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2. Interstitial voices: The poetics of difference in Afrodiasporic women's literature
- Collection:
- Black Caribbean Literature (BCL)
- Contributers:
- Sullivan,Mecca J. (Author)
- Format:
- Dissertation/Thesis
- Publication Date:
- 2012
- Published:
- Pennsylvania: University of Pennsylvania
- Location:
- African American Research Center, Library, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
- Journal Title:
- ProQuest Dissertations and Theses
- Notes:
- 320 p., Examines the place of difference in black women's writing of the African diaspora. The works of well-known and canonical writers Toni Morrison, Buchi Emecheta, Jamaica Kincaid, and Audre Lorde illustrate key functions of the poetics of difference. The author reads these writers alongside important but underexplored figures, including Ghanaian-born poet Ama Ata Aidoo, Cuban-born novelist Achy Obejas, Trinidadian-born writer Dionne Brand, and South African/Botswanan writer Bessie Head, as well as younger writers such as U.S.-born playwright Suzan-Lori Parks, Nigerian-born fiction writer Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, and St. Thomas-born writer Tiphanie Yanique. These writers reframe identity around radical models of difference by: (1) developing and naming hybrid genres; and (2) destabilizing formal conventions of recognizable genres through multiplicities of voice. By highlighting difference as a core component of black female identity, these writers make crucial interventions in several areas, including Afrodiasporic cultural, feminist, queer, and postcolonial theories of identity, as well as feminist, Afrodiasporic cultural, formalist, and narratological conceptions of voice.
3. The Erotics of Ache: The Social Experience of Pleasure in Afro-Cuban Ritual Performance
- Collection:
- Black Caribbean Literature (BCL)
- Contributers:
- Valladares,Amy Daken (Author)
- Format:
- Dissertation/Thesis
- Publication Date:
- 2013
- Published:
- New York: New York University
- Location:
- African American Research Center, Library, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
- Journal Title:
- ProQuest Dissertations and Theses
- Notes:
- 277 p., Afro-Cuban (Santería ) drummers are trained ritual specialists in minority religious communities, initiated through secret rites into homosocial community groups. Historically, women and non-heteronormative men have been excluded from playing consecrated batá drums. This dissertation investigates how drummers construct the sensual and physical essence of musical sound around gender and sexual hierarchies in Afro-Cuban diasporic contexts (Havana, Miami, New York, and New Jersey). Drummers possess a theory of power based on concepts of how the feeling of aché (from Yoruban language, "the power to make things happen") is channeled during performance. Considers colonial-period Afro-Cuban social societies (cabildos ) as a source of possible residual patriarchal authority in the current male drumming cult community.
4. Transfiguring Trinidad and Tobago: Queer cultural production, erotic subjectivity and the praxis of black queer anthropology
- Collection:
- Black Caribbean Literature (BCL)
- Contributers:
- Gill,Lyndon Kamaal (Author)
- Format:
- Dissertation/Thesis
- Publication Date:
- 2010
- Published:
- Massachusetts: Harvard University
- Location:
- African American Research Center, Library, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
- Journal Title:
- ProQuest Dissertations and Theses
- Notes:
- 362 p., This study not only confirms the long presence of same-sex desiring peoples in the twin-island Republic of Trinidad and Tobago, but it focuses in upon the artistry and community-building techniques of these subjects as part of a paradigmatic shift in Caribbean cultural analysis. By foregrounding the work and the perspectives of same-sex desiring Trinbagonians in an analysis of Carnival masquerade, Calypso music and HIV/AIDS activism, this project also proposes a novel theoretical framework for the study of subjectivity.