195 p., Paule Marshall's The Chosen Place, The Timeless People (1969), Gayl Jones' Corregidora (1975), and Octavia Butler's Kindred (1979) enhance our conceptualization of black aestheticism and black nationalism as cultural and political movements. The writers use the novel as genre to question the ideological paradigm of a black nationalist aesthetic by providing alternative definitions of community, black women's sexuality, and race relations. Because of the ways in which these writers respond to black aestheticism and black nationalism, they transform our understanding of movements often perceived as sexist, racist, homophobic, and anti-Semitic.
268 p., This study used a Black feminist critical framework to examine the conditions that influence the production of black women's fiction during the postwar era (1945-60). The novels of Ann Petry, Dorothy West and Paule Marshall were studied as artifacts that were shaped by the cultural and political climate of this crucial period in American history. A survey was also conducted of their associations with members and organizations in the American Left to determine what impact their social activism had on their lives and art. It was determined that these writers' political engagement played a significant role in the creation of transformative narratives about the power of black women to resist oppression in all of its forms. As a consequence of their contribution to a rich black feminist literary tradition, these postwar black women fiction writers serve as important foremothers to later generations of black women artists.
Explores the experiences of Caribbean women teachers who are recruited to teach in a mid sized Southern city. Narrative methods were used to analyze four Barbadian women teachers' perspectives on their: initial experiences and challenges; teaching philosophies and approaches to teaching American students; and successful transition into Louisville, Kentucky's public schools after five years of teaching. In an age where school districts across the nation seek educators from overseas to address the well-documented teacher shortage, this study has implications for helping future international teacher candidates transition into U.S. public schools.
168 p., Explores Caribbean literature that contests the privileging of nation and diaspora community models, and instead presents the spontaneous and productive formation of communities through praxis. Conceptualizing community through this lens challenges systemic emphases on unity, shared history, and shared identity, while it simultaneously incorporates difference at its very foundation. The author draws on Caribbean and postcolonial theory, subaltern studies historiography, and feminist theory in my analysis of Caryl Phillips's The Atlantic Sound , Erna Brodber's Louisiana, Zee Edgell's Beka Lamb , and Maryse Condé's I, Tituba, Black Witch of Salem.
321 p., Locates contemporary articulations of afrofeminismo in manifold modes of cultural production including literature, music, visual displays of the body, and digital media. Examines the development of afrofeminismo in relation to colonial sexual violence in sugar-based economies to explain how colonial dynamics inflect ideologies of blanqueamiento/embranquecimento (racial whitening) and pseudo-scientific racial determinism. In this context, the author addresses representations of the mujer negra (black woman) and the mulata (mulatto woman) in Caribbean and Brazilian cultural discourse.
220 p., Employs a black feminist diaspora literary lens to identify, define, trace, and speak to the African Diaspora as it functions in black women's diaspora fiction and informs our understanding of black women's diaspora identity. Considers three authors and novels by women of, in, and across the African Diaspora. The study centers on Sandra Jackson-Opoku's The River Where Blood Is Born as a primary site of analysis of diaspora formation and theorization, Dionne Brand's At the Full and Change of the Moon and Maryse Condé's Desirada as comparative textual and theoretical sites.
344 p., Explores continuities and transformations in the construction of Afro-Cuban womanhood in Cuba between 1902 and 1958. A dynamic and evolving process, the construction of Afro-Cuban womanhood encompassed the formal and informal practices that multiple individuals--from lawmakers and professionals to intellectuals and activists to workers and their families--established and challenged through public debates and personal interactions in order to negotiate evolving systems of power. The dissertation argues that Afro-Cuban women were integral to the formation of a modern Cuban identity. Studies of pre-revolutionary Cuba dichotomize race and gender in their analyses of citizenship and national identity formation. As such, they devote insufficient attention to the role of Afro-Cuban women in engendering social transformations.
351 p., Explores the racial and gender decolonization of New York and Curaçaoan women in a select group of novels, paintings and performance text by women from Curaçao and New York City. The Curaçaoan novels are: Aliefka Bijlsma's Gezandstraald [Sandblasted] (2007); Loeki Morales' Bloedlijn Overzee: Een Familiezoektocht [Overseas Bloodline: A Family Search] (2002); Myra Römer's Het Geheim van Gracia [The Secret of Gracia] (2008). The Curaçaoan painters are: Jean Girigori (1948), Minerva Lauffer (1957) and Viviana (1972). The New York novels and performance text are: Black Artemis' Picture Me Rollin' (2005), Angie Cruz's Soledad (2003) and Nelly Rosario's Song of the Water Saints (2002) and Josefina Báez's Dominicanish (2000). The ways the women characters, figures, images and voices align to subvert gendered delineations as well as the stifling cultural and colonial imprints on their bodies and their selves in Curaçao and New York are central to the decolonizing project explored here.
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.