263 p., Focuses on the writing and thinking of W.E.B. Du Bois and Zora Neale Hurston in order to explore the continuing effects of the legacy of enslavement as well as question the need for entre nous black spaces in the twenty-first century. In pairing Du Bois with Hurston, the author considers the difficulties of entre nous speaking along generational lines, gender differences, and regional affiliations. Though their writing and speaking differed, as scholars and artists they resisted the demands of the minstrel mask to produce a body of work that subverted dominant culture's devaluation of black folk responses to ongoing racial terror and dehumanization. Hurston and Du Bois did this while trying to conceptualize what a black "us" in the United States and in the black diaspora in the Americas entailed and what, if anything, exists between the "us."
209 p., Explores the representation of black masculinities in Claude McKay's novels, Home to Harlem (1928), Banjo (1929) and Banana Bottom (1933). I use the trope of marronage to theorize McKay's representations of black male subjectivities across a range of African diasporan spaces in the Caribbean, the USA and Europe, arguing that McKay's male characters negotiate these diasporan spaces with the complex consciousness and proclivities of maroons. Through the trope of marronage, the project will demonstrate how McKay's male characters use their maroon conditions to map, explore and define a black diasporan experience -- one, moreover, that is shaped by "creolizations"-- the various pushes and pulls of multiple forms of psychological and cultural crossover. The Introduction places marronage in its historical and cultural contexts and defines who the Maroons were and what particular characteristics managed their existence. The trope of marronage, as an organizing frame for McKay's texts, is intricately tied to the understanding of how "creolization," a term that is integrally associated with the Caribbean experience of hybridity, as both an experience and a concept, structures McKay's sensibility and representations.
241 p., Explores the power children realize in the past, present, and future from their real or imagined connections to their absent mothers in twentieth- and twenty-first-century African diasporic women's fiction, science fiction, and film. Much of the existing scholarship on the diasporic mother focuses on her place in history, yet texts by Toni Morrison, Gloria Naylor, Gayl Jones, Octavia E. Butler, Nalo Hopkinson, Sheree Renée Thomas, Nisi Shawl, and Julie Dash suggest through their depictions of the lasting links children create with their mothers that the power of the diasporic mother and, by proxy, the black family and community extends into the future.
African American Research Center, Library, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
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330 p., Explores the impact of the great Orishas (Yoruba: "deities") of the crossroads, Eshu-Elegguá , on the thriving literary and visual arts of the African diaspora. Eshu-Elegguá are multiple figures who work between physical and spiritual realms, open possibilities, and embody unpredictability and chance. Analyzes the texts Mumbo Jumbo (Ismael Reed, 1972), Sortilégio: Mistério Negro (Abdias do Nasicmento, 1951), Chago de Guisa (Gerardo Fulleda León, 1988), Brown Girl in the Ring (Nalo Hopkinson, 1998), Midnight Robber (Nalo Hopkinson, 2000), and Wide Sargasso Sea (Jean Rhys, 1966). The objective is to explore the aesthetic codes and philosophies that the figures of Eshu-Elegguá carry into the texts; trace their voices across multiple forms of cultural expression; and navigate the dialogues that these intermediary figures open between a group of literary texts that have not yet been studied together.
287 p., With a focus on cultural memory, this dissertation investigates French Caribbean women's plays and their performance at Ubu Repertory Theater, a pioneering French-American theatre in New York. After a theoretical introduction and a historical chapter investigating slavery and its remembrance in the Francophone Caribbean, each chapter is divided into two sections, the first examining the play, and the second its production at Ubu. The author relies on theories of collective memory and cultural trauma to read Ina Césaire's Fire's Daughters, Maryse Condé's The Tropical Breeze Hotel, and Gerty Dambury's Crosscurrents as plays that dramatize a link between the past (the Middle Passage, slavery, and sexual relations between enslaved women and white men) and present-day behaviors, attitudes, and pain. It is argued that these plays work to revise problematic practices of remembrance in France and the Antilles. These practices dissociate slavery from its local context; make the trauma of enslaved women's rape a secret; divide Antilleans of different races, ethnicities, genders, and social classes; and associate resistance almost exclusively with Haiti. In a second section of each chapter, the production and reception of these plays at Ubu are examined.
African American Research Center, Library, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
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237 p., A close reading of three works by female authors. Presents a trajectory, covering different epochs from post emancipation, independence, and the contemporary, of their portrayal of subalterns, the specific strategies they use to reveal their protagonists' resistance, growth and self-affirmation.
This dissertation examines the migratory experiences of the protagonists from four African diasporic novels: Fruit of the Lemon by Andrea Levy (1999), Kehinde by Buchi Emecheta (1994), Breath, Eyes, Memory by Edwidge Danticat (1994), and The Color Purple by Alice Walker (1982). When analyzed comparatively these texts demonstrate that a completely integrated identity (that merges two cultures) is contingent upon a return to the protagonist's cultural roots either by the protagonist herself or someone who is closely aligned with her. The protagonist or her representative must travel to her ancestral homeland and in the process develop a value system that reflects the duality of her identity.
African American Research Center, Library, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
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63 p., "A comparison of Joyce's Ulysses (1922) and Walcott's Omeros (1990) reveals the similar colonial experiences which were produced by island landscapes. Overall, this thesis will argue that the colonial turmoil which Joyce highlighted in Ulysses becomes mirrored in the postcolonial plot of Omeros." --The Author
St. Augustine, Trinidad and Tobago: University of the West Indies
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African American Research Center, Library, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
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252 p., Traces the construction of diverse masculinities in the fictional representations of post-colonial Anglophone Caribbean literature focusing on Afro-, Indo-, and Eurocentric ethnicities and subjectivities.
