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2. Black Masculinities as Marronage: Claude McKay's Representation of Black Male Subjectivities in Metropolitan Spaces
- Collection:
- Black Caribbean Literature (BCL)
- Contributers:
- Brown,Jarrett Hugh (Author)
- Format:
- Dissertation/Thesis
- Publication Date:
- 2011
- 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:
- 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.
3. "De Understadin to Go 'Long wid It": W.E.B. Du Bois, Zora Neale Hurston, and the Black Diaspora in the Americas
- Collection:
- Black Caribbean Literature (BCL)
- Contributers:
- Cantave,Sophia (Author)
- Format:
- Dissertation/Thesis
- Publication Date:
- 2011
- Published:
- Massachusetts: Tufts University
- Location:
- African American Research Center, Library, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
- Journal Title:
- ProQuest Dissertations and Theses
- Notes:
- 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."
4. 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.
5. Following Eshu-Eleggua's codes: A comparative approach to the literatures of the African diaspora
- Collection:
- Black Caribbean Literature (BCL)
- Contributers:
- Dyer-Spiegel,Jacob A. (Author)
- Format:
- Dissertation/Thesis
- Publication Date:
- 2011
- Published:
- Boston, MA: University of Massachusetts Amherst
- Location:
- African American Research Center, Library, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
- Notes:
- 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.
6. 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.
7. Postcards from the edge-city: Mass-media and photographic images in contemporary novels of the Black diaspora
- Collection:
- Black Caribbean Literature (BCL)
- Contributers:
- Mason,Lauren Camille (Author)
- Format:
- Dissertation/Thesis
- Publication Date:
- 2011
- Published:
- Michigan: Michigan State University
- Location:
- African American Research Center, Library, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
- Journal Title:
- ProQuest Dissertations and Theses
- Notes:
- 164 p., Explores four contemporary novels and a film that rely heavily on photographic and mass-media images to illuminate, articulate, and critique modern-day Black urban existence: Patrick Chamoiseau's Texaco (1997), Chris Abani's Graceland (2004), John Edgar Wideman's Fanon , Paulo Lins' Cidade de Deus (1997), and Fernando Meirelles' 2002 film adaptation of Lins' novel City of God . Chapters examine the ways in which photographic and/or mass-media images are used as narrative tropes or devices for representing the material conditions of an emerging slum existence. The author argues that each text reveals a preoccupation with the rise of global urbanism and visual culture as new types of discursive spaces--new kinds of "texts"-- that shape not only the real life of black people, but also the literary landscape of Black writing across the globe.
8. Identity in motion: The symbiotic connection between migration and identity in four 20th century novels by African diasporic women writers
- Collection:
- Black Caribbean Literature (BCL)
- Contributers:
- Sampson-Choma,Tosha Kabara (Author)
- Format:
- Dissertation/Thesis
- Publication Date:
- 2011
- Published:
- Lincoln, Nebraska: The University of Nebraska - Lincoln
- Location:
- African American Research Center, Library, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
- Journal Title:
- ProQuest Dissertations and Theses
- Notes:
- 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.