Examines differences in kin and nonkin networks among African Americans, Caribbean Blacks (Black Caribbeans), and non-Hispanic Whites. Data are taken from the National Survey of American Life, a nationally representative study of African Americans, Black Caribbeans, and non-Hispanic Whites. Selected measures of informal support from family, friendship, fictive kin, and congregation/church networks were utilized.
Argues that the task for the researcher is attempting to understand how race and class differently interact in particular contexts. Concludes that a focus on Black Caribbean heritage families can further develop the concept of concerted cultivation, and demonstrate the complex ways in which, for these families, such a strategy is a tool of social reproduction but also functions as attempted protection against racism in White mainstream society.
Using Black women's responses to same-race sexual assault, demonstrates how scholars can use interpersonal violence to understand social processes and develop conceptual models. African and Caribbean immigrants often avoid the language of social structure in their rape accounts and use cultural references to distance themselves from African Americans.
African American Research Center, Library, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Notes:
309 p., Drawing from Haitian Vodou and New Orleanian Voudou and from Cuban and South Floridian Santería, as well as from Afro-Baptist (Caribbean, Geechee, and Bahamian) models of encounters with otherness, this book reemplaces deep-southern texts within the counterclockwise ring-stepping of a long Afro-Atlantic modernity. Includes "Down to the Mire : Travels, Shouts & Fe Chauffe, Balanse, Swing : Saint Domingue Refugees in the Govi of New Orleans."
African American Research Center, Library, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Notes:
309 p., Offers a corrective to some of America's institutionalized invisibilities by delving into the submerged networks of ritual performance, writing, intercultural history, and migration that have linked the coastal U.S. South with the Caribbean and the wider Atlantic world. Draws from Haitian Vodou and New Orleanian Cuban and South Floridian Santería,and Afro-Baptist (Caribbean, Geechee, and Bahamian) models of encounters with otherness.
203 p., Examines the presence of slave vocality in Black Atlantic literature, placing the North American tradition of slave narrative against works from authors throughout the United States and the Caribbean. Challenges existing approaches to slave narrative by viewing the genre as one based on the fundamental impossibility of expressing black subjectivity under the political, ethical, and psychic conditions of slavery. The slave narrative thus ceases to represent an attempt by former slaves to access freedom and agency through writing, along with its promises of reason and autonomy, but rather signals (or sounds) a process of expression built not upon meaning, but upon signification. In other words, rather than crafting themselves into legible objects for the sake of narration and perception, slave narrators performed their roles as exchangeable units, both discursive and political, in ways that exposed the underlying lacunae of being a slave-narrator, a significative protocol that persists in contemporary black fiction throughout the Atlantic, even in areas in which the slave narrative did not historically emerge.
