268 p., This study used a Black feminist critical framework to examine the conditions that influence the production of black women's fiction during the postwar era (1945-60). The novels of Ann Petry, Dorothy West and Paule Marshall were studied as artifacts that were shaped by the cultural and political climate of this crucial period in American history. A survey was also conducted of their associations with members and organizations in the American Left to determine what impact their social activism had on their lives and art. It was determined that these writers' political engagement played a significant role in the creation of transformative narratives about the power of black women to resist oppression in all of its forms. As a consequence of their contribution to a rich black feminist literary tradition, these postwar black women fiction writers serve as important foremothers to later generations of black women artists.
164 p., Traces the journey of blacks from the Middle Passage through urban migration northward in black fiction. Argues that the historical use of religious rhetoric is transcended in black writing of the 20th century in order to recast black victimization during slavery, counter the progress of turn-of-the-century white supremacy, and chronicle the rise of economic racism which created the 20th century black ghetto. The religious doctrines discussed in this study include Puritan missionizing and heretical purges in I, Tituba, Black Witch of Salem , the social work of the Catholic church in Contending Forces: A Romance Illustrative of Negro Life North and South , and the cultural intensity of the Pentecostal/Apostolic church in Go Tell It on the Mountain.
Jamaican author (of European and African ancestry) H. G. De Lisser's novel the White Witch of Rosehall reflects arrogant European colonizing attitudes toward savage blacks in early 20th-century Jamaica
African American Research Center, Library, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Notes:
187 p., Alas/ Graciela Rojas Sucre-- Y se hicieron amigos/Alicia Castro Argüello-- Amor de mulata/ Argentina Díaz Lozano-- La sombra de la otra/Victoria Urbano -- El negro/Leonor Paz y Paz -- El penador/ Luisita Aguilera Patiño -- Juan Negro / Dina del Carmen Rodas Jerez --Al negro le pagan por bailar /Matilde Elena López --Siervo de siervos/Rima de Vallbona -- ¿Hombre raro o sensitivo? / Catalina Barrios y Barrios -- ¿Y yo?/ Julieta Pinto -- Amor se escribe con G/ Rosa María Britton -- El horno de la vida / Bertalicia Peralta -- La aristócrata y su mulato /Irma Prego -- El talingo / Consuelo Tomás -- Cuando Claudina camina /Consuelo Tomás -- Hay que tener vergüenza/ Moravia Ochoa López -- El secreto de Lola / Moravia Ochoa López -- El veredicto / María Dávila -- Atrapado / Aída Judith González Castrellón -- El mulato/ Marta Susana Prieto; Includes biblipgraphical references ( 175-186)
African American Research Center, Library, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Notes:
326 p, A novel that deals with the experiences of several black seamen from the Caribbean, Africa, and the United States who are together on a beach in Marseilles. "The main character, Lincoln "Banjo" Agrippa, meets Ray, an intellectual from Haiti, and the pair illustrates the contrast between the rigidity and mechanism of industrial America and the vitality and naturalness of rural life in the islands." --Schavi Mali Ali, "Claude McKay," Dictionary of Literary Biography, vol. 51.
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.
African American Research Center, Library, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Notes:
A lyrical and evocative dreamscape of the Caribbean. Lively pictures & spare, poetic text are used to illustrate the actions of four island children & evoke the mood of the Caribbean. Where does sea meet sky? Where does sound meet color? Where does song meet soul? They meet where children run, splash, sing, and live, on an island in the West Indies. Rachel Isadora has written an inventive text, just right for the very young, featuring the activities children love. Winsome watercolors depict the connections that exist in the world around us, and take us to the places that lie deep in the hearts of all children, no matter where they live.
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.
Milstein,Linda Breiner (Author) and Taylor,Cheryl Munro (Illustrator)
Format:
Book, Whole
Publication Date:
1995
Published:
New York: Tambourine Books
Location:
African American Research Center, Library, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Notes:
32 p., A counting and story book set in the Caribbean. Fishermen, market ladies, and babies alike all love coconut. Count down from ten to one with the Coconut Mon as he winds his way around the island.
Within sectors of North America's African-American community, the colloquial expression "being touched by the brush" describes a multi-ethnic individual that possesses subtle Negroid physical features which are only detectable by close inspection by a "trained eye." Here, Edison discusses the historical factors in Puerto Rico and Panama that make up the foundation upon which Francisco Arrivi's "Los Vejigantes" and Carlos Guillermo Wilson's "Chombo" were constructed.;
African American Research Center, Library, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Notes:
120 p, Includes the author's experiences as a teenager, rescue the popular speech and collective creation of legends like "Elf", "the wandur", "dead", "the Shina huaca", etc .; or set of stories about the fox and outrage against the lion, which were counted by their grandparents, rescuing ancient oral traditions
African American Research Center, Library, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Notes:
224 p., Marronage - the process of flight by slaves from servitude to establish their own hegemonies in inhospitable or wild territories - had its beginnings in the early 1500s in Hispaniola, the first European settlement in the New World. As fictional personae the maroons continue to weave in and out of oral and literary tales as central and ancient characters of Jamaica's heritage. Identifies the place of Jamaican fiction in the larger regional literature and focuses on its essential themes and strategies of discourse for conveying these themes.
African American Research Center, Library, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Notes:
342 p, Examines how the low socioeconomic status of the black population in Cuba informs the representation of black characters in Cuban narrative fiction. From its very first example (Espejo de paciencia, 1608) until the most recent short fiction written after the 1959 Revolution, Cuban narrative fiction has played (and still plays) an important role in creating and maintaining the subaltern position of the black population in Cuba.
241 p., Explores the power children realize in the past, present, and future from their real or imagined connections to their absent mothers in twentieth- and twenty-first-century African diasporic women's fiction, science fiction, and film. Much of the existing scholarship on the diasporic mother focuses on her place in history, yet texts by Toni Morrison, Gloria Naylor, Gayl Jones, Octavia E. Butler, Nalo Hopkinson, Sheree Renée Thomas, Nisi Shawl, and Julie Dash suggest through their depictions of the lasting links children create with their mothers that the power of the diasporic mother and, by proxy, the black family and community extends into the future.
African American Research Center, Library, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Notes:
277 p., This wild and entertaining novel, winner of the 1986 Grand Prix Litteraire de la Femme, expands on the true story of the West Indian slave Tituba, who was accused of witchcraft in Salem, Massachusetts, arrested in 1692, and forgotten in jail until the general amnesty for witches two years later. Maryse Conde brings Tituba out of historical silence and creates for her a fictional childhood, adolescence, and old age. She turns her into what she calls "a sort of female hero, an epic heroine, like the legendary 'Nanny of the maroons, "' who, schooled in the sorcery and magical ritual of obeah, is arrested for healing members of the family that owns her. Rich with postmodern irony, the novel even includes an encounter with Hester Prawn of Hawthorne's Scarlet Letter.
African American Research Center, Library, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Notes:
247 p, Set in both Toronto and the Caribbean, this novel gives voice to the power of love and belonging in a story of two women, profoundly different, each in her own spiritual exile.
African American Research Center, Library, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Notes:
277 p, After his grandfather leaves his family and returns to a dangerous situation on his home island in the Caribbean, fourteen-year-old Junius decides to follow him in search of his lost heritage.
African American Research Center, Library, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Notes:
290 p., "...le premier volet de la trilogie La geste noire, série de trois romans dressant de grands portraits ayant marqué l'Histoire des Noirs."-- Page 4 of cover.
395 p., Inspired by the study of Western historiography and the processes by which silence enters into history in Michel-Rolph Trouillot's seminal work, Silencing the Past: Power and the Production of History, this dissertation demonstrates that fiction can be used both for silencing the past and for rewriting it. This study focuses on seven novels, one short story and two plays published between 1798 to 2007: Adonis ou le Bon Nègre by Jean-Baptiste Picquenard, L'Habitation de Saint-Domingue ou L'Insurrection by Charles de Rémusat, Benito Cereno by Herman Melville, Les Nuits chaudes du Cap-Français by Hugues Rebell, Drums at Dusk by Arna Bontemps, Le Royaume de ce monde (El reino de este mundo ) by Alejo Carpentier, Monsieur Toussaint by Edouard Glissant, and the trilogy of the historical novel (Le SouleÌvement des âmes, Le Maître des carrefours, La Pierre du bâtisseur ) by Madison Smartt Bell.
African American Research Center, Library, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Notes:
210 p., From the days of slavery, the Negro from Martinique has never stopped "marronner", that is to say, to try to escape his condition, winning the great woods, the plebeians districts boroughs or even the neighboring islands. Simon, principal figure of the book, was one of them. He knew in the 17th century the arrival of the first slaves from Africa Guinea, the eighteenth hell of sugar plantations in the nineteenth fever abolition, in the early twentieth that of marching strikes and, at the dawn of XXI, the mare desperadoes of false modernity.
369 p., Looks at contemporary novels of the anglophone African diaspora through the lens of movement, migration, and dislocation, with particular attention to how the selected authors depict black diasporic identity formation, and how they contribute to it through their writings. Thematically, this dissertation examines literary representations of the social, cultural, and psychological consequences that involuntary and voluntary migrations have had for black communities and individuals in North America, the Caribbean, and Britain. It explores the juncture of history, memory, geography, and diasporic identity, as represented by eight contemporary novelists of African and African-Caribbean descent: Charles Johnson ( Middle Passage ), Lawrence Hill ( The Book of Negroes ), Toni Morrison (Sula and Tar Baby ), George Lamming (The Emigrants ), Caryl Phillips (The Final Passage, A State of Independence, and Crossing the River ), Andrea Levy (Small Island ), Cecil Foster (Sleep on, Beloved ), and Edwidge Danticat ( Breath, Eyes, Memory ).
306 p., This project brings together adventure novels by white British authors, like Frederick Marryat, Mary Elizabeth Braddon and H. Rider Haggard, and African American and Afro-Caribbean texts by authors like Frederick Douglass, Pauline Hopkins, and Maxwell Philip, to argue that the sensational elements of the adventure genre that were so effective in developing British national identity were appropriated by African American and Afro-Caribbean authors to re-imagine national identity as a flexible and multi-ethnic concept.
211 p., Explores the similarities and differences which characterize the depiction of people of color in certain representative 19th century Cuban and Brazilian slavery novels as a function of the authorial approach of each territory's literary tradition toward the issues of slavery, racial prejudice, and people of color. The selected texts, derived from the peak periods in slavery literature of each territory, include Francisco , by Anselmo Snárez y Romero; Sab , by Gertrudis Gómez de Avellaneda; Cecilia Valdés , by Cirilo Villaverde; A escrava Isaura , by Bernardo Guimarães; O mulato , by Aluísio Azevedo; and Bom-Crioulo , by Adolfo Caminha. While the present study explores the enslavement, abuse, and discrimination of people of color as a consequence of a deep-seated discourse of power, privilege and racial superiority, it focuses more extensively on the representation of people of color, particularly in their capacity to constructively appropriate the cultural values of the white dominant group and recognize their identity as ambiguous.
Reviews a novel about the lives of a mixed-race British/American family living in the United States. In its depiction of African Americans, White Americans, Britons, and Caribbean immigrants, the book demonstrates Americans' obsession with race. In addition to the contrast between desires for racial authenticity and class mobility, Smith’s novel exposes the variability of Black America, and especially the intersection between class and race.
African American Research Center, Library, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Notes:
111 p, Examines the ways Guadeloupean women writers Maryse Conde, Simone Schwarz-Bart and Myriam Warner-Vieyra demystify the theme of the return to Africa as opposed to the masculinist version by Negritude male writers from the 1930s to 1960s. Negritude, a cultural and literary movement, drew much of its strength from the idea of a mythical or cultural reconnection with the African past allegorized as a mother figure. In contrast these women writers, of the post-colonial era who are to large extent heirs of Negritude, differ sharply from their male counterparts in their representation of Africa. In their novels, the continent is not represented as a propitious mother figure but a disappointing father figure.
African American Research Center, Library, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Notes:
v, 174 leaves ; 29 cm., This novel is a contemporary novel that deals with the history of france; "UMI:9959638."/ Includes bibliographical references ( 167-174)./ Reproduction: Photocopy./ Ann Arbor, Mich. :/ UMI,/ 2000./ v, 174 ; 21 cm.
African American Research Center, Library, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Notes:
Winner of the 1978 National Book Critic's Circle Award for fiction., 305 p., The lives of 5 people, black and white, servant and millionaire, are entertwined. The setting is a Caribbean island. A visitor, young Jadine, neice of the butler and his wife and protegee of the Streets, educated at the Sorbonne, comes home for a visit from Paris. Son, black American street man breaks into the house and all lives are changed. Jadine and Son come together and strive to hold and understand each other as backgrounds and cultural circumstances come into play.
African American Research Center, Library, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Notes:
233 p, Contents: Introduction. "Out of Many, One": A Case of Multiple Childhoods -- I. "The Ending Up Is the Starting Out": The Bildungsroman Re/formed -- II. "Behold the Great Image of Authority": African West Indian Male Initiation -- III. "His Great Struggle Beginning": African American Male Initiation -- IV. Womanish Girls: African American Female Initiation -- V. Journeys to Selfhood: African West Indian Female Initiation -- Conclusion. Ten Is the Age of Darkness -- Chronology of the African American Bildungsroman -- Chronology of the African West Indian Bildungsroman
African American Research Center, Library, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Notes:
472 p, The chosen place is Bourneville, a remote, devastated part of a Caribbean island; the timeless people are its inhabitants, black, poor, inextricably linked to their past enslavement. The advance team for an ambitious American research project arrives, and the tense, ambivalent relationships that evolve dramatize the vicissitudes of power.
African American Research Center, Library, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Notes:
316 p., She was an 18th century black Suriname woman with millions of dollars. But she sought the forbidden: to marry a white man. Why, when she already had so much? Elisabeth Samson's immense wealth puzzled many early historians who concluded that it could only have been the result of an inheritance from a master with whom she had lived and by whom she had been set free.
Wynter,Sylvia (Author), Bogues,Anthony (Author), and Eudell,Demetrius Lynn (Author)
Format:
Book, Whole
Publication Date:
2010
Published:
Kingston ; Miami: I. Randle
Location:
African American Research Center, Library, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Notes:
Originally published: London : J. Cape, 1962., 340 p., Written in the late 1950s on the cusp of Jamaica's independence from Britain, The Hills of Hebron tells the story of a group of formerly enslaved Jamaicans as they attempt to create a new life and assert themselves against the colonial power.
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:
331 p., Partly autobiographical, this novel looks at the racial politics of the 1950s and 1960s. Ramsay Tull is witness to the black racial discontents and the desire for national independence that are threatening the old colonial order; but when a chance comes to study at Oxford University, he becomes immersed in European literary culture and Marxism. On his return to Jamaica, Ramsay becomes actively involved in radical nationalist politics and begins his second journey, away from his middle-class origins and back to a true appreciation of the Jamaican people.
Condé,Maryse (Author) and Philcox,Richard (Translator)
Format:
Book, Whole
Publication Date:
1997
Published:
Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press
Location:
African American Research Center, Library, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Notes:
216 p., Follows the history of a fictional African royal family through forced exile to the Caribbean and eventual emigration to the United States, setting up a provocative critique of multiculturalism and modern race relations. Explores the complex interplay between America and Africa, symbolized in the cultural and racial jumble of the Caribbean islands.
African American Research Center, Library, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Notes:
951 p., Story of an elderly African, blind and dying, traveling from Africa to Brazil in search of the lost son for decades. Along the journey, she will tell her life, marked by killings, rape, violence and slavery. Set in an important historical context in the formation of the Brazilian people and narrated in a way in which the historical facts are immersed in daily life and in the lives of the characters.
African American Research Center, Library, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Notes:
951 p., A story of an African elderly who is blind, and on the verge of death, travels to from African to Brazil in a hunt for the lost child for decades.
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.
Boisseron,Bénédicte (Editor) and Ekotto,Frieda (Editor)
Format:
Book, Edited
Language:
French
Publication Date:
2011
Published:
Pessac: Presses universitaires de Bordeaux
Location:
African American Research Center, Library, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Notes:
151 p., Includes "Parcours d'un corps" / Raphaël Confiant (Martinique); "Sa Légèreté Libellule" / Jean Bernabé (Martinique); "Les derniers jours d'une mulâtresse" / Patrick Chamoiseau (Martinique); "Wayang Kulit" / Maryse Condé (Guadeloupe); "Chocolater son petit corps" / Suzanne Dracius (Martinique); "La Femme-Fleuve" / Ernest Pépin (Guadeloupe); "Une chouette dans un Port-au-Prince sans électricité" / Dany Laferrière (Haïti/Canada); and "L'ex-île" / Daniel Maximin (Guadeloupe).
