Part of a special journal issue dedicated to strategies for societal renewal in Haiti., Based on what is known about the role of women in development, the highest returns to investment are likely to come from initiatives that harness the productive capacity of women.
African American Research Center, Library, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Notes:
105 p., Caribbean women writers' fictional works can be used to examine female resistance to Caribbean social norms. British Victorian women's social roles can be connected to postcolonial Caribbean social structures exhibiting gender bias. These attitudes are not indigenous to regional men, but the result of attempts by Caribbean societies to mimic and adapt to European culture.
Reviews the book, Race, gender and educational desire: Why black women succeed and fail by Heidi Safia Mirza (2009). The author looks to understand and unpack the complex intersectionalities that mark contemporary black British feminism, teasing out their particular implications for education and educational debates today.
This article discusses different views about sustainable development, emphasizing -- on the basis of a survey conducted in Brazil, Mexico, and Cuba -- the role of rural women in food production and natural resource management, the strength of the rural women's movement in the conquest of rights, and the decisive participation of women in defining proposals for public policies that guarantee gender equality in rural areas. A brief comparative analysis leads us to conclude that the development model in the three countries still prioritizes the male figure in relation to land tenure, access to credit and purchase of equipment or other material resources, it is suggested that both in Cuba, a socialist country, and in Mexico and Brazil, capitalist counties, the assumptions of social policies directed to rural female workers should take into account the basic needs of rural women to guarantee a more humane and sustainable development. Adapted from the source document.
For women writers of the Caribbean as well as for larger marginalized communities, the relationship between oral traditions and written texts is a part of the defining thread of Caribbean historiography. This article draws on Waugh and Hutcheon to examine the use of such texts by women writers of the Hispanophone Caribbean in order to highlight narrative strategies of historically marginalized groups to contest hegemonic constructions of the nation.
Analyzes the prominent role played by first wave feminism and by women writers between 1898-1903 as the Jamaica Times articulated a broad-based, middle class nationalism and launched a campaign to establish a Jamaican national literature. This archival material is significant because it suggests a significant modification of anglophone Caribbean feminist, literary and nationalist historiography: first wave feminism was not introduced to Jamaica exclusively through black nationalist organizations in the late 19th and early 20th century, but emerged in a broader phenomenon of respectable, middle class nationalism encompassing Jamaican nationalism and Pan Africanism.
107 p., Stephanie St Clair was born in 1897 on the island of Guadeloupe. In 1923 she created and ran a highly-lucrative policy bank in Harlem. By 1926, the operation earned a quarter of a million dollars To this day, she remains the only black female gangster to run a numbers bank of that size St Clair also contributed generously to the community and advocated for racial uplift. This thesis explores some of the factors that influenced her decision to become an entrepreneur who would create and run her own enterprise; and, paradoxically, become an activist within her community. Also implicit, and therefore a component of the inquiry, was St. Clair's decision to describe herself as a lady when the definition would not have applied to her in that era.
239 p., Undertakes a critical task of "writing to" and "writing back to" Frantz Fanon on the issues of violence, masculinity, and nation-formation. The author deploys Brian Keith Axel's formulations of "national interruption" to position African diasporic women's novels--specifically Gayl Jones's Corregidora, Tsitsi Dangarembga's Nervous Conditions, and Edwidge Danticat's Breath, Eyes, Memory --as critical interruptions to Fanon's formulations.
295 p., Focuses on the function of black vernacular myths and rituals in three primary women's texts of the Americas: Toni Morrison's Song of Solomon (1977), Simone Schwartz-Bart's Pluie et Vent sur Telumee Miracle (1972) and Paule Marshall's Praisesong for the Widow (1983). My project codifies how the black vernacular expressions of mythology and ritual are used to negotiate power between the individual and their community. The author traces how the women in these texts used resources of the black vernacular tradition as social and cultural collateral to empower themselves within an alternative system of values that simultaneously validates self and communal worth.
175 p., Focuses on the lives of enslaved women in the Caribbean and their resistance to bondage. Caribbean enslaved women exhibited their strong character, independence and exceptional self worth through their opposition to the tasks they performed in the fields on plantations. Resistance was expressed in many different rebellious ways including not getting married, refusing to reproduce, and through various other forms as part of their open physical resistance. Identifies the role enslaved women in both the Caribbean and the USA played in major uprisings, revolts, and rebellions during their enslavement period.
