Amherst, MA: University of Massachusetts at Amherst
Location:
African American Research Center, Library, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
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267 p, This dissertation offers an economic analysis of militarization in the Caribbean through an examination of United States Department of Defense contract awards
African American Research Center, Library, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
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213 p, Examines the teaching and learning of writing in the first college-level English course students are required to take at the College of the Bahamas
African American Research Center, Library, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
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274 p., In 1915, American Marine forces landed in Haiti under the guise of a mission for pacification. However, they actually ended up occupying the country for a period of two decades, as they controlled with a tight grip its political affairs as well as its economic resources. The present study deals with the educational development in Haiti during those eventful years.
African American Research Center, Library, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
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159 p, Discusses the importance of the role played by the Caribbean mother in her Latina daughters' negotiation of a hybrid identity as seen through the works of Julia Álvarez, Cristina García, and Esmeralda Santiago
African American Research Center, Library, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
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332 p, Focuses on the overlooked role that mid-level combat officers play in creating military doctrine. Mars Learning closely evaluates Marine civil and military pacification operations in Haiti, the Dominican Republic, and Nicaragua, and illuminates the debates surrounding the development of Marine Corps’ small wars doctrine between 1915 and 1940.
African American Research Center, Library, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
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350 p, Presents evidence of this transformation as it has affected Caribbean food systems and evaluates its impact on food import dependence and nutritional vulnerability
African American Research Center, Library, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
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195 p, "Over one-third of households in Jamaica are headed by women in the permanent absence of partners. Within the context of the Jamaican social and economic conditions, this study examines the familial experiences of poor women as mothers and providers in female-headed households." (Author)
African American Research Center, Library, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
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323 p, This thesis explores mestizaje as transculturation, and as an ideology. As transculturation, which is the outcome of the mixture of Spaniards (or Portuguese), Indians, and blacks
243 p, "Explores the Rastafari movement and the Nation of Islam as institutions that provide a group-identity for their adherents. The study seeks to determine the characteristics of the identity that is institutionalized by each movement, and the nature of the institutionalization process. The research was conducted primarily in South Florida where both movements exist... Both movements were found to be millenarian in nature, essentially because of the significant utility of the concept that their members would rise to prominence through God's grace. Additionally, both movements were identified as expressive social movements, since they were determined as being primarily concerned with changing the attitudes of their members rather than effecting structural social change." (author)
African American Research Center, Library, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
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248 p, Rhetorically, the composite message of reggae music makes claims on attitudes and behaviors which are characterized as appeals to resist the dominant ideology of Jamaica
African American Research Center, Library, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
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Jamaican deejay Yellowman is best known for 'slackness': lyrics centered on masculine heterosexual potency, sexist objectification of women, and graphic sexual narratives. Yet a deeper look at Yellowman's life and recorded output suggests that when his slackness is read in the context of Afro-Jamaican culture, reggae history, and his Rastafarian faith, a more complex interpretation of his slackness is needed. The study draws on Carolyn Cooper's (2001) theory that slackness is a 'metaphorical revolt against law and order, an undermining of consensual standards of decency' (p. 141). Whereas the term 'culture' is used in reggae to depict music that is Afrocentric, Rasta-inspired, and socially conscious, and is normally seen as the antithesis of slackness, it is suggested that for Yellowman, the slack/culture dichotomy is eroded when slackness becomes part of the religious repertoire of resistance against mainstream Jamaican society. The dissertation presents: a) an overview of theory and methodology b) an ethnographic case study based on Yellowman's life and career, and c) four analytical chapters that offer itineraries to theorize slackness in Yellowman's music. First, it is argued that through slackness Yellowman subverted embedded Jamaican cultural notions of sexuality, gender, race, nationality, and beauty by promoting the dundus (black albino) as sexually appealing, hyper-masculine, and part of the imagined black nation. Second, it is demonstrated how Yellowman's sexual lyrics are an example of Obika Gray's (2004) thesis that slackness was a conscious political project employed by the Jamaican poor to contest the normative values of dominant society. The pitting of Yellowman and slackness in reggae journalism against Bob Marley and culture is contested. Third, it is refuted that Yellowman employs slackness for the purpose of moral regulation based on conservative Afro-Jamaican sexual mores and his understanding of Rastafarian morality. Finally, Yellowman's perforating of Christian dualistic ideas of carnal/spiritual is situated in the Rastafarian Babylon/Zion binary, demonstrating how Afro-Caribbean religion has redefined Christian dualism using an Afrocentric body-positive ideology.
African American Research Center, Library, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
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547 p, "Variations in preference convergence and issue evolution explain the impact blacks had on U.S. policy more so than variations in organizational power. An analysis to other ethnic groups is also examined."
African American Research Center, Library, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
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241 p., The purpose of this research was to identify connections between West African rhythms and Haitian rhythms on the development of syncopation in musical compositions (1791–1900). The specific problems of the study were: to identify West African and Haitian rhythms; to identify characteristics of the music of Cuba, Brazil, and the United States and the development of syncopation that followed (1791–1900); and to determine connections between African and Haitian rhythms and Cuban Habanera, Brazilian Tango/Choro, and American Ragtime.
African American Research Center, Library, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Journal Title Details:
p. 180
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Study investigated the degree to which national culture correlates with transformational leadership practices in Jamaica, Bahamas, Panama, and the United States
African American Research Center, Library, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
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177 p, Objectives of the study were to identify, collect, and catalog references on agricultural education and to assess agricultural education in Latin America. Some trends of agricultural education in Mexico, Central America, and the Caribbean include the following: the rationalization of institutional growth, linking teaching research and extension to offer opportunities for students and professors for practical and professional experiences, and the upgrading of information systems.
African American Research Center, Library, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Journal Title Details:
p. 299
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Panneflek compares the academic achievement, as measured by the Standardized Achievement Test, of Seventh-day, Protestant, Roman Catholic, and Public school sixth-graders in Curacao
African American Research Center, Library, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Journal Title Details:
p. 150
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This project was designed to raise the consciousness of members of the African-Bahamian church through a series of lectures which focused upon the particularities of the African experience
African American Research Center, Library, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
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68 p, Traditional Caribbean history has been directed by and focused upon the conquerors who came to the region to colonize and seek profitable resources. Native Caribbean peoples and African slaves used to work the land have been silenced by traditional history so that it has become necessary for modern Caribbean thinkers to challenge that history and recreate it. Alejo Carpentier and Michelle Cliff challenge traditional Caribbean history in their texts, The Kingdom of This World and Abeng, respectively. Each of these texts rewrites traditional history to include the perspectives of natives and the slaves of Haiti and Jamaica. Traditional history is challenged by the inclusion of these perspectives, thus providing a rewritten, revised history.
African American Research Center, Library, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
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92 p, Investigates the power of stories told within Caribbean dancehall music and culture that present “good reasons” that are adopted by members of that culture. Shows that dancehall stories reveal powerful ideological frames that “naturalize” ways of being within Caribbean dancehall culture. Various relationships between “good reasons” presented in lyrical stories and the adoption of these “good reasons” by participants in their own stories emerged as well.
African American Research Center, Library, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
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316 p., Demonstrates how the lambada —a genre of electric guitar-based dance music consolidated in the port city of Belém, Pará in the 1970s— makes audible a history of mobile, cosmopolitan connections that transcend and transgress the boundaries of the Amazon region proper. These submerged "translaterai" links with the circum-Caribbean and the Brazilian Northeast challenge hegemonic constructions of Belém as a provincial outpost or pocket of exclusion "at land's end."
Campinas: Instituto de Estudos da Linguagem da Universidade de Campinas
Location:
African American Research Center, Library, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Notes:
232 p, Cruz e Souza and Lima Barreto works evince similar strategies to face historical circumstantial challenges relevant to the end of the 19th Century. Concerning the racial exclusion processes enrooted in the preceding centuries due to slavery, the authors developed the collective trauma consciousness and its further consequences on daily lives within the poetical and fictional areas.
African American Research Center, Library, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
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52 p., Gottschalk traveled extensively. A sojourn in Cuba during 1854 was the beginning of a series of trips to Central and South America. He also traveled to Puerto Rico after his Havana debut and at the start of his Caribbean period. Taken with the music he heard on the island, he composed a work entitled Souvenir de Porto Rico; Marche des gibaros, Op. 31 (RO250).
191 p., How does recent black migration impact Atlanta's geographies of black life? Since 1990, the Atlanta metropolitan region has become a major destination for three groups of black migrants from disparate origins: native-born "return south" blacks from other U.S. regions, Afro-Caribbean immigrants, and sub-Saharan African immigrants. These migrants' ethnic diversity dismantles existing notions of "black" culture, politics, and place. Black Migration to Atlanta revises scholarship by demonstrating that we cannot understand the complexity of black lives in Atlanta without investigating the complex relationship between space, migration, and popular culture. Atlanta emerges not just as an urban core, but as a region --a multiplicity of metropolitan sites--imagined and contested through residential patterns, commercial geographies, and popular culture's attempts to accommodate cultural and geographic shifts brought by recent black migration.
This study examines the identity categories of gender and race in the Cuban context of the first thirty years of the Revolution and focuses on black and mulata women, in which both categories converge. In this work I analyze the literary discourse of the Afro-Cuban female poets between the 1960s and 1980s and discern the role of self-representation that each of these poets constructs within the framework of "being black" or "mulata" woman. Also, since gender and race are redefined by the dominant power, this project analyzes the political hegemonic discourse of the period in relation to race and gender, and illuminates its role in preserving racial stereotypes as well as the patriarchal normatives of gender.
This paper explores the African Diaspora and the psychological, social, political, and economic effects of the Atlantic slave trade on people of African descent in the historical fiction text The Farming of Bones by Edwidge Danticat and the travel narrative The Atlantic Sound by Caryl Phillips. By examining the complex history of the British and French slave trade and its later consequences in the twentieth century, this paper examines the connection between the evidence of displacement and the search for identity coupled with the idea of healing in regards to trauma suffered by the spirits of Danticats' and Phillips' characters symbols of those in the African Diaspora.
292 p., Based on multi-sited ethnographic fieldwork in the United States and Trinidad and Tobago, examines the process by which the members of the National United Freedom Fighters (NUFF) initially resorted to violent political tactics and later abandoned them to adopt a state-sanctioned, self-funded "development" approach to their ongoing pursuit of social justice. The two different phases of the NUFF' social movement were led by the same actors, in the same impoverished region, with the same material development goals. Through comparative analysis of these two phases, and the material and discursive conditions characteristic of the two different historical moments in which they emerged, this study teases out the specific contextual variables that provoked the NUFF's initial commitment to and subsequent renunciation of violent political action.
155 p., The present dissertation examines nativity-status and place-of-birth-differences in locational outcomes among native-born black American, and foreign-born black Caribbean and black African households. The main objective is to evaluate the degree to which the spatial assimilation model, which was formulated to capture the experience of white European ethnic groups arriving to the U.S. during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, can describe the outcomes of black immigrant ethnic groups arriving to the U.S. in the late twentieth century. Using data from the five percent Public Use Microdata Sample (PUMS) of the 2000 Census extracted from the Integrated Public Use Microdata Series (IPUMS), I investigate the degree to which native-born black Americans and foreign-born black Caribbeans and black Africans are able to translate their individual-level socioeconomic status attainments, such as income and educational levels, into residence in suburban versus central-city neighborhoods. In addition I also test to see if black immigrants' returns to their socioeconomic attainments differed from those of native-born blacks. This study contributes to the literature on immigrant socioeconomic and locational attainment in three ways. First, it revisits traditional residential assimilation theories, and attempts to identify the factors that enable black immigrants to reside in qualitatively different neighborhoods compared to those in which native-born black Americans reside. Second, it examines intra-ethnic black locational outcomes by place-of-birth/national origin status. Finally, up-to-date census data will provide an updated snapshot of black immigrants' socioeconomic and residential status attainments, an important endeavor given the large increase in size and diversity for this population.
261 p., Italian painter Agostino Brunias first traveled to the Caribbean sometime around 1770 in the employ of Sir William Young, First Baronet, a British aristocrat who had been charged with overseeing the sale of lands in the islands won by Britain from France at the end of the Seven Years War. Working primarily on the islands of Dominica and St. Vincent, as Young's official painter, Brunias was ostensibly charged with documenting the exotic bounty and diversity of the islands. For roughly the next quarter century, he painted for plantocrats and the colonial elite, creating romanticized tableaux that featured Caribbeans of color--so called "Red" and "Black" Caribs, dark-skinned Africans and Afro-Creoles, and people of mixed race. Examines how the artist's images reflected and refracted ideas about race commonly held by Britons in the colonial Caribbean during the late 18th century.
118 p., The purpose of this research study was to determine the health-promotion behaviors during menopause of English-speaking Caribbean Women in New York City and to identify implications for health practitioners. Data were obtained from a population sample of (N = 60) women between the ages of 45-64, from two predominantly Caribbean churches in Brooklyn using a convenience sampling method. A self-administered questionnaire packet consisting of three surveys totaling 89 questions was mailed to participants. The findings of the study indicated that there was a significant relation between self-efficacy and health-promotion behaviors. While level of education did not appear to have any influence on health-promotion behaviors. There were no significant differences of health promotion based on country of origin.
203 p., Explores the work experiences of professional Caribbean immigrant English-speaking women in the United States. Much study has been dedicated to the experiences and success of Caribbean immigrant women and men in service and domestic roles. The study explores these professional immigrant women's experiences attaining career success in the United States racial society. Data was obtained from 12 professional Caribbean immigrant women using semi-structured interviews conducted by the researcher.
217 p., A comparative study of late 20th-century migration narratives by African American and Afro-Caribbean women, such as Paule Marshall, Toni Morrison, Jamaica Kincaid, and Loida Maritza Pérez. Informed by critical race theory, postcolonial, and feminist approaches to literature, this dissertation intervenes in literary studies of the African diaspora by underscoring the cultural and political implications that class and national differences have on intra-racial relations among Blacks.
225 p., This dissertation is a cultural history of Barbados since its 1966 independence. As a pivotal point in the Transatlantic Slave Trade of the 17th and 18th centuries, one of Britain's most prized colonies well into the mid 20th century, and, since 1966, one of the most stable postcolonial nation-states in the Western hemisphere, Barbados offers an extremely important and, yet, understudied site of world history. Barbadian identity stands at a crossroads where ideals of British respectability, African cultural retentions, U.S. commodity markets, and global economic flows meet. Focusing on the rise of Barbadian popular music, performance, and visual culture this dissertation demonstrates how the unique history of Barbados has contributed to complex relations of national, gendered, and sexual identities, and how these identities are represented and interpreted on a global stage. This project examines the relation between the global pop culture market, the Barbadian artists within it, and the goals and desires of Barbadian people over the past fifty years, ultimately positing that the popular culture market is a site for postcolonial identity formation.
Explores the experiences of Caribbean women teachers who are recruited to teach in a mid sized Southern city. Narrative methods were used to analyze four Barbadian women teachers' perspectives on their: initial experiences and challenges; teaching philosophies and approaches to teaching American students; and successful transition into Louisville, Kentucky's public schools after five years of teaching. In an age where school districts across the nation seek educators from overseas to address the well-documented teacher shortage, this study has implications for helping future international teacher candidates transition into U.S. public schools.
159 p., Metamorphic literatures is both the identification of a cohesive group of texts, as well as the assertion that these particular texts are part of a global literary movement. The literatures coming out of this movement fundamentally seek to (1) resist colonization and enslavement, (2) re-vision history and resurface figures of redress, and (3) reimagine gender, sexualities, and the queer diasporic body. The tropes of this new literary movement that are expanded upon in the following work will organize the language, characteristics, and outlines of this movement of contemporary diasporic writers.
Examines death and barrenness images prevalent in literature produced by black women during the 1970s and 1980s, taking for study the novels Bluest Eye (1970), Praisesong for the Widow (1983), Corregidora (1975), and Mama Day (1988). Argues that images in these narratives represent contemporary manifestations of social death that directly relate to what belief in the American dream, and that these images symbolize the ways in which decisions made had a deadening effect on black communities, primarily experienced as a loss of social sensibility and vitality of relationships.
101 p., Little published research describes views of intimate heterosexual relationships among non-Western samples of women. This study represents a first attempt to document Afro-Caribbean women's views about their intimate relationships. A small sample of 53 Afro-Caribbean women from the island of Barbados were interviewed in their homes for a larger study of body image. Included in the measures were questionnaires about the extent to which women's expectations were or were not met in their current heterosexual relationships and if symptoms of depression were experienced. The women in this study generally reported, like Western women, that their relationships met their expectations (whatever those expectations may have been), that they contributed more positive than negative behaviors to the relationship, and that they experienced mostly mild or infrequent depressive symptoms. Unlike findings for Western samples, however, neither relationship duration, women's level of education, nor the extent to which they reported depressive symptoms covaried with whether they reported that their expectations were met or not. In summary, this study did not shed light on possible sources of Afro-Caribbean women's relationship satisfaction, although it potentially ruled out a few.
450 p., Examines how the development of public health, aided by the intervention of the Rockefeller Foundation, intersected with the birth of nationalism in Jamaica between 1918 and 1944. It demonstrates that a modern public health program based in western biomedicine, racial categorization and colonial modes of behavior were vital to claims of fitness for self-rule by Jamaican nationalists. In the late 1930s the demand for greater representation in government was accompanied by the scrutiny of the sexual behaviors and personal hygiene of the Afro-Jamaican masses. The author analyzes how disease and reproduction played a central role in the competing constructions of Afro-Jamaican bodies by colonial elites and ambitious middle class nationalists.
255 p., This qualitative study examines the social, spiritual and political role the Black Oneness Churches play in Black communities. It also provides an anti-colonial examination of the Afro-Caribbean Oneness churches to understand how it functioned in the formation and defense of the emerging Black communities for the period 1960-1980. This project is based on qualitative interviews and focus groups conducted with Black Clergy and Black women in the Oneness church of the Greater Toronto area. This study is based on the following four objectives: (1) Understanding the central importance of the Black Oneness Pentecostal Church post 1960 to Black communities. (2) Providing a voice for those of the Black Church that are currently underrepresented in academic scholarship. (3) Examining how the Black Church responds to allegations of its own complicities in colonial practices. (4) Engage spirituality as a legitimate location and space from which to know and resist colonization. The study also introduces an emerging framework entitled: Whiteness as Theology. This framework is a critique of the theological discourse of Whiteness and the enduring relevance of the Black Church in a pluralistic Afro-Christian culture.
