480 p., This dissertation examines the role of the Haitian Revolution and Haiti's national history in the construction of Black Internationalism and Black Atlantic intellectual culture in the first half of the twentieth century. The author argues for the centrality of Haiti in the genesis of Black internationalism, contending that revolutionary Haiti played a major place in Black Atlantic thought and culture in the time covered. Suggests viewing the dynamics between the Harlem Renaissance, Haitian Indigenism, and Negrtude and key writers and intellectuals in terms of interpenetration, interindepedence, and mutual reciprocity and collaboration.
Focuses on the enlistment of slaves in the Brazilian army from 1800 to 1888. Questions about the nature of military institutions; Army's policy toward slavery; Principles that governed recruitment and slavery; Administrative procedures that the government and army developed to deal with runaways in the ranks.;
African American Research Center, Library, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Notes:
319 p., Peter Hulme and William H. Sherman assemble a stellar collection of original essays and visual materials that situate Shakespeare's play in both its original contexts and our own cultural moment. In a final section, the book traverses the Atlantic for a look at American and Caribbean readings of the play and its translation into colonial allegory. Includes Aimé Césaire, Pratricia Seed and Gorge Lamming.
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.
85 p., This thesis examines the practice of Obeah--an Afro-Caribbean system of healing, harming, and divination through the use of spiritual powers--within two slave communities in Berbice and Demerara (British Guiana). This study is based primarily on legal documents--including testimony from more than a dozen slaves--generated during the criminal trials of two men accused of practicing Obeah in 1819 and 1821-22. In contrast to most previous studies of Obeah, which have been based largely on descriptions provided by British observers, this project takes advantage of this complex, overlapping body of evidence to explore the social dynamics of Obeah as experienced by enslaved men and women themselves, including Obeah practitioners, their clients, and other witnesses. This study reveals that Obeah rituals could be extremely violent, that Obeah practitioners were feared as well as respected among their contemporaries, that the authority of Obeah practitioners was based on demonstrable success, and that slave communities in general were complex social worlds characterized by conflict and division as well as by support and unity--conclusions that combine to produce a fresh, humane vision of Afro-diasporan culture and community under slavery.
African American Research Center, Library, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Notes:
135 p., Examines Caribbean cultural identities along the lines of race, class, nationalism, and history. Contents include: Remembering Toussaint, rethinking postcolonial: the Haitian revolution and the writing of historical trauma in the Caribbean / Li-Chun Hsiao --
Unveiling the mask: race, nationhood, and caribeñidad in "La tierra y el cielo" / Sheree Henlon -- The music, the artist, and the aficionado: tracing the role of race and class in Caribbean popular music through literature / Kathleen Costello -- Negrismo and négritude in the reshaping of Caribbean cultural identity / Mamadou Badiane.
