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.
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.
African American Research Center, Library, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Notes:
477 p., This study is a "deep history" of the British invasion and occupation of Havana and western Cuba (1762-3) at the end of the Seven Years' War. By contextualizing this event within the broader story of intercolonial relations of war, trade, and slavery from 1713 to 1790, it demonstrates that the British occupation was a continuation and expansion of relations that preceded and postdated the invading warships' arrival. These Anglo-Cuban relations were forged through contraband commerce, the British slave trade to Cuba, and the practices of interimperial warfare, all of which undermined Spanish sovereignty in Cuba and linked its populations of both European and African descent to its British colonial neighbors.
