Washington, DC; Stanford, CA: Woodrow Wilson Center Press; Stanford University Press
Location:
African American Research Center, Library, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Notes:
430 p., Assesses the consequences of civil war for democratization in Latin America, focusing on questions of state capacity. Contributors focus on seven countries: Colombia, El Salvador, Guatemala, Haiti, Mexico, Nicaragua, and Peru where state weakness fostered conflict and the task of state reconstruction presents multiple challenges. Includes Johanna Mendelson Forman's "An illusory peace: the United Nations and state building in Haiti."
Chabela Ramírez, the black singer and activist born in Montevideo in 1958, is a singular personality of candombe, the only multi-form Afro-Uruguayan musical genre. Retracing her trajectory leads us through the history of Uruguay's black community (10% of the total population) and candombe, with particular attention on how this musical expression went from devalued practice to national heritage in a country deeply marked by a Eurocentric ideology. Ramírez founded and gave voice, with Afrogama, the choir and dance group that she leads, to a unique aesthetic thought that brought meaning to candombe via the field of Afro-religions (Umbanda and Batuque).
Blinder,V. S. (Author), Murphy,M. M. (Author), Vahdat,L. T. (Author), Gold,H. T. (Author), Melo-Martin,I. (Author), Hayes,M. K. (Author), Scheff,R. J. (Author), Chuang,E. (Author), Moore,A. (Author), and Mazumdar,M. (Author)
Format:
Journal Article
Publication Date:
Aug 2012
Published:
Netherlands: Springer Science+Business Media
Location:
African American Research Center, Library, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Employment status is related to treatment recovery and quality of life in breast cancer survivors, yet little is known about return to work in immigrant and minority survivors. The authors conducted an exploratory qualitative study using ethnically cohesive focus groups of urban breast cancer survivors who were African-American, African-Caribbean, Chinese, Filipina, Latina, or non-Latina white. Overall, there were we few differences between the different ethnic groups. These results have important implications for the provision of support services to and clinical management of employed women with breast cancer, as well as for further large-scale research in disparities and employment outcomes.
Child trafficking, under the guise of intercountry adoption, is a form of human trafficking that is often misunderstood by policy makers, governments, the media, and nongovernmental organizations. Uses the 2010 abduction attempt of Haitian children by American missionaries as a case to demonstrate how existing policies are insufficient to provide protection to victims and to prosecute perpetrators of this form of child trafficking.
African American Research Center, Library, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Notes:
212 p., Analysis of Canadian and US democracy promotion in the Americas, with a focus on Haiti, Peru, and Bolivia in particular. The main argument is that democracy promotion is typically formulated to advance commercial, geopolitical and security objectives that conflict with a genuine commitment to democratic development. Includes chapter "Polyarchy at any cost in Haiti."
Much of the music literature of churches in the Philippines was destroyed during World War II, particularly in Manila. Marcelo Adonay (1848–1928) was one of the major figures in Philippine music of the 19th century European traditions and styles of choral music prevailed in Latin America; however, the period of 1810 to 1830 witnessed efforts towards independence from Spain in many areas, including music. Unfortunately, this independence weakened some of the institutions that supported and produced music, including the church. A brief survey is provided of sacred, theatrical, and civic choral music (the major venues, composers, organizations, works, and developments) in Mexico, Central America, the Caribbean, Venezuela, the Andes region, the Rioplatense region, Brazil, and Spain.
African American Research Center, Library, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Notes:
Unedited] Jazz is a music formed from a combination of influences. In its infancy, jazz was a melting pot of military brass bands, work songs, and field hollers of the United States slaves during the 19th c., European harmonies and forms, and the rhythms of Africa and the Caribbean. Later, the blues and the influence of Spanish and French Creoles with European classical training nudged jazz further along in its development. Jazz has always been a world-music in the sense that music from around the globe has been embraced and incorporated. This dictionary covers the history of jazz through a chronology, an introductory essay, and an extensive bibliography. The dictionary section has over 1,500 cross-referenced entries on significant jazz performers, band leaders, bands, venues, record labels, recordings, and the different styles of jazz.
"Dominican culture and society can be characterized as a hybrid whose nature is expressed in various domains. For example, folk or popular Catholicism, the religion of some 90 percent of the national population, is in summary a cultural amalgamation. But deconstructed, it can be seen to retain elements of the various contributors to its eclectic configuration: Spanish of different regions, classes, Catholic religious orders, and even religions with regard to Judaic and Islamic features retained in Spanish folk Catholicism; West and Central African of various ethnic origins; continuities of native Taíno beliefs and practices; and other origins, such as the possible East Indian origin of the vodú deity of the “black” Guedé family, Santa Marta la Dominadora." -The Author
African American Research Center, Library, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Notes:
208 p., Illustrates the way enslaved Africans lived and helped to shape Jamaican society in the three decades before British abolition of the slave trade. Audra Diptee's in-depth investigations reveal unexpected insights into the demographics of those captured in Africa and legally transported on British slave ships.
Explores the way writers address the formation and fate of the contemporary American working class in an age of neoliberal globalization. Specifically, the essay examines Russell Banks's 1985 novel Continental Drift, which interweaves the stories of two characters who pull up stakes and head to Florida in search of a better life: an oil furnace repair man from New Hampshire and a young, single mother from Haiti.
In many of the lesser developed areas of the world, regional development planning is increasingly important for meeting the needs of current and future inhabitants. Illustrates how matrix assessment methodology was applied to produce a landslide-susceptibility map for the Commonwealth of Dominica, an island nation in the eastern Caribbean, and how with a follow up study the relative landslide-susceptibility mapping was validated. A second Caribbean application on Jamaica demonstrates how this methodology can be applied in a more geologically complex setting.
The singing of capeyuye (the Mascogo—Black Seminole people—equivalent of the U.S. spiritual) became a significant token of individual and communal identity in that population. The life and career of Gertrudis Vázquez are studied as emblematic of that tradition. The technical aspects of capeyuye are described and its performance is examined with the context of Mascogo society, particularly its connection with important events such as funerals, birthdays, and other festive occasions.
Argues that the underdevelopment of Dominican social policies reflects the political impact of international migration flows, including both Dominican emigration to the United States and the immigration into the Dominican Republic from neighboring Haiti. These flows have inhibited the development of progressive political actors, including the partisan left and organized labor, and facilitated the adoption of an economic production model that erects additional obstacles to the expansion of the country's social policies.
Explores the neighborhood-based samba practices of working class Afro-Brazilians during the festas juninas (June festivals) in Bahia, Brazil. In contrast to Bahia's famous Carnival, a recognized site for activism, the festas juninas appear apolitical, seeming to lack overt resistance to color-based inequities that persist in Brazil despite national discourses of mestiçagem (mixing) and racial democracy. In recent years, however, June samba has (re-)emerged as a means for marginalized people to assert belonging in June events and festival narratives from which they have been excluded. Their activism draws on tactics used by Bahia's Afrocentric activist carnival organizations, but with important differences. Most notably, rather than placing Africa at the center of their interventions, June samba participants express new notions of Black Bahian subjectivity through the critically informed embrace of local Afro-diasporic traditions—especially a recently recognized UNESCO masterpiece known as samba de roda—and more cosmopolitan musical sensibilities.
A benefit-cost analysis was performed on varying levels of standard buildings codes for Haiti and Puerto Rico. It was found that in the two areas studied, the expected loss of life was reduced the most by use of high seismic building code levels, but lower levels of seismic building code were more cost-effective when considering only building damages and the costs for code implementation.
Analyzes how identity construction and ethnic representation processes take place in a folkloric festival framed by the multicultural policies of the Colombian state. Accounts for how institutions and base Afrocolombian communities use bullerengue—a local musical tradition that is now strong in the Uraba zone—as a tool in this construction process.
African American Research Center, Library, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Notes:
16 p, This report provides background information on current political and economic conditions in the Dominican Republic, as well as an overview of some of the key issues in US-Dominican relations.
Crossroads populate religious and folkloric beliefs all around the world. Stories of an intersection of dimensions, as well as of roads where a guardian-trickster deity awaits to carry human desires to the gods, are widely encountered in European, Caribbean, and West African lore (as well as the legends formed around blues and rock stars). The symbolism of the crossroads speaks directly to one's innate recognition of a charged metaphorical space; a space that is liminal, betwixt-and-between. This notion of the crossroads serves as inspiration for examining the relationship between U2's music and listeners' progressive political awareness—the marriage of critical consciousness and action for social justice and change. To this end, an in-depth study is carried out of six listeners' experiences at the potent crossroads of their developing progressive awareness and their encounters with U2's music.
Washington, DC: Pew Internet & American Life Project
Location:
African American Research Center, Library, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Notes:
25 p., Charitable donations from mobile phones have grown more common in recent years. Two thirds (64%) of American adults now use text messaging, and 9% have texted a charitable donation from their mobile phone. The first-ever, in-depth study on mobile donors, which analyzed the "Text to Haiti" campaign after the 2010 earthquake -- finds that these contributions were often spur-of-the-moment decisions that spread virally through friend networks.
Considers the role of music, both symbolic and material, in screen representations of Rio de Janeiro since the 1950s. The music of Rio's streets and hillsides has played more than a mere supporting role in the cinematic representations of the city across the last half-century. Embracing samba, bossa nova, MPB, soul, funk, funk carioca (a local variant of Miami bass), and rap, the heterogeneous voices of Rio's soundscape have arguably shaped audiences' understanding and imagination of its cultural geography and social dynamic as much as the films' visual narratives and dramas. The author discusses some key examples spanning the last 50 years, from Nelson Pereira dos Santos's Rio, Zona Norte (Rio, North Zone, 1957) and Marcel Camus's Orfeu negro (Black Orpheus, 1959), to Carlos Diegues's remake Orfeu (Orpheus, 1999) and Fernando Meirelles and Kátia Lund's Cidade de Deus (City of God, 2002). Taking as his point of departure the mythical narrative of Orpheus, he explores the representation of popular music as a force for social redemption, regeneration, and reconciliation. He interrogates the interplay of different musical styles and idioms, such as samba and bossa nova, on screen, and challenges one of the common assumptions about shifts in style and sound: the idea that the harder soundtracks of most recent films (centering on rap and funk carioca) correspond to a necessarily more realistic and truthful representation of the city, as opposed to the allegedly sentimentalized depictions associated with the bossa nova-influenced scores of Orfeu negro and Rio, Zona Norte. In cinematic representations of the city, Rio's musical identity continues to be performed in a dialogue between tradition and innovation, the local and the diasporic, with no song style being more real than any other.
African American Research Center, Library, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Notes:
Unedited] Shows how community music-makers and dancers take in all that is around them socially and globally, and publicly and bodily unfold their memories, sentiments, and raw responses within open spaces designated or commandeered for local popular dance. The book reveals a rarely discussed perspective on contemporary Cuban society during the 1990s, the peak decade of timba, and beyond, as the Cuban leadership transferred from Fidel Castro to his brother. Simultaneously, it reveals popular dance music in the context of a young and astutely educated Cuban generation of fierce and creative performers. By looking at the experiences of black Cubans and exploring the notion of 'Afro Cuba', the book explains timba's evolution and achieved significance in the larger context of Cuban culture. It discusses a maroon aesthetic extended beyond the colonial era to the context of contemporary society; describes the dance spaces of Cuba; and examines the performance of identity and desire through the character of the 'especulador'.
African American Research Center, Library, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Notes:
247 p., The Southern Caribbean was the last frontier in the Atlantic world and the most contested region in the Caribbean during the Age of Revolution. The three British colonies of Grenada, Trinidad and Demerera were characterized by insecurity and personified by the high mobility of people and ideas across empires; it was a part of the Caribbean that, more than any other region, provided an example of the liminal space of contested empires. Because of the multiculturalism inherent in this part of the world, as well as the undeveloped protean nature of the region, this was a place of shifting borderland communities and transient ideas, where women in motion and free people of color played a central role.
Espín Guillois,Vilma (Author), Santos Tamayo,Asela de los (Author), and Ferrer,Yolanda (Author)
Format:
Book, Whole
Publication Date:
2012-01-01
Published:
New York: Pathfinder
Location:
African American Research Center, Library, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Notes:
364 p., A collection of four interviews by different journalists with Vilma Espín, Asela de los Santos and Yolanda Ferrer from 1975-2008. Founded by Fidel Castro and directed by Vilma Espín, the Federation of Cuban Women sought to mobilize women following the 1959 Cuban Revolution. Called the "revolution within the revolution," the Cuban women's movement sent women into new regions of the country to teach the illiterate and nurse the ill.
Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press
Location:
African American Research Center, Library, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Notes:
298 p., Showing how revolutionary and prerevolutionary values coexist in a potent and sometimes contradictory mix, Hamilton addresses changing patterns in heterosexual relations, competing views of masculinity and femininity, same-sex relationships and homophobia, AIDS, sexual violence, interracial relationships, and sexual tourism. Hamilton's examination of sexual experiences across generations and social groups demonstrates that sexual politics have been integral to the construction of a new revolutionary Cuban society.
Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press
Location:
African American Research Center, Library, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Notes:
298 p., Showing how revolutionary and prerevolutionary values coexist in a potent and sometimes contradictory mix, Hamilton addresses changing patterns in heterosexual relations, competing views of masculinity and femininity, same-sex relationships and homophobia, AIDS, sexual violence, interracial relationships, and sexual tourism. Hamilton's examination of sexual experiences across generations and social groups demonstrates that sexual politics have been integral to the construction of a new revolutionary Cuban society.
African American Research Center, Library, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Notes:
144 p., Features interviews with government and health agency officials, HIV/AIDS activists, and residents of the country's capital, Bridgetown. Using these and records from local libraries and archives, Murray unravels the complex historical, social, political, and economic forces through which same-sex desire, identity, and prejudice are produced and valued in this Caribbean nation-state. Illustrates the influence of both Euro-American and regional gender and sexual politics on sexual diversity in Barbados.
