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.
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.
Hathaway describes the characters and plot of this novel, which is set in the Civil Rights era and focuses on the experiences of a Trinidadian immigrant who has come to the U. S. on a scholarship to a small, Catholic college in the Midwest
Hathaway discusses how this novel records the human toll of Guyanese politics as it chronicles the activities of one extended family suffering under the reign of a corrupt government
"First work of a young Haitian born author, How to Make Love to a Negro without getting tired is still valid seventeen years after its release. Meanwhile, the novel became a classic of Quebec literature and Dany Laferriere has been recognized as a major writer of French literature. Greeted by unanimous criticism and enthusiastic audiences, How to Make Love to a Negro Without Getting Tired was a resounding success in several countries, particularly in the Anglophone world in which we compared its author to Bukowski and Miller."
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.
African American Research Center, Library, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Notes:
368 p., A series of extended, illuminated moments in the history of Spanish and British imperialism in the Caribbean: Raleigh's final, shameful expedition to the New World; Francisco Miranda's disastrous invasion of South America in the eighteenth century; the more subtle aggressions of the mid-twentieth-century English writer Foster Morris; the transforming and distorting peregrinations of Blair, the black Trinidadian revolutionary.
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:
149 p, "This interdisciplinary study combines concepts of symbolic anthropology with traditional literary criticism to survey six novels by the Caribbean authors George Lamming and Wilson Harris." (Publisher)
African American Research Center, Library, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Notes:
148 p, Episodes from the young life of Annie John, aged 10 to 17, as she grows up on the Caribbean Island of Antigua. This is a magical coming-of-age tale, ripe with the special ambience of its tropical setting and sustained by Annie's far from naive awareness of the world around her. Death, illness, and poverty intrude on the narrator's perceptive sensibility from time to time, but even these experiences instruct her and expand her understanding of life and its shifting reality.Although Annie leaves Antigua at the end of the novel for a new role as a student in England, the hollowness she feels at her departure is balanced by the new self that awaits her as she begins the search for her own identity. A poetic and intensely moving work from the author of At the Bottom of the River.;
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)
In April 1999, Dionne Brand, Leslie Sanders, and Rinaldo Walcott sat down to have a conversation about Brand's second novel At The Full and Change of the Moon. The
interview took place over a promised riposte, and was a conversation among friends.
The novel concerns itself with the contemporary lives of the descendents of Marie Ursule a slave who commits a rebellious and horrific act of mass poisoning on a plantation but saves her daughter Bolla.
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.
African American Research Center, Library, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Notes:
314 p, "Set in Trinidad, Manu's obsession to play "diable" in the carnival leads him into conflict with his wife, Samdaye, and sets into motion a chain of events that threatens to destroy the lives of his family and neighbors." (Publisher)
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.
Review of Jamaican-American writer Claude McKay' Home to Harlem (1928), a best-seller that won the Harmon Gold Award for Literature. The novel, which depicted street life in Harlem, would have a major impact on black intellectuals in the Caribbean, West Africa, and Europe.
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.
Danticat,Edwidge (Author) and New York (Series Editor)
Format:
Book, Whole
Publication Date:
1995
Published:
Vintage Books
Location:
African American Research Center, Library, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Notes:
At the age of twelve, Sophie Caco is sent from the impoverished village of Croix-des-Rosets to New York to be reunited with her mother, where she gains a legacy of shame that only be healed when she returns to Haiti, to the woman who first reared her., 234 p
African American Research Center, Library, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Notes:
147 p, The Caliban-Prospero encounter in Shakespeare's "The Tempest" has evolved as a metaphor for the colonial experience. The present study utilizes the Caliban symbol in examining the influence of colonialism in Caribbean literature, focusing on the works of three major writers from the Caribbean islands: Jean Rhys, of British descent from Dominica; George Lamming, of African origin from Barbados; and Sam Selvon, of mixed Indian and Scottish heritage from Trinidad.
African American Research Center, Library, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Notes:
672 p., This novel captures the “glittering string” of islands and their history; beginning in 1310, through Columbus's arrival, and the “bloody slave revolt” of Haiti to the rise of Castro. It deals with revolution and romance, slavery and superstition.
"Condé's work seems to elicit a critical discourse saturated with spatial metaphors or reflections on the theme of space and travel. Critics state that is difficult to separate Condé's narrative from her concepts of home, homeland, ancestry." (Rosello)
African American Research Center, Library, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Notes:
187 p, Contents: Introduction: The Third Wave -- Guanahani -- Waves and Echoes -- Olive Senior: Country Air and Juggled Worlds -- Summer Lightning: Customs of the Country -- Arrival of the Snake-Woman and Discerner of Hearts: The Wider World -- Zee Edgell: The Belize Chronicles -- Beka Lamb: A Lesson in History -- In Times Like These: Growing into Home -- Shiva Naipaul: Choreographer of Chaos -- Essays and Stories -- Fireflies: Illuminating the Void -- The Chip-Chip Gatherers: Ropes Across the Abyss -- A Hot Country: Too Much Nothing -- Caryl Phillips: The End of All Exploring -- The Final Passage: The Book of the Parents -- A State of Independence: The Book of the Sons -- Cambridge: The Book of the Ancestors -- Robert Antoni: The Voyage In -- Short Fiction -- Divina Trace: The Tale of Telling.
African American Research Center, Library, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Notes:
228 p, Contents: Canonized hybridities, resistant hybridities: Chutney Soca, carnival, and the politics of nationalism / Shalini Puri -- Soca and social formations: avoiding the romance of culture in Trinidad / Stefano Harney -- Trinidad romance: the invention of Jamaican carnival / Belinda J. Edmondson -- All that is black melts into air: negritud and nation in Puerto Rico / Catherine Den Tandt -- Positive vibration? Capitalist textual hegemony and Bob Marley / Mike Alleyne --"Titid ad pèp la se marasa": Jean-Bertrand Aristide and the new national romance in Haiti / Kevin Meehan -- Shadowboxing in the Mangrove: the politics of identity in postcolonial Martinique / Richard Price and Sally Price -- Beautiful Indians, troublesome negroes, and nice white men: Caribbean romances and the invention of Trinidad / Faith Smith -- Homing instincts: immigrant nostalgia and gender politics in Brown girl, brownstones / Supriya Nair -- Derek Walcott: liminal spaces/substantive histories / Tejumola Olaniyan
African American Research Center, Library, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Notes:
263 p., Analyzing pamphlets, newspapers, estate papers, trial transcripts, and missionary correspondence, this book recovers stories of ordinary Caribbean people, enslaved and free, as they made places for themselves in the empire and the Atlantic world, from the time of sugar tycoon Simon Taylor to the perspective of Samuel Ringgold Ward, African American eyewitness to the 1865 Morant Bay rebellion.
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.
Place of publication not identified: CayStreet Publications
Location:
African American Research Center, Library, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Notes:
164 p., Topics include George Town In the 50's and 60's, The Wights and McTaggarts as the owners of Cayman’s First Supermarket who were pioneers of keeping Caymanian young people employed, Miss Kippy School in George Town, Cayman Prep and Rev.George Hicks, Cayman High and Rev. John R. Gray, Aunt Ione's Fried Fish, Church Girls, Ghosts and Rolling Calf, Dating in the 60's,The Flag Carrier, Cayman Bruce Lee, C.H. Goring and Barbadians in Cayman, A Cayman Summer, and 50’s Christmas in Cayman.
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.
Port of Spain, Trinidad and Tobago: Bocas Lit Fest
Location:
African American Research Center, Library, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Notes:
119 p, This book of sixteen tales is divided into two parts: the first features stories told by youngsters beneath the age of 10, and the second showcases the work of children aged 11 through 15. The titles of some stories are the same, but this is where the similarities stop. Each of the sixteeen fables is equally precious, highlighting the talent, creativity and boundless imagination of our nation’s budding wordsmiths.
