"Tells the story of the emigration of African Americans to Haiti and the Dominican Republic in 1824. Today an enclave of descendants live in Samaná in the Dominican Republic."
203 p., Examines the presence of slave vocality in Black Atlantic literature, placing the North American tradition of slave narrative against works from authors throughout the United States and the Caribbean. Challenges existing approaches to slave narrative by viewing the genre as one based on the fundamental impossibility of expressing black subjectivity under the political, ethical, and psychic conditions of slavery. The slave narrative thus ceases to represent an attempt by former slaves to access freedom and agency through writing, along with its promises of reason and autonomy, but rather signals (or sounds) a process of expression built not upon meaning, but upon signification. In other words, rather than crafting themselves into legible objects for the sake of narration and perception, slave narrators performed their roles as exchangeable units, both discursive and political, in ways that exposed the underlying lacunae of being a slave-narrator, a significative protocol that persists in contemporary black fiction throughout the Atlantic, even in areas in which the slave narrative did not historically emerge.
African American Research Center, Library, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Notes:
240 p., Survey and focus group sampling of students in high achieving schools compared to lower achieving schools were used to examine why there are fewer black men graduating from high schools in New York City as well as high schools around the country compared to other groups of students. Race is disaggregated in order to look at the difference in achievement rates for African American, black Hispanic, African, and Afro-Caribbean men.
107 p., The Millon Clinical Multiaxial Inventory-Third Edition (MCMI-III) currently ranks among the most commonly utilized personality tools. Most of the studies that examined racial/ethnic differences on the MCMI were conducted using the MCMI-I and MCMI-II. While many MCMI studies have explored racial differences, few studies have examined the impact of cultural factors on MCMI-III performance. In the current study, the performance of African Americans (n = 52) and Caribbean Blacks (n = 77) were compared on the Antisocial, Narcissistic, Paranoid, and Delusional Disorder scales of the MCMI-III.
Author discusses the complexities of identity representation in terms of her Afro Caribbean/"third" world background and her historically African-American university (HBCU) affiliation. Notes how her academic identity marked by her first and third world educational experiences as a Caribbean person of color in the U.S. positions her between the borders of insider/outsider.
295 p., Focuses on the function of black vernacular myths and rituals in three primary women's texts of the Americas: Toni Morrison's Song of Solomon (1977), Simone Schwartz-Bart's Pluie et Vent sur Telumee Miracle (1972) and Paule Marshall's Praisesong for the Widow (1983). My project codifies how the black vernacular expressions of mythology and ritual are used to negotiate power between the individual and their community. The author traces how the women in these texts used resources of the black vernacular tradition as social and cultural collateral to empower themselves within an alternative system of values that simultaneously validates self and communal worth.
The relationship between perceived paternal nurturing and involvement and psychosocial developmental outcomes in 202 college-aged African American and Caribbean American young adults were assessed.
Congressman Charles B. Rangel (D-Harlem), who was instrumental in obtaining a license from the U.S. Treasury Department on behalf of the NAACP delegation for the trip to Cuba, hailed the planned trade link with Black farmers. Rangel said he considers the results of the NAACP's Cuba visit "an important breakthrough." Rangel is a longtime advocate of U.S. trade with Cuba, arguing that removal of the U.S. embargo would promote democracy in Cuba.
