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2. Coloring the Caribbean: Agostino Brunias and the painting of race in the British West Indies, c.1765-1800
- Collection:
- Black Caribbean Literature (BCL)
- Contributers:
- Bagneris,Amanda Michaela (Author)
- Format:
- Dissertation/Thesis
- Publication Date:
- 2009
- Published:
- Massachusetts: Harvard University
- Location:
- African American Research Center, Library, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
- Journal Title:
- ProQuest Dissertations and Theses
- Notes:
- 261 p., Italian painter Agostino Brunias first traveled to the Caribbean sometime around 1770 in the employ of Sir William Young, First Baronet, a British aristocrat who had been charged with overseeing the sale of lands in the islands won by Britain from France at the end of the Seven Years War. Working primarily on the islands of Dominica and St. Vincent, as Young's official painter, Brunias was ostensibly charged with documenting the exotic bounty and diversity of the islands. For roughly the next quarter century, he painted for plantocrats and the colonial elite, creating romanticized tableaux that featured Caribbeans of color--so called "Red" and "Black" Caribs, dark-skinned Africans and Afro-Creoles, and people of mixed race. Examines how the artist's images reflected and refracted ideas about race commonly held by Britons in the colonial Caribbean during the late 18th century.
3. The Making of the Jamaican National Body: Colonialism and Public Health, 1918--1944
- Collection:
- Black Caribbean Literature (BCL)
- Contributers:
- Briggs,Jill Catherine (Author)
- Format:
- Dissertation/Thesis
- Publication Date:
- 2013
- Published:
- California: University of California, Santa Barbara
- Location:
- African American Research Center, Library, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
- Journal Title:
- ProQuest Dissertations and Theses
- Notes:
- 450 p., Examines how the development of public health, aided by the intervention of the Rockefeller Foundation, intersected with the birth of nationalism in Jamaica between 1918 and 1944. It demonstrates that a modern public health program based in western biomedicine, racial categorization and colonial modes of behavior were vital to claims of fitness for self-rule by Jamaican nationalists. In the late 1930s the demand for greater representation in government was accompanied by the scrutiny of the sexual behaviors and personal hygiene of the Afro-Jamaican masses. The author analyzes how disease and reproduction played a central role in the competing constructions of Afro-Jamaican bodies by colonial elites and ambitious middle class nationalists.
4. "This bad business": Obeah, violence, and power in a nineteenth-century British Caribbean slave community
- Collection:
- Black Caribbean Literature (BCL)
- Contributers:
- Browne,Randy M. (Author)
- Format:
- Dissertation/Thesis
- Publication Date:
- 2009
- Published:
- Chapel Hill, NC: The University of North Carolina
- Location:
- African American Research Center, Library, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
- Journal Title:
- ProQuest Dissertations and Theses
- Notes:
- 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.
5. Constructing Afro-Cuban Womanhood: Race, Gender, and Citizenship in Republican-Era Cuba, 1902--1958
- Collection:
- Black Caribbean Literature (BCL)
- Contributers:
- Brunson,Takkara Keosha (Author)
- Format:
- Dissertation/Thesis
- Publication Date:
- 2011
- Published:
- Texas: The University of Texas at Austin
- Location:
- African American Research Center, Library, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
- Journal Title:
- ProQuest Dissertations and Theses
- Notes:
- 344 p., Explores continuities and transformations in the construction of Afro-Cuban womanhood in Cuba between 1902 and 1958. A dynamic and evolving process, the construction of Afro-Cuban womanhood encompassed the formal and informal practices that multiple individuals--from lawmakers and professionals to intellectuals and activists to workers and their families--established and challenged through public debates and personal interactions in order to negotiate evolving systems of power. The dissertation argues that Afro-Cuban women were integral to the formation of a modern Cuban identity. Studies of pre-revolutionary Cuba dichotomize race and gender in their analyses of citizenship and national identity formation. As such, they devote insufficient attention to the role of Afro-Cuban women in engendering social transformations.
6. Revaluing the Dynamics of Orality in the Continental Caribbean Literature of Colombia
- Collection:
- Black Caribbean Literature (BCL)
- Contributers:
- Castillo,Marisol (Author)
- Format:
- Dissertation/Thesis
- Publication Date:
- 2011
- Published:
- California: University of California, Los Angeles
- Location:
- African American Research Center, Library, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
- Journal Title:
- ProQuest Dissertations and Theses
- Notes:
- 152 p., Sheds light on the importance of orality as it is embedded in the cultural traditions of the Colombian Caribbean. Examines the different ways in which orality is manifested and produced in Colombian popular culture and literature. Also explores the dynamics of "primary orality," in which orality compensates for the absence of knowledge or usage of a written alphabet, and "secondary orality," in which orality is sustained by a technological device, in this case the cassette.
7. (Re)membering Revolution, Imagining Blackness: The Haitian Revolution in the Black Cultural Imaginary
- Collection:
- Black Caribbean Literature (BCL)
- Contributers:
- Ceptus,Babara (Author)
- Format:
- Dissertation/Thesis
- Publication Date:
- 2011
- Published:
- California: University of California, Davis
- Location:
- African American Research Center, Library, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
- Journal Title:
- ProQuest Dissertations and Theses
- Notes:
- 180 p., The articles, lectures, popular and professional histories, travelogues, and ethnographies of John B. Russwurm, Samuel M. Cornish, James McCune Smith, Augustus Straker, T.G. Steward, Ana Julia Cooper, James Weldon Johnson, Langston Hughes and Zora Neal Hurston, stakes claims about the capacity of black people for liberty, citizenship, and self-determination. Current historians of Haiti's legacy must contend with the historiographies of early black scholars in order to fully appreciate the way the Haitian revolution was not silenced, but remained intimately present for writers and scholars trying to develop a unified black identity.
8. The Role of the Trickster Figure and Four Afro-Caribbean Meta-Tropes in the Realization of Agency by Three Slave Protagonists
- Collection:
- Black Caribbean Literature (BCL)
- Contributers:
- Cross,David Sebastian (Author)
- Format:
- Dissertation/Thesis
- Publication Date:
- 2013
- Published:
- South Carolina: University of South Carolina
- Location:
- African American Research Center, Library, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
- Journal Title:
- ProQuest Dissertations and Theses
- Notes:
- 473 p., Demonstrates that the figure of the trickster is a key trope for the achievement of agency by the narrators of the three slave narratives Autobiografia de un esclavo, "Routes in North Africa by Abú Bekr es[dotbelow] s[dotbelow]iddik" [sic], and Biografia de un cimarrón. Also shows how both the realization of the trickster's role and the achievement of agency to which such a role is oriented are dependent on the use of the four Afro-Caribbean meta-tropes ndoki, nkisi, nganga, and simbi.
9. Search for a New Land: Imperial Power and Afro-Creole Resistance in the British Leeward Islands 1624--1745
- Collection:
- Black Caribbean Literature (BCL)
- Contributers:
- Dator,James F. (Author)
- Format:
- Dissertation/Thesis
- Publication Date:
- 2011
- Published:
- Michigan: University of Michigan
- Location:
- African American Research Center, Library, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
- Journal Title:
- ProQuest Dissertations and Theses
- Notes:
- 409 p., By exploring how colonists and enslaved folk migrated across island boundaries, manipulated imperial tensions, and organized acts of collective dissent, this dissertation attempts to demonstrate the relationship between space, power, and imperial governance in the British Leeward Islands from the time of transnational colonization through their ascendency as black majorities. It examines the ways British empire makers struggled to turn a series of closely interlinked islands stretching from Guadeloupe to the Virgin Islands into a unified colony and how this effort was challenged by the development of a regional black identity that linked slaves across island and imperial boundaries in the early eighteenth century.
10. Preacher's Cave: Developing a National Heritage Tourism Site in Eleuthera, Bahamas
- Collection:
- Black Caribbean Literature (BCL)
- Contributers:
- Day,Jane S. (Author)
- Format:
- Dissertation/Thesis
- Publication Date:
- 2010
- Published:
- Florida: Florida Atlantic University
- Location:
- African American Research Center, Library, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
- Journal Title:
- ProQuest Dissertations and Theses
- Notes:
- 186 p., Preacher's Cave, an archaeological site in North Eleuthera, Bahamas, is arguably one of the most important historical places in that country. This large cave, isolated in a natural setting, has long been associated in the popular imagination with the first English colonists who shipwrecked in the Bahamas in 1648 and laid the foundation for the modern nation. Before the present work, no systematic scientific archaeological work had ever been conducted at this site. These excavations, in conjunction with the written record, also suggest that the area surrounding the site is the location of the first free black community in the country.
11. Broadcast on the Winds: Diasporic Politics in the Age of Garvey, 1919--1940
- Collection:
- Black Caribbean Literature (BCL)
- Contributers:
- Ewing,Adam (Author)
- Format:
- Dissertation/Thesis
- Publication Date:
- 2011
- Published:
- Massachusetts: Harvard University
- Location:
- African American Research Center, Library, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
- Journal Title:
- ProQuest Dissertations and Theses
- Notes:
- 400 p., This dissertation explores the spread and articulation of Garveyism--the political movement spearheaded by Jamaican activist Marcus Garvey--across Africa, the greater Caribbean, and the United States in the years following the First World War. Scholarship on Garveyism has remained fixed within a conceptual framework that views the movement synonymously with the rise and fall of Garvey's organization, the Universal Negro Improvement Association (UNIA), and which focuses predominantly on the activities of the organization in the United States. This study argues that Garveyism is more fully rendered as a global endeavor of network-building, consciousness-raising, and activism that extended beyond the operational parameters of the UNIA, influenced a diverse array of regionally-constituted political projects, and nurtured the flowering of a profoundly "Garveyist" period in the history of the African diaspora.
12. African Americans from "back yonder": The historical archaeology of the formation, maintenance, and dissolution of the American enclave in Samana, Dominican Republic
- Collection:
- Black Caribbean Literature (BCL)
- Contributers:
- Fellows,Kristen R. (Author)
- Format:
- Dissertation/Thesis
- Publication Date:
- 2013
- Published:
- Pennsylvania: University of Pennsylvania
- Location:
- African American Research Center, Library, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
- Journal Title:
- ProQuest Dissertations and Theses
- Notes:
- 480 p., By the end of 1825, 6,000 African Americans had left the United States to settle in the free black Republic of Haiti. After arriving on the island, 200 immigrants formed an enclave in what is now Samaná, Dominican Republic. The Americans in Samaná continued to speak English, remained Protestant (in a country of devout Catholics), and retained American cultural practices for over 150 years. Relying on historical archaeological methods, this dissertation explores the processes of community formation, maintenance, and dissolution, while paying particular attention to intersections of race and nation.
13. Negro: Travel and the pan-African imagination during the nineteenth century
- Collection:
- Black Caribbean Literature (BCL)
- Contributers:
- Flemming,Tracy K. (Author)
- Format:
- Dissertation/Thesis
- Publication Date:
- 2010
- Published:
- Michigan: University of Michigan
- Location:
- African American Research Center, Library, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
- Journal Title:
- ProQuest Dissertations and Theses
- Notes:
- 178 p., This dissertation is about the role that conservative religious notions of racial ideology played in the historical origins of black nationalism and pan-Africanism. Focuses on the writings of an African Caribbean, Edward Blyden, as the centerpiece of the study. Blyden, a native of Saint Thomas (Virgin Islands) and considered one of the "fathers" of both pan-Africanism and African nationalism, was a particularly complex diasporic intellectual. Traveling first to the United States in the pre-Civil War period, then to Africa and Britain at the height of the European imperial venture - and Christian missionary efforts - Blyden served as a conduit between the West (the United States and Britain) and both a traditional and a Muslim Africa. He saw his role as one of mediating (critiquing/translating) these divergent voices and ideologies with the object of constituting a "modern," pan-African subject.
14. The Power of "Retributive Justice"*: Punishment and the Body in the Morant Bay Rebellion, 1865
- Collection:
- Black Caribbean Literature (BCL)
- Contributers:
- Flores,Rachael A. (Author)
- Format:
- Dissertation/Thesis
- Publication Date:
- 2011
- Published:
- District of Columbia: The George Washington University
- Location:
- African American Research Center, Library, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
- Journal Title:
- ProQuest Dissertations and Theses
- Notes:
- 112 p., On Wednesday October 11th, 1865, a group of malcontented men and women in Jamaica, a British colony, began a rebellion whose aftershocks echoed well beyond the confines of Morant Bay, the small town where it started. Although the initial rebellion lasted for just a few days, its brutal suppression and the implications that it held for the British Empire sparked a controversy that touched on some of the deepest fissures in British society at that time. At its heart, the rebellion highlighted the contested notions of power within the British imperial system. In Jamaica, disenfranchised local peasants rebelled to challenge a political system that excluded and oppressed them.
15. Possible Republics: Tracing the 'Entanglements' of Race and Nation in Afro-Latina/o Caribbean Thought and Activism, 1870--1930
- Collection:
- Black Caribbean Literature (BCL)
- Contributers:
- Fuste,Jose I. (Author)
- Format:
- Dissertation/Thesis
- Publication Date:
- 2012
- Published:
- California: University of California, San Diego
- Location:
- African American Research Center, Library, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
- Journal Title:
- ProQuest Dissertations and Theses
- Notes:
- 282 p., Challenges how critical scholarship on race and racism in Latin America has traditionally understood racial subalterns in Cuba and Puerto Rico as people who are prevented from acting as black political subjects because of the hegemonic power of discourses of nationhood premised on ideas of mestizaje and racial fraternity. By providing an intellectual history of several important yet largely ignored Cuban and Puerto Rican activists intellectuals of color who lived and worked between the Caribbean and the U.S. at the turn of the 20th century, the author shows that instead of being tricked by creole elite national narratives, they attempted to redefine ideas of nationhood to challenge racism, colonialism, and imperialism at local, national, and transnational levels.
16. Entangled Roots: Race, Historical Literature, and Citizenship in the Nineteenth-Century Americas
- Collection:
- Black Caribbean Literature (BCL)
- Contributers:
- Genova,Thomas (Author)
- Format:
- Dissertation/Thesis
- Publication Date:
- 2012
- Published:
- California: University of California, Santa Cruz
- Location:
- African American Research Center, Library, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
- Journal Title:
- ProQuest Dissertations and Theses
- Notes:
- Examines in the transnational conversation on the place of Afro-descendants in the republican nation-state that occurred in New-World historical literature during the 19th century. Tracing the evolution of republican thought in the Americas from the classical liberalism of the independence period to the more democratic forms of government that took hold in the late 1800s, the pages that follow will chart the circulation of ideas regarding race and republican citizenship in the Atlantic World during the long nineteenth century, the changes that those ideas undergo as they circulate, and the racialized tensions that surface as they move between and among Europe and various locations throughout the Americas. Focusing on a diverse group of writers--including the anonymous Cuban author of Jicoténcal; the North Americans Thomas Jefferson, James Fenimore Cooper, and Mary Mann; the Argentines Domingo Faustino Sarmiento and Eduarda Mansilla de García; the Dominican Manuel de Jesús Galván; the Haitian Émile Nau; and the Brazilian Euclides da Cunha.
17. Christian Slavery: Protestant Missions and Slave Conversion in the Atlantic World, 1660--1760
- Collection:
- Black Caribbean Literature (BCL)
- Contributers:
- Gerbner,Katharine Reid (Author)
- Format:
- Dissertation/Thesis
- Publication Date:
- 2013
- Published:
- Massachusetts: Harvard University
- Location:
- African American Research Center, Library, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
- Journal Title:
- ProQuest Dissertations and Theses
- Notes:
- 257 p., Shows how Protestant missionaries in the early modern Atlantic World developed a new vision for slavery that integrated Christianity with human bondage. Quaker, Anglican, and Moravian missionaries arrived in the Caribbean intending to "convert" enslaved Africans to Christianity, but their actions formed only one part of a dialogue that engaged ideas about family, kinship, sex, and language. Enslaved people perceived these newcomers alternately as advocates, enemies, interlopers, and powerful spiritual practitioners, and they sought to utilize their presence for pragmatic, political, and religious reasons.
18. Public performance: Free people of color fashioning identities in mid-nineteenth-century Cuba
- Collection:
- Black Caribbean Literature (BCL)
- Contributers:
- Grant,Jacqueline (Author)
- Format:
- Dissertation/Thesis
- Publication Date:
- 2012
- Published:
- Florida: University of Miami
- Location:
- African American Research Center, Library, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
- Journal Title:
- ProQuest Dissertations and Theses
- Notes:
- 237 p., Free people of color held an ambiguous place in Caribbean slave societies. On the one hand they were nominally free, but the reality of their daily lives was often something less than free. This work examines how free people of color, or libres de color , in nineteenth-century Cuba attempted to carve out lives for themselves in the face of social, economic, and political constraints imposed on them by white Cubans and Spaniards living in the island. It focuses on how through different Afro-Cuban associations some libres de color used public music and dance performances to self-fashion identities on their own terms.
19. Presenting Jamaican folk songs on the art music stage: Social history and artistic decisions
- Collection:
- Black Caribbean Literature (BCL)
- Contributers:
- Johnson,Byron Gordon (Author)
- Format:
- Dissertation/Thesis
- Publication Date:
- 2010
- Published:
- Mississippi: The University of Southern Mississippi
- Location:
- African American Research Center, Library, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
- Journal Title:
- ProQuest Dissertations and Theses
- Notes:
- 113 p., Jamaican folk songs have become a definitive characteristic of Jamaican culture. They are exemplars of a culture whose music reflects the lifestyle of most of its citizens. In modern times, their beauty has been show cased in local and foreign performances which exposes an element of the country to the world. Additionally, the arrangements of songs by Jamaican composers like Noel Dexter and Peter Ashbourne have aided in their renaissance in modern times. This research analyzes the arrangements by Noel Dexter and Peter Ashbourne. It explores the transition of Jamaican folk songs from the slave fields to the art music stage.
20. "The Haitian turn": Haiti, the Black Atlantic, and black transnational consciousness
- Collection:
- Black Caribbean Literature (BCL)
- Contributers:
- Joseph,Celucien L. (Author)
- Format:
- Dissertation/Thesis
- Publication Date:
- 2012
- Published:
- Texas: The University of Texas at Dallas
- Location:
- African American Research Center, Library, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
- Journal Title:
- ProQuest Dissertations and Theses
- Notes:
- 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.
21. Worlds Real and Invented: The Grenada Revolution and the Caribbean Literary Imaginary
- Collection:
- Black Caribbean Literature (BCL)
- Contributers:
- Lambert,Laurie Rhonda (Author)
- Format:
- Dissertation/Thesis
- Publication Date:
- 2013
- Published:
- New York: New York University
- Location:
- African American Research Center, Library, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
- Journal Title:
- ProQuest Dissertations and Theses
- Notes:
- 289 p., Argues that Caribbean writers challenge state notions of democracy and revolution by embracing ideological opacity (forms of political action that are not immediately legible) as a form of radicalism. Writers such as Merle Collins, Dionne Brand, and George Lamming narrated a new revolutionary consciousness using literary form and structure to express créolité (Caribbean cultural hybridity) and represent political resistance. This form of radicalism allows writers to explore political change in terms that are more subtle than discourses of outright revolution. The dissertation draws on the work of theorist Édouard Glissant who uses opacity as a critical term to articulate the right of Caribbean people to create their own forms of knowledge and to refuse Western epistemologies.
22. Engendering inequality: Masculinity and racial exclusion in Cuba, 1895--1902
- Collection:
- Black Caribbean Literature (BCL)
- Contributers:
- Lucero,Bonnie A. (Author)
- Format:
- Dissertation/Thesis
- Publication Date:
- 2013
- Published:
- North Carolina: The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
- Location:
- African American Research Center, Library, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
- Journal Title:
- ProQuest Dissertations and Theses
- Notes:
- 500 p., Explains the rise of a culture of racial silence in a time of heightening racial exclusion in Cuba at the turn of the twentieth century. Employing a case study of Cienfuegos, a port city on the south-central coast of the island, the author examines gendered articulations of inequality among Cuban separatists between the outbreak of the war of independence in 1895 and the inauguration of the Cuban republic in 1902. It is argued that Cuban struggles for political power in the wake of the American military intervention (1898) and military occupation (1899-1902) fundamentally transformed separatist visions of citizenship, increasingly restricting its boundaries along racial lines.
23. Beyond recovery: The uses of history in contemporary African American and Caribbean literature
- Collection:
- Black Caribbean Literature (BCL)
- Contributers:
- McMorris,Kristy K. (Author)
- Format:
- Dissertation/Thesis
- Publication Date:
- 2010
- Published:
- New York: New York University
- Location:
- African American Research Center, Library, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
- Journal Title:
- ProQuest Dissertations and Theses
- Notes:
- 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.
24. Alternative communities in Caribbean literature
- Collection:
- Black Caribbean Literature (BCL)
- Contributers:
- Meriwether,Raffaella A. (Author)
- Format:
- Dissertation/Thesis
- Publication Date:
- 2011
- Published:
- North Carolina: The University of North Carolina at Greensboro
- Location:
- African American Research Center, Library, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
- Journal Title:
- ProQuest Dissertations and Theses
- Notes:
- 168 p., Explores Caribbean literature that contests the privileging of nation and diaspora community models, and instead presents the spontaneous and productive formation of communities through praxis. Conceptualizing community through this lens challenges systemic emphases on unity, shared history, and shared identity, while it simultaneously incorporates difference at its very foundation. The author draws on Caribbean and postcolonial theory, subaltern studies historiography, and feminist theory in my analysis of Caryl Phillips's The Atlantic Sound , Erna Brodber's Louisiana, Zee Edgell's Beka Lamb , and Maryse Condé's I, Tituba, Black Witch of Salem.
25. "Make a common cause": Negotiation and the failure to compromise in the Haitian Revolution, 1791
- Collection:
- Black Caribbean Literature (BCL)
- Contributers:
- Mobley,Christina Frances (Author)
- Format:
- Dissertation/Thesis
- Publication Date:
- 2010
- Published:
- North Carolina: The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
- Location:
- African American Research Center, Library, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
- Journal Title:
- ProQuest Dissertations and Theses
- Notes:
- 59 p., Investigates the demands made in negotiations between white colonists, gens de couleurs, and insurgents in the opening months of the Haitian Revolution. Argues that, at least initially, demands for general emancipation were not made, but instead that insurgents sought the amelioration of working conditions on plantations and gens de couleur asked for political rights.
26. The Blood of Our Heroes: Race, Memory, and Iconography in Cuba, 1902--1962
- Collection:
- Black Caribbean Literature (BCL)
- Contributers:
- Nathan,Robert C. (Author)
- Format:
- Dissertation/Thesis
- Publication Date:
- 2012
- Published:
- North Carolina: The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
- Location:
- African American Research Center, Library, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
- Journal Title:
- ProQuest Dissertations and Theses
- Notes:
- 280 p., Examines how Cubans mobilized the memory of their wars of independence as the symbolic and narrative foundations of their nationhood. Argues that the creation of a set of heroes, icons, and parables was crucial to consolidation of the Cuban republic and to the establishment of political and racial norms that sustained it. Cuban independence was threatened from its outset by the prospect of U.S. intervention. In this context, securing political stability and social unity became matters of national survival. The sanctification of national heroes enabled Cubans to demonstrate the historical legitimacy of their fragile republic, and Cubans circulated narratives emphasizing the cooperation of black and white Cubans in the anti-colonial struggle to deny and forestall conflicts over racial inequality.
27. Secret Societies and Other Mutual Aid Societies: A Triangular Investigation of Africa, the West Indies and the United States of America, 1775--1950
- Collection:
- Black Caribbean Literature (BCL)
- Contributers:
- Noel,Ronald Courtney (Author)
- Format:
- Dissertation/Thesis
- Publication Date:
- 2012
- Published:
- District of Columbia: Howard University
- Location:
- African American Research Center, Library, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
- Journal Title:
- ProQuest Dissertations and Theses
- Notes:
- 370 p., Examines three general geographical areas in which people who originated in Africa were dispersed to the West during the Transatlantic Trade in Captured Africans. In Africa there was a process of inculcating cultural values while harnessing skills in an authentic education system called retreat schools. These schools were the original African lodges or secret societies that supported the communal system since they made people indigenous. Everyone in a village had an obligation to become initiated in order to learn the secrets of their society. Those individuals who were not indoctrinated were ostracized because they did not experience transformation and pledged an oath of loyalty. The purpose of this study is to investigate the elaborate infrastructure that was historically an integral part of early African institutional character, and aspects of its presentation among New World Africans.
28. Vodou et evangelisation
- Collection:
- Black Caribbean Literature (BCL)
- Contributers:
- Paulemon,Mesina (Author)
- Format:
- Dissertation/Thesis
- Language:
- French
- Publication Date:
- 2011
- Published:
- Canada: Universite de Sherbrooke
- Location:
- African American Research Center, Library, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
- Journal Title:
- ProQuest Dissertations and Theses
- Notes:
- 237 p., Arrivé en Haïti avec les Noirs d'Afrique aux 15e et 16e siècles, le vodou est depuis ce temps un élément de la culture haïtienne. Il y a aujourd'hui une coexistence des catholiques, des protestants avec les vodouisants d'où le problème de syncrétisme qui caractérise le vodou. Le silence entretenu à son sujet, dans divers milieux et pour. différentes raisons, renforce les préjugés vieux de plusieurs siècles et rend difficile l'évangélisation. Évangéliser la personne vodouisante suppose de bien connaître sa perception de Dieu et les valeurs véhiculées par le vodou. Un sondage auprès des jeunes et d'adultes a enrichi mes connaissances sur le vodou et les moyens d'une évangélisation en Haïti.
29. Locating slavery in the modern national imaginary: The legacy of Haiti
- Collection:
- Black Caribbean Literature (BCL)
- Contributers:
- Puente,Lindsay Rae (Author)
- Format:
- Dissertation/Thesis
- Publication Date:
- 2010
- Published:
- California: University of California, Irvine
- Location:
- African American Research Center, Library, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
- Journal Title:
- ProQuest Dissertations and Theses
- Notes:
- 227 p., Considers the often-silenced, tangible traces that the Haitian Revolution and radical anti-slavery have left in the greater Caribbean as they emerge in contemporary cultural productions. The author looks at national trends in the Dominican Republic, Cuba and Jamaica in order to formulate an understanding of the uses of gendered images of slavery and blackness in modern nation-building campaigns. Critically assesses what is left out of these narratives and how these gaps serve specific purposes. Argues for the centrality of the Caribbean in any true understanding of the history of modernity and the contemporary nation-state by investigating the after-shocks of the Haitian Revolution and of radical anti-slavery.
30. Carlos Cooks and Garveyism: Bridging Two Eras of Black Nationalism
- Collection:
- Black Caribbean Literature (BCL)
- Contributers:
- Rivera,Pedro R. (Author)
- Format:
- Dissertation/Thesis
- Publication Date:
- 2012
- Published:
- District of Columbia: Howard University
- Location:
- African American Research Center, Library, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
- Journal Title:
- ProQuest Dissertations and Theses
- Notes:
- 230 p., Carlos A. Cooks (1913-1966) was a pan-African leader, street speaker and is remembered as perhaps the most militant advocate of the racial-pride philosophies and self-help programs of Marcus Garvey (1887-1940). Cooks was born in the Dominican Republic and raised in a household where his father was a Garveyite. Cooks arrived in New York City in 1929, joined the ranks of the Universal Negro Improvement Association (UNIA), and later formed his own organization, the African Nationalist Pioneer Movement (ANPM), after Garvey died in 1940. For the following two decades, Cooks struggled to materialize the original objectives of the UNIA, exhibiting the commitment that earned him distinction among Harlem personalities. By the 1960s, Cooks had kept the legacy of Garvey going, worked with leaders fighting for freedom in Africa and the diaspora, and organized cultural and economic activities that became part of the Black Power Movement. T
31. A Dark Spectre: The Haitian Revolution and American Politics
- Collection:
- Black Caribbean Literature (BCL)
- Contributers:
- Silverman,Aaron Jay (Author)
- Format:
- Dissertation/Thesis
- Publication Date:
- 2010
- Published:
- California: University of California, Los Angeles
- Location:
- African American Research Center, Library, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
- Journal Title:
- ProQuest Dissertations and Theses
- Notes:
- 637 p., Utilizes perceptions and attitudes towards the Haitian Revolution as a means to resituate party conflict and the boundaries of American nationalism in the Early Republic. The concept of nationalism is utilized in both the shaping of political culture and in the institutional formation of the state. As a result, the Haitian Revolution generated contradictory factional responses between the Federalists and Democratic-Republicans to the emergence of revolutionary abolitionism in the Atlantic. On a more popular level, the ordeal of Haiti engendered a fear of black militant abolitionism that hardened American attitudes towards the possibility of further slave emancipation in the United States.
32. Oscar Wao and literary blackness: Decoding the GhettoNerd
- Collection:
- Black Caribbean Literature (BCL)
- Contributers:
- Solis,Caitlin D. (Author)
- Format:
- Dissertation/Thesis
- Publication Date:
- 2009
- Published:
- Texas: The University of Texas at San Antonio
- Location:
- African American Research Center, Library, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
- Journal Title:
- ProQuest Dissertations and Theses
- Notes:
- 84 p., Examines literary blackness in The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao by Junot Díaz. The literary construct of the GhettoNerd, a character whose voice and worldview is informed not only by the harsh realities of inner-city life, but also by the other-worldliness of Genre and popular culture, stands as a testament to the cultural mixtape that is hip-hop. The author argues that the GhettoNerd is useful for making visible historical trauma and exposing marginalization while articulating agency and self-determination. In the case of Oscar Wao, Díaz creates the GhettoNerd in a Dominican context as a vehicle for exposing the blanqueamiento, the trujillato, and the deracialization among the Dominican diaspora.
33. The Red International and the Black Caribbean: Transnational Radical Organizations in New York City, Mexico and the West Indies, 1919--1939
- Collection:
- Black Caribbean Literature (BCL)
- Contributers:
- Stevens,Margaret (Author)
- Format:
- Dissertation/Thesis
- Publication Date:
- 2010
- Published:
- Rhode Island: Brown University
- Location:
- African American Research Center, Library, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
- Journal Title:
- ProQuest Dissertations and Theses
- Notes:
- 429 p.
34. Curiosity seekers, time travelers, and avant-garde artists: U.S. American literary and artistic responses to the occupation of Haiti (1915--1934)
- Collection:
- Black Caribbean Literature (BCL)
- Contributers:
- Stevens,Shelley (Author)
- Format:
- Dissertation/Thesis
- Publication Date:
- 2013
- Published:
- Georgia: Georgia State University
- Location:
- African American Research Center, Library, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
- Journal Title:
- ProQuest Dissertations and Theses
- Notes:
- 398 p., U.S. American literary and creative artists perform the work of developing a discursive response to two critical moments in Haitian history: the Revolution (1791-1804) and the U.S. Marine Occupation (1915 to 1934), inspiring imaginations and imaginary concepts. Revolutionary images of Toussaint Louverture proliferated beyond the boundaries of Haiti illuminating the complicity of colonial powers in maintaining notions of a particularized racial discourse. These productive literatures and art forms actively engage in creating the transnational ideal of diaspora as we understand it today.
35. Woman radical, woman intellectual, woman activist: The political life of Pan-African feminist Amy Ashwood Garvey
- Collection:
- Black Caribbean Literature (BCL)
- Contributers:
- Swaby,Nydia (Author)
- Format:
- Dissertation/Thesis
- Publication Date:
- 2011
- Published:
- New York: Sarah Lawrence College
- Location:
- African American Research Center, Library, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
- Journal Title:
- ProQuest Dissertations and Theses
- Notes:
- 95 p., While Pan-Africanism is largely understood as Black men's fight for colonial liberation and state independence, women played an important and often unheralded role. This thesis challenges the masculinist history of Pan-Africanism using Amy Ashwood Garvey's life to highlight women's intellectual and political contributions to the movement. The author discusses Ashwood Garvey's role in co-founding the Universal Negro Improvement Association (UNIA) and her work with the International African Friends of Abyssinia (IAFA), the International African Service Bureau (IASB), the Council of African Affairs, and the Fifth Pan-African Congress held in 1945. In addition to being an ardent Pan-Africanist, Ashwood Garvey was also a feminist who fought for women's equality through a wide range of anti-imperialist activities. Using her life as a lens through which to examine feminism's intersection with antiracist and anti-imperialist activism, this thesis underscores the fact that, for women throughout the African diaspora, struggles around race, gender, and colonialism operate in a symbiotic relationship to one another.
36. Global and Local Challenges to the Inculturation of the Faith in Jamaica
- Collection:
- Black Caribbean Literature (BCL)
- Contributers:
- Tulloch,Rohan (Author)
- Format:
- Dissertation/Thesis
- Publication Date:
- 2011
- Published:
- Canada: Regis College
- Location:
- African American Research Center, Library, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
- Journal Title:
- ProQuest Dissertations and Theses
- Notes:
- 109 p., Examines the local and global tensions which challenge inculturation in Jamaica, including the role African-derived religions play in that context. The history of Christianity in Jamaica, the development of the Roman Catholic Church's teachings with regards to culture, globalization and its impact on the local Church, and the appropriate method for doing inculturation in the Jamaica in an increasingly global context are examined.
37. An Allegory for Life: An 18th century African-influenced cemetery landscape, Nassau, Bahamas
- Collection:
- Black Caribbean Literature (BCL)
- Contributers:
- Turner,Grace S. R. (Author)
- Format:
- Dissertation/Thesis
- Publication Date:
- 2013
- Published:
- Virginia: The College of William and Mary
- Location:
- African American Research Center, Library, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
- Journal Title:
- ProQuest Dissertations and Theses
- Notes:
- 271 p., Uses W.E.B. Du Bois' reference to the worlds 'within and without the veil' as the narrative setting for presenting the case of an African-Bahamian urban cemetery in use from the early 18th century to the early 20th century. The author argues that people of African descent lived what Du Bois termed a 'double consciousness.' Thus, the ways in which they shaped and changed this cemetery landscape reflect the complexities of their lives. Since the material expressions of this cemetery landscape represent the cultural perspectives of the affiliated communities so changes in its maintenance constitute archaeologically visible evidence of this process. Evidence in this study includes analysis of human remains; the cultural preference for cemetery space near water; certain trees planted as a living grave site memorial; butchered animal remains as evidence of food offerings; and placement of personal dishes on top of graves.
38. Citizenship, religion and revolution in Cuba
- Collection:
- Black Caribbean Literature (BCL)
- Contributers:
- Watson,Carolyn E. (Author)
- Format:
- Dissertation/Thesis
- Publication Date:
- 2009
- Published:
- New Mexico: The University of New Mexico
- Location:
- African American Research Center, Library, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
- Journal Title:
- ProQuest Dissertations and Theses
- Notes:
- 301 p., Throughout the 20th century, various Cuban regimes have tried to eliminate the practice of religions of African origin by combining repressive legislation and coercive social practices that stigmatized practitioners as culturally backward, socially deviant, and mentally deficient. Religious practitioners, however, used the state apparatus to continue worshipping their African deities, sometimes challenging government officials' excessive application of the law or devising ways to evade their scrutiny. Through an analysis of archival documents, newspapers, works produced by practitioners, oral history interviews and published ethnographies, this dissertation examines the strategies practitioners of Ocha-Ifá - also known as Santería - employed as they continued practicing the religion of their ancestors and participating in the national projects of the twentieth century. Focusing on the period after the 1959 revolution, this dissertation argues that revolutionary policies that were designed to discourage the practice of religions of African origin actually facilitated its continued practice and development in unintended ways.
39. The Afro-Portuguese maritime world and the foundations of Spanish Caribbean society, 1570--1640
- Collection:
- Black Caribbean Literature (BCL)
- Contributers:
- Wheat,David (Author)
- Format:
- Dissertation/Thesis
- Publication Date:
- 2009
- Published:
- Tennessee: Vanderbilt University
- Location:
- African American Research Center, Library, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
- Journal Title:
- ProQuest Dissertations and Theses
- Notes:
- 299 p.
40. Caliban's Victorian children: Racial negotiations from emancipation to jubilee
- Collection:
- Black Caribbean Literature (BCL)
- Contributers:
- Williams,Tony Paxton (Author)
- Format:
- Dissertation/Thesis
- Publication Date:
- 2013
- Published:
- Pennsylvania: Temple University
- Location:
- African American Research Center, Library, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
- Journal Title:
- ProQuest Dissertations and Theses
- Notes:
- 234 p., This dissertation examines the various discursive expressions of black agency that formed the stereotypical representations of African descendants found in Victorian racial discourse. It is, therefore, an analysis of the discursive practices of peoples of African descent and not of the actual stereotypes frequently associated with Victorian racial discourse. A close reading and analysis of the discursive practices of peoples of African descent subject to British rule will generate more focused critical narratives about the fantasies that plagued the British imagination well into the 20sth century. This study also suggest that contemporary scholars should look at Victorian racial discourse as an active dialogue and conversation with the Other, rather than a description of the psychology of power.