Los Angeles, CA: University of California, Los Angeles
Location:
African American Research Center, Library, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Notes:
411 p., "Even though accepted definitions of the Caribbean Creole focus on its status as native to the region, it is just as emphatically tied to somewhere else, giving it a vexed status. Through a comparative analysis of fictional, sociological, historical and psychological portraits of the Caribbean Creole, I argue that the Creole's working definition is equally indebted to casting it as a cultural outsider in local contexts in and around the Caribbean." --The Author
275 p., Racial ideology in Cuba, which negates the importance and effects of race and a racial hierarchy, gained significant legitimacy at the start of the Cuban Revolution due to increased levels of equality and the initial commitment by the Revolution to eradicate racism and racial discrimination. Racism was declared to be solved and race was subsequently erased from the public script two years after its triumph in 1959. This project determines (1) how the ideology of racial harmony and Cuban socialism join to create a racial ideology that often succeeds in reducing the salience of race for Cubans, particularly among the revolution's supporters (2) how this racial ideology affects identity formation, racial consciousness and racial attitudes among blacks as it interacts with visible racial disparities and (3) the trajectory that black politics has taken in Cuba.
74 p., The purpose of this study was to validate the Multigroup Ethnic Identity Measure (MEIM) on a sample of Afro-Caribbean college students. Participants were drawn from a larger national study on culture and identity collected at 26 universities from across the United States. Students included in this sample were either born in a Caribbean country, or had one or both parents from a Caribbean country. The students completed various measures of culture and identity.
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.
155 p., Explores the interweaving of colonial and post-colonial British and Jamaican Laws and the interpretive legalities of sexuality, compulsory heterosexuality, and queerness. The research project begins by exploring the ways in which the gendered colonial law produces black sexualities as excessive and in need of discipline while also noticing how Caribbean peoples negotiate and subvert these legalities. The work then turns to dancehall and its enmeshment with landscape (which reflects theatre-in-the round and African spiritual ceremonies), psycho scape (which retains African uses of marronage and pageantry as personhood), and musicscape (which deploys homophobia to demand heterosexuality), in order to tease out the complexities of Caribbean sexualities and queer practices.
327 p., "This research is in response to the general academic need to examine how black histories have been conceived and written. Instead of folklore, I look to the Osainistas (healers and herbalists initiated into the secrets of Osain) in Cuba as possible partners in a conversation in collaborative conservation. My study of Lucumí (Yorùbá-derived) religion and Osain (deity of the sacred forests, herbs and healings) reveals an embodied understanding of nature through which the boundaries of subject as well as material and spiritual become collapsed and traversed through specialized communication techniques. Ways of knowing through invocations, praise poetry, music and dance are essential to nearly all Yorùbá ritual in which spiritual forces are actualized-evoking and thus invoking spirit into physical form. Yorùbá employ these embodied techniques to transcend boundaries and open communication among spirit, material, temporal and spatial worlds, particularly to understand and work with natural resources. This embodied knowledge is, as Yvonne Daniel argues in her book Dancing Wisdom , "rich and viable and should be referenced among other kinds of knowledge" (2005:4). This intermittently conducted 2003-06 ethnographic study, relies on what I am calling evocative ethnography, which is organized around ethnography using visual and cognitive techniques along with archival research to explore how Lucumí conceptualize nature and how I can translate these embodied perceptions." --The Author.
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.
