369 p., Reconstructs the process of migration, assimilation, and the realization of full sociopolitical participation in the United States in terms of the relationship between peoples of African descent--who were compelled to migrate as slaves across the Middle Passage, and who also voluntarily immigrated from various localities within the Black Atlantic--and select groups of immigrants from other locations around the globe. The author concentrates on novels by William Faulkner, Paule Marshall, James Baldwin, and cartoonist Chris Ware, and examine closely how these authors, in their respective texts, work to restructure, reimagine, and thereby challenge the enshrined American narratives of national belonging and acculturation through literary constructions of the identities and experiences of peoples of African descent, as migrants themselves, in tandem with their social, political, economic, sexual, racial, and cultural engagements with other immigrants to the nation-state.
How do people respond to the news that they are HIV positive? To date, there have been few published qualitative studies of HIV diagnosis experiences, and none focusing on Caribbean people. Twenty-five HIV-positive Caribbean people in London, UK, related their diagnosis experience and its immediate aftermath in semi-structured interviews. Diagnosis with HIV caused profound shock and distress to participants, as they associated the disease with immediate death and stigmatisation. The respondents struggled with "biographical disruption", the radical disjuncture between life before and after diagnosis, which led them into a state of liminality, as they found themselves "betwixt and between" established structural and social identities. Respondents were faced with multifaceted loss: of their known self, their present life, their envisioned future and the partner they had expected to play a role in each of these. A minority of accounts suggest that the way in which healthcare practitioners delivered the diagnosis intensified the participants' distress. This research suggests that healthcare practitioners should educate patients in specific aspects of HIV transmission and treatment, and engage closely with them in order to understand their needs and potential reactions to a positive diagnosis. Adapted from the source document.
59 p., Investigates the demands made in negotiations between white colonists, gens de couleurs, and insurgents in the opening months of the Haitian Revolution. Argues that, at least initially, demands for general emancipation were not made, but instead that insurgents sought the amelioration of working conditions on plantations and gens de couleur asked for political rights.
African American Research Center, Library, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Notes:
78 p., This documents the lack of access to reproductive and maternal care in post-earthquake Haiti, even with unprecedented availability of free healthcare services. The report also describes how hunger has led women to trade sex for food and how poor camp conditions exacerbate the impact of sexual violence because of difficulties accessing post-rape care. It looks at how recovery efforts have failed to adequately address the needs and rights of women and girls, particularly their rights to health and security.
169 p., Examines entanglements of race, place, gender, and class in Puerto Rican reggaetón. Based on ethnographic and archival research in San Juan, Puerto Rico, and in New York, New York, I argue that Puerto Rican youth engage with an African diasporic space via their participation in the popular music reggaetón. By African diasporic space, the author refers to the process by which local groups incorporate diasporic resources such as cultural practices or icons from other sites in the African diaspora into new expressions of blackness that respond to their localized experiences of racial exclusion. Participation in African diasporic space not only facilitates cultural exchange across different African diasporic sites, but it also exposes local communities in these sites to new understandings and expressions of blackness from other places. As one manifestation of these processes in Puerto Rico, reggaetón refutes the hegemonic construction of Puerto Rican national identity as a "racial democracy."
193 p., Kwame Dawes coined the term "reggae aesthetic" to explain the paradigm shift in 1960s-70s Caribbean literature that also dovetailed the rise of reggae music in Jamaica. By exploring the impact of popular music on the social developments in late 1960s and early 1970s Jamaica, Dawes offered a new method of Caribbean literary analysis reminiscent of the extant blues tradition in African American literature--similar to the way that reggae music borrows from the blues--and in so doing, highlighted the artistic and cultural influences that link people of color across the "Black Atlantic." This dissertation builds on Dawes's theory by exploring the history and function of music as an aesthetic form and narrative trope in literature of the Black Atlantic. Blues and reggae in contemporary fiction manifest the oral tradition in African storytelling.
Discusses the relationship between economic conditions and discourses surrounding partner choice in Cuba. Holds that economic changes caused by the collapse of the Soviet Union have necessitated strategies economic survival which differ from previously-held ideals of romantic partnerships. Suggests that anxieties surrounding changes in gender and kinship relations also reflect broader concerns about Cuba's social and economic hierarchies and the future of socialism.
Kingston Jamaica: University of the West Indies Press
Location:
African American Research Center, Library, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Notes:
335 p, Rock it Come Over describes the music and lore of slavery from the early sixteenth century through emancipation in 1838 to the mid twentieth century.
247 p., Discusses the diasporic origins of Palo Mayombe, a Kongo-Cuban religious tradition, while seeking to analyze how it fulfills, in a new transplanted setting, the spiritual needs of a given segment of the Cuban immigrant population in the United States—designated here as the “strangers in a new land”—“serving not only as a healing mechanism but also a vehicle towards the preservation of ethnic and cultural identity.”
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.
