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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
