480 p., This dissertation examines the role of the Haitian Revolution and Haiti's national history in the construction of Black Internationalism and Black Atlantic intellectual culture in the first half of the twentieth century. The author argues for the centrality of Haiti in the genesis of Black internationalism, contending that revolutionary Haiti played a major place in Black Atlantic thought and culture in the time covered. Suggests viewing the dynamics between the Harlem Renaissance, Haitian Indigenism, and Negrtude and key writers and intellectuals in terms of interpenetration, interindepedence, and mutual reciprocity and collaboration.
African American Research Center, Library, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
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145 p, The Guatemalan government sought to build an extensive railroad system in the 1880s, and actively recruited foreign labor. For poor workers of African descent, immigrating to Guatemala was seen as an opportunity to improve their lives and escape from the racism of the Jim Crow U.S. South and the French and British colonial Caribbean. Using primary and secondary sources as well as ethnographic data, Opie details the struggles of these workers who were ultimately inspired to organize by the ideas of Marcus Garvey. Regularly suffering class- and race-based attacks and persecution, black laborers frequently met such attacks with resistance. Their leverage--being able to shut down the railroad--was crucially important to the revolutionary movements in 1897 and 1920.
370 p., Examines three general geographical areas in which people who originated in Africa were dispersed to the West during the Transatlantic Trade in Captured Africans. In Africa there was a process of inculcating cultural values while harnessing skills in an authentic education system called retreat schools. These schools were the original African lodges or secret societies that supported the communal system since they made people indigenous. Everyone in a village had an obligation to become initiated in order to learn the secrets of their society. Those individuals who were not indoctrinated were ostracized because they did not experience transformation and pledged an oath of loyalty. The purpose of this study is to investigate the elaborate infrastructure that was historically an integral part of early African institutional character, and aspects of its presentation among New World Africans.
The concept of the ghetto, referring to specifically urban experiences of sociospatial marginalization, has played a prominent role in black popular culture. This article explores the role of the ghetto as a discursive space of immobility and traces its global journey as a mobile imaginary.