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.
195 p., Paule Marshall's The Chosen Place, The Timeless People (1969), Gayl Jones' Corregidora (1975), and Octavia Butler's Kindred (1979) enhance our conceptualization of black aestheticism and black nationalism as cultural and political movements. The writers use the novel as genre to question the ideological paradigm of a black nationalist aesthetic by providing alternative definitions of community, black women's sexuality, and race relations. Because of the ways in which these writers respond to black aestheticism and black nationalism, they transform our understanding of movements often perceived as sexist, racist, homophobic, and anti-Semitic.
African American Research Center, Library, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Notes:
219 p., This book investigates Kamau Brathwaite's and Derek Walcott's postcolonial debates, reading them against the traditional sites of the Caribbean imaginary.
African American Research Center, Library, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Notes:
263 p., A study of the poetics of experimental writing, focusing on the work of W. E. B. Du Bois, Nathaniel Mackey, Suzan-Lori Parks and Kamau Brathwaite. Arguing that conceptions of time tend to be at the heart of political concerns throughout the sites of the African diaspora, this project challenges those notions of black writing that rest on the binary or oppression/resistance. Specifically concerned with poetry, Kamau Brathwaite and Nathaniel Mackey specifically confront and contravene the legacy of the lyric voice in both the presentation and topics of their work. Brathwaite invents a shifting system of fonts, margins and a capacious first-person singular/plural to articulate a time and a "we" of the Caribbean and the diaspora.
251 p., Argues that there is a difference between biological essentialism and racial authenticity. Essentialism is reactionary, whereas racial authenticity is thoughtful, constructed and aimed at countering common beliefs. Once authenticity is positioned as a means to an end and not an end itself, authenticity can be used as a way of reading social situations, questioning how authentic arguments are used in culture, and understanding why their use is sometimes necessary. Also, using authenticity as a way of reading social situations takes the focus off of the authentic representation of race and places attention on American society by examining how the authentic representation works in dialogue with other arguments about race. This study uses the Harlem Renaissance as a backdrop to view how Afro-Caribbeans inserted themselves into African American discourses on race. The dark skinned immigrants blended in visually, but were far removed from many of the formative racial experiences of their American peers. These people may have come to align with African Americans and fight white racism, but they were in fact taking up new identity positions and learning to perform forms of blackness on the fly. The works that are examined in the various chapters of this dissertation show Black writers as critical agents of change who work hard to balance their own personal needs with the needs of their race and position themselves within a racist society.
335 p., A central premise of this project is that individuals and communities perceive the significance of history differently depending on their historical conditions. Indeed, much of the emphasis on memory studies in the last two decades has been informed by an awareness of changing perspectives on the past. Thus, given its focus on black peoples in the United States and the Caribbean, this dissertation aims to illuminate an emergent historical consciousness in the African Diaspora in the late 20th century. This dissertation is divided into two sections. In Part I, "Ancestors: Exploring Historical Inheritances," I analyze Maryse Conde's Les derniers rois mages (1993) and Patrick Chamoiseau's Texaco (1993) as they interrogate the concept of familial lineage and query the significance of the past imagined as an inheritance. Whereas Chamoiseau questions the ability of written history to represent memory and experience, Conde empties the idea of heritage of all significance as new relationships to the past come to the fore. In Part II, "New Birth: Exploring Discourses of Reproduction," I focus on Gayl Jones' Corregidora (1975) and Audre Lorde's Zami: A New Spelling of My Name (1982) as they reveal the limitations of genealogical discourse. By creating their pasts and imagining their heritage, the characters in these texts challenge the primacy of lineage as they point toward other, more viable networks of community and belonging.
220 p., Employs a black feminist diaspora literary lens to identify, define, trace, and speak to the African Diaspora as it functions in black women's diaspora fiction and informs our understanding of black women's diaspora identity. Considers three authors and novels by women of, in, and across the African Diaspora. The study centers on Sandra Jackson-Opoku's The River Where Blood Is Born as a primary site of analysis of diaspora formation and theorization, Dionne Brand's At the Full and Change of the Moon and Maryse Condé's Desirada as comparative textual and theoretical sites.
223 p., Argues that certain iconic poems have shaped the canon of American poetry. Not merely "canonical" in the usual sense, iconic poems enjoy a special cultural sanction and influence; they have become discourses themselves, generating our notions about American poetry. By "iconic" the author means extraordinarily famous works like Henry Wadsworth Longfellow's "Paul Revere's Ride," Walt Whitman's "Song of Myself," and Claude McKay's "If We Must Die," that do not merely reside in the national memory but that have determined each poet's reception and thus have shaped the history of American poetry.
Manuel,Zapata Olivella (Author) and Darío,Henao Restrepo (Author)
Format:
Book, Whole
Language:
Spanish
Publication Date:
2010
Published:
Bogotá: Ministerio de Cultura
Location:
African American Research Center, Library, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Notes:
667 p, An extensive novel on the African diaspora in the Americas covering five hundred years of history. Covers black heroes, Yoruba religion, fairy tales and songs of African tradition.
Hardwick,Lorna (Editor) and Gillespie,Carol (Editor)
Format:
Book, Edited
Publication Date:
2010
Published:
New York: Oxford University Press
Location:
African American Research Center, Library, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Notes:
422 p., Classical material was traditionally used to express colonial authority, but it was also appropriated by imperial subjects and put to new uses. Includes Cashman Kerr Prince's "Divided Child, or Derek Walcott's post-colonial philology" and Emily Greenwood's "Arriving backwards : the return of The Odyssey in the English-speaking Caribbean."
221 p., Carmen (Mérimée 1845, Bizet 1875), the story about the (in)famous Gypsy dancer from Spain, is the second most adapted narrative in the history of world cinema, with over eighty global versions officially recognized to date. Despite the global reach of the Carmen phenomenon, many scholars claim that this tale has hardly been reworked in Spanish America and never in the Caribbean. Following Carmen from Spain to Spanish America, the author shows how the template of Carmen (a love story that reveals the racio-ethnic and gender stratification in Spain) has been artfully but unsuspectingly reappropriated and "creolized" in postcolonial Cuba in the controversial film María Antonia (1991) by Afro-Cuban filmmaker Sergio Giral, based on the landmark play María Antonia (1964) by Afro-Cuban playwright Eugenio Hernández Espinosa.
Animan Akassi,Clément (Editor) and Lavou,Victorien (Editor)
Format:
Book, Edited
Language:
Spanish, English, and French
Publication Date:
2010
Published:
Perpignan: Presses universitaires de Perpignan
Location:
African American Research Center, Library, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Notes:
358 p., Contents include "The africans and afrodescendants who constructed Veracruz and the jarocho ethos 1521-1778" by Marco Polo Hernàndez-Cuevas; (Re)presentacién afro-panameria en pensamientos del negro cubena: pensamiento afro-panameûo de Carlos Guillermo 'Cubena' Wilson" by Laverne M. Seales-Saley; "Mâs allâ del 'folklore': bunde y bullerengue, ritmos africanos de liberacién en Panamà" by Xiomara Aldeano-Bolton; "Repensando los movimientos sociales afrodescendientes en las Américas y el espacio Caribe" by Jesiis "Chucho" Garcia; "Negrismo and négritude: reflection on two poetics of Caribbean cultural identity" by Mamadou Badiane; "Politicas culturales, la formacién de la identidad hispano-africana y el hombre y la costumbre" by Elisa Rizo; "Movimientos culturales y politicos Afroperuanos entre los arios 1980-2000" by Alexis Rossemond;
210 p., This project examines the ways in which several texts written in the late 20th century by African American and Caribbean writers appropriate history and witness trauma. Analyzes the writings of Toni Morrison, Ernest Gaines, Paule Marshall, and Fred D'Aguiar as they offer distinct approaches to history and the resulting effects such reconstituted, discovered, or, in some cases, imagined histories can have on the affirmation of the self as a subject. Explores the values of the African diaspora cross-culturally as manifested in the representational practices of these writers.
African American Research Center, Library, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Notes:
247 p., Explores the literary tradition of Caribbean Latino literature written in the U.S. beginning with José Martí and concluding with 2008 Pulitzer Prize winning novelist, Junot Díaz. The contributors consider the way that spatial migration in literature serves as a metaphor for gender, sexuality, racial, identity, linguistic, and national migrations. The essays in this collection reveal the multiple ways that writers of this tradition use their unique positioning as both insiders and outsides to critique U.S. hegemonic discourses while simultaneously interrogating national discourses in their home countries.
African American Research Center, Library, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Notes:
251 p., Explores how Juan Francisco Manzano and Gabriel de la Concepcion Valdés (also known as Plácido) appropriated Hispanic literature to inscribe an African descendant subjectivity in 19th century proto-nationalist Cuban discourse. Revises Mary Louise Pratt's notion of "intercultural texts" and Angel Rama's "literary transculturation", proposing "transculturated colonial literature" to trace the contradictions, re-significations, silences and shifts in the aesthetic and ideological function of Manzano and Plácido's texts. As such, 19th century Afro-Cuban literature is analyzed as an active space of negotiation and exchange disputing racial and religious hierarchies to inscribe an Afro-Cuban religio-cultural subject. The author concludes that both Manzano and Plácido disrupted the aesthetic and ideological norms of the colonial status quo by producing the first instance of literary transculturation in Cuba.
African American Research Center, Library, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Notes:
191 p., Conceptualizes the idea of jolie-laide ("the beautiful ugly") as a fully elaborated sexual poetics by three women writers of the African diaspora: Gayl Jones (USA), Jamaica Kincaid (Antigua, Caribbean), and Jackie Kay (Scotland, UK). The introductory chapter situates the study in a critical and cultural context and defines key terms. The chapters that follow analyze the thematic preoccupations and narrative strategies of the three writers' respective novels ( Corregidora and Eva's Man, The Autobiography of My Mother , and Trumpet ) and historicize the novels' explicit and implicit ideologies. With their jolie-laide portrayals of gender, the body and sex and sexuality, these three writers fashion complex representations of black female sexual subjectivity and critique the biased images, exaggerations, distortions, and silences of earlier representations. Recognizing that jolie-laide can be used to problematize racial, gender, and sexual binaries, these novelists exploit the structural possibilities of a jolie-laide sexual poetics to address culturally taboo topics in explicit, graphic, and imaginative language and with inventive jolie-laide tropes. They challenge white supremacist stereotypes of black sexuality as well as the sanitized characterizations of black sex found within the literary traditions of black respectability.
330 p., This dissertation examines the major works of Trinidad-born playwright Mustapha Matura, dealing with plays written from 1970 to the present. By considering the relation of Matura's work to Britain and Trinidad, it explores the complexity of identity performance in postcolonial theatre and the ongoing need for agency among diasporic communities. Postcolonial scholarship fully recognizes the significance of writing in the development of postcolonial identities, yet dominant postcolonial theory largely excludes theatre from discussions of that development. Given its aural and visual presentation and its immediate interaction with an audience, theatre provides a unique postcolonial moment through which audience members can survey issues of race and place in their lives.
227 p., Considers the often-silenced, tangible traces that the Haitian Revolution and radical anti-slavery have left in the greater Caribbean as they emerge in contemporary cultural productions. The author looks at national trends in the Dominican Republic, Cuba and Jamaica in order to formulate an understanding of the uses of gendered images of slavery and blackness in modern nation-building campaigns. Critically assesses what is left out of these narratives and how these gaps serve specific purposes. Argues for the centrality of the Caribbean in any true understanding of the history of modernity and the contemporary nation-state by investigating the after-shocks of the Haitian Revolution and of radical anti-slavery.
Ventura de Molina, Jacinto, b.1766 (Author), Acree,William G. (Editor), and Borucki,Alex (Editor)
Format:
Book, Edited
Language:
Spanish
Publication Date:
2010
Published:
Madrid: Iberoamericana
Location:
African American Research Center, Library, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Notes:
285 p., Contents: Mapa del Río de la Plata hacia 1800 -- Cronología sobre Molina -- El Río de la Plata en los años de Jacinto Ventura de Molina / Alex Borucki -- Un sueño realizado : un letrado negro y el poder de la escritura / William G. Akree, Jr. -- [Notas] -- Escritos de Jacinto Ventura de Molina, c. 1817-1837. Escritos históricos y autobiográficos. Los afrodescendientes en los escritos de Molina. Peticiones al poder. Molina en los escritos de sus contemporáneos / [various authors]. Defensor de los pobres. Escritos políticos y literarios.; Collection consists chiefly of works by Ventura de Molina: political, historical, literary, and legal.
African American Research Center, Library, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Notes:
141 p., Contents: Haciendo visibles a los invisibles / Paula Marcela Moreno Zapata --
Breve introducción sobre los aportes literarios y culturales afrocolombianos --
Catálogo de la Biblioteca de Literatura Afrocolombiana --
Guía de animación a la lectura : Biblioteca de Literatura Afrocolombiana / Beatriz Helena Robledo y José Ignacio Caro.
178 p., This dissertation is about the role that conservative religious notions of racial ideology played in the historical origins of black nationalism and pan-Africanism. Focuses on the writings of an African Caribbean, Edward Blyden, as the centerpiece of the study. Blyden, a native of Saint Thomas (Virgin Islands) and considered one of the "fathers" of both pan-Africanism and African nationalism, was a particularly complex diasporic intellectual. Traveling first to the United States in the pre-Civil War period, then to Africa and Britain at the height of the European imperial venture - and Christian missionary efforts - Blyden served as a conduit between the West (the United States and Britain) and both a traditional and a Muslim Africa. He saw his role as one of mediating (critiquing/translating) these divergent voices and ideologies with the object of constituting a "modern," pan-African subject.
210 p., In African and Caribbean literature the question of power relations is omnipresent. It is identifiable in the literature of the independence period, which explored socio-cultural issues while African and Caribbean nations were emerging from the grip of colonial powers, and also in that of today, where developed countries and developing countries are still negotiating their relationship. While the Black woman is the first to feel the effects of power, because the latter is doubly marginalized as a woman and black, she has historically been silenced by a literary canon that does not leave her room for self-expression. Through an analysis of power relations between Black women and the patriarchal institution, we reveal the tactics that women use to endure the alienating systems in which they are located: (1) the rehabilitation of their sexuality (2) feminine solidarity (3) formal education (4) supernatural power and (5) the reexamination of Western values.
African American Research Center, Library, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Notes:
105 p., Caribbean women writers' fictional works can be used to examine female resistance to Caribbean social norms. British Victorian women's social roles can be connected to postcolonial Caribbean social structures exhibiting gender bias. These attitudes are not indigenous to regional men, but the result of attempts by Caribbean societies to mimic and adapt to European culture.
205 p., Analyzes the poetry of the African American Langston Hughes and the Jamaican Louise Bennett during the 1940s. Through an examination of the unique similarities of their poetic projects, namely their engagement of performance to build their audiences, their experiments with poetic personae to represent vernacular social voices, their doubleness as national and transnational figures, their circulation of poetry in radio and print journalism and their use of poetry as pedagogy to promote reading, this dissertation establishes a new perspective on the role of poetry in decolonizing language practices. While Hughes and Bennett are often celebrated for their representation of oral language and folk culture, this project reframes these critical discussions by drawing attention to how they engage performance to foster an embodied form of reading that draws on Creole knowledge systems.
African American Research Center, Library, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Notes:
273 p., Explores the iconography of Cuban rumba--a unique AfroCuban dance and music complex that represents the foundation of contemporary Cuban popular culture--and argues that rumba constitutes an essential part of a greater African-based ontology. Rumba dance performance is conceptualized as knowledge embodied, an avatar of nonverbal cultural communication and consciousness, which plays a central role in the organization of daily life and formation of identity. This dissertation demonstrates that concrete continuities exist between the diaspora and mainland Africa through close scrutiny of rumba and parallel performance art traditions in north, west and central Africa. Also attempts to identify specific African-based stylistic conventions as exemplified by Sahara's Imazighen (also known as Berber) peoples, Mali's Mande (known as Gangá in Cuba) and related groups, and the Kongo civilization establishing that although ethno-cultural boundaries exist, they tend to be permeable.
200 p., An interdisciplinary project that combines cultural studies, film, gender, and postcolonial studies to investigate Afro-Caribbean models of masculinity in film and literature. The project details the ways in which imperialist phallocentric masculinity is valorized within African American cinema and exported to the Caribbean where it is mimicked and valorized. Secondly, it introduces Afro-Caribbean masculinity into the scholarly discussion of African American masculinities started by several African American cultural critics such as Mark Anthony Neal and bell hooks. Both of these prominent scholars in African American studies criticize the construction of African American masculinity as presented in African American culture. They, and others, call for a more progressive Black masculinity, one that supports Black feminism and fights homophobia. Much of their critique also applies to Afro-Caribbean culture, which has been strongly influenced by African American culture in regard to the traumatizing transition between boyhood and manhood which has great influence on Black males perspectives on feminism and homophobia. hook's critique in particular challenges the passive acceptance of "soul murder" or, in other words, silent acceptance of trauma as rites of passage into manhood for African American men.
African American Research Center, Library, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Notes:
329 p., Just beneath the surface of most scholars’ research on the ethno-racial composition of Spanish-speaking America lies a definitive connection between the African Diaspora and the Latin American identity. Although to a lesser extent, this is also true of Portuguese-speaking Brazil––the existence of African-related people and their role as an integral part of the total Latin ethnicity currently appears to be more readily accepted and discussed in Brazil than in other Latin American countries. Afro-Peruvians, Afro-Colombians, Afro-Venezuelans, Afro-Uruguayans, or Afro-Mexicans––to name just a few––are rarely openly acknowledged in most of Spanish-speaking Latin America.
African American Research Center, Library, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Notes:
249 p., Investigates the role of music in 20th century literature of the Americas. It expands the concept of the New Negro Renaissance in terms of time, place, and language. Previous studies have diminished the geographical and temporal extent of this defining moment, locating it in Harlem, starting in 1919 with the end of WWI and the Great Migration, and ending with the 1930 Great Depression. This project departs from this traditional account, demonstrating that what is usually perceived as a North American phenomenon was, in fact, international from its inception. Paying particular attention to the United States and the Caribbean, it examines "The New Negro Flow," which represents the discussion occurring during the first half of the 20th century between places in the Americas where there had been a large transplanted Black population.
117 p., Literary scholars frequently analyze the allusions to Western Christianity apparent in Toni Morrison's novels, but these studies overlook the ways in which some of her novels are informed by a Caribbean presence. This study argues that Rastafari themes, symbols, and ideologies are recurrent in Toni Morrison's Tar Baby, Beloved, and Song of Solomon. Rastafari is a social movement primarily concerned with restoring the image of Africa to a holy place. A Rastafari analysis of these texts broadens the literary spectrum to suggest that these novels highlight Morrison's attempt to write about the multifaceted element of the black community, which remains deeply connected to its American, African, and Caribbean roots.
African American Research Center, Library, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Notes:
Originally published: 1953., 272 p., A powerful reflection on colonial Jamaica and the condition of the urban poor, told through the voices and stories of several boldly drawn characters.
African American Research Center, Library, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Notes:
259 p., Explores the many aspects of Negritude - both as a concept and as a movement. Provides an account of its historical origins and examines the sociological and ideological background of themes that have preoccupied French-speaking black writers and intellectuals.
African American Research Center, Library, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Notes:
304 p., Exploration of literary and cultural exchanges between the United States and the Caribbean during the roughly eighty-year period of their greatest interaction, from the close of the Spanish-American War to the Cuban Revolution. The interconnected histories of colonization, migration, slavery, and political struggle thrust writers from both regions into a vibrant literary conversation across national borders.
African American Research Center, Library, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Notes:
274 p., Explores the poetry and prose of Caribbean women writers, revealing in their imagery a rich tradition of erotic relations between women. She takes the book's title from Dionne Brand's novel In Another Place, Not Here, where eroticism between women is likened to the sweet and subversive act of cane cutters stealing sugar. The natural world is repeatedly reclaimed and reinterpreted to express love between women in the poetry and prose that Tinsley analyzes.
239 p., Undertakes a critical task of "writing to" and "writing back to" Frantz Fanon on the issues of violence, masculinity, and nation-formation. The author deploys Brian Keith Axel's formulations of "national interruption" to position African diasporic women's novels--specifically Gayl Jones's Corregidora, Tsitsi Dangarembga's Nervous Conditions, and Edwidge Danticat's Breath, Eyes, Memory --as critical interruptions to Fanon's formulations.
295 p., Focuses on the function of black vernacular myths and rituals in three primary women's texts of the Americas: Toni Morrison's Song of Solomon (1977), Simone Schwartz-Bart's Pluie et Vent sur Telumee Miracle (1972) and Paule Marshall's Praisesong for the Widow (1983). My project codifies how the black vernacular expressions of mythology and ritual are used to negotiate power between the individual and their community. The author traces how the women in these texts used resources of the black vernacular tradition as social and cultural collateral to empower themselves within an alternative system of values that simultaneously validates self and communal worth.
African American Research Center, Library, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Notes:
210 p., Contents: Carlos Arturo Truque: Colombia a corazón abierto / Sonia Nadezhda Truque -- La vocación y el medio: historia de un escritor / Carlos Arturo Truque -- Vivan los compañeros -- Granizada -- La noche de San Silvestre -- Sangre en el llano -- El día que terminó el verano -- Sonatina para dos tambores -- La fuga -- La diana -- El encuentro -- Fucú -- El misterio -- Martín encuentra dos razones -- Dos hombres -- Porque así era la gente -- La aventura de tío conejo -- La muerte tuvo cara y sello -- José dolores arregla un asunto -- Lo triste de vivir así -- El collar -- Las gafas oscuras -- De cómo Jim empezó a olvidar -- Puntales para mi casa -- La otra oportunidad -- El pigüita -- Longinos.
68 p., A collection of poems that explores the immigrant experience, detailing three worlds that forge a Caribbean-American voice. All three sections of the manuscript examine an identity that comes directly, almost solely, from her surroundings. In the tradition of Louise Bennett, the use of dialect aside, Section I attempts to comprehend a narrow Caribbean existence by scrutinizing a life that is tied to nature, family, and country. Section II sees the world slightly more broadly, but there the speaker is also acutely aware of her identity and the complexity in bridging the two worlds she now finds herself simultaneously occupying, one immediate, the other existing only through reflection.
