnicas y de género las mujeres y hombres negros del norte de Esmeraldas?, es la pregunta central de investigación que se plantea la autora. Sobre la base de un enfoque integrado de varias corrientes críticas del pensamiento social y combinando la investigación bibliográfica y el trabajo de campo en dos comunidades representativas, la autora resuelve la pregunta planteada inicialmente.
101 p., Little published research describes views of intimate heterosexual relationships among non-Western samples of women. This study represents a first attempt to document Afro-Caribbean women's views about their intimate relationships. A small sample of 53 Afro-Caribbean women from the island of Barbados were interviewed in their homes for a larger study of body image. Included in the measures were questionnaires about the extent to which women's expectations were or were not met in their current heterosexual relationships and if symptoms of depression were experienced. The women in this study generally reported, like Western women, that their relationships met their expectations (whatever those expectations may have been), that they contributed more positive than negative behaviors to the relationship, and that they experienced mostly mild or infrequent depressive symptoms. Unlike findings for Western samples, however, neither relationship duration, women's level of education, nor the extent to which they reported depressive symptoms covaried with whether they reported that their expectations were met or not. In summary, this study did not shed light on possible sources of Afro-Caribbean women's relationship satisfaction, although it potentially ruled out a few.