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.
96 p., Recent research indicates that among the different ethnic groups in the United States, African Americans report the highest level of self-esteem (Twenge & Crocker, 2002). However, the literature offers a monolithic categorization of African Americans. Black individuals from countries where Blacks are the majority are socialized to think differently about matters of race compared with the thinking of African Americans. Likewise, membership in the minority group will have different implications for Black Caribbeans. The current study examined the effects of racial socialization and resilience on the self-esteem of two groups of Black girls: African Americans and Black Caribbeans. Because of the theorized difference in racial socialization, it was hypothesized that the two groups would differ in their levels of self-esteem and that resilience would moderate the relationship between racial socialization and self-esteem. Participants consisted of 25 African American and 26 Black Caribbean high school students.
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.
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.
173 p., Examines the effects of nationality and other factors influencing the employment of Haitian women in the U.S. labor force. Effects of human and social capital, as well as household and structural characteristics were explored. In an effort to better understand Haitian women's (N=3908, 16.9%) economic integration in the labor market, their total personal income, hours worked and wage income were compared with three other groups of immigrant women from Jamaica (N=5057, 21.8%) Cuba (N=8696, 37.4%) and the Dominican Republic (N=5540, 23.9%). Although these immigrant women came from the same region, this research argued that linguistic advantages set them apart.
