African American Research Center, Library, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Notes:
349 p, For many Trinidadians, Carnival is the quintessential expression of Trinidadian-ness. On one level, this thesis is an ethnographic "enactment" of one particular Carnival celebration in the circumscribed space and time of Port of Spain 1992. On another, this study explores the historical, systemic, political and hermeneutical linkages between Trinidad's "national" identity, its culture and its annual Carnival. Argues that Trinidad's Carnival is more properly understood, not as a rite of reversal, but as a performance which constitutes and expresses the Trinidadian Self.
223 p., This dissertation engages with radical Caribbean theater as a crucial literary archive that is nonetheless underexplored as an expression of political culture and thought. The theoretical grounding of the chapters emerges from the analytically generative thrust of a comment by C. L. R. James in The Black Jacobins: "to neglect the racial factor as merely incidental is an error only less grave than to make it fundamental." While the phrase asserts that race cannot be neglected, it also cautions against ensconcing race as fundamental analytical priority, suggesting a powerfully fluid conceptualization of radical political culture. Argues that radical theater projects in Jamaica and the Dominican Republic share this fluid conceptualization of radical politics with the Trinidadian James's own stage versions of the Haitian Revolution.
362 p., This study not only confirms the long presence of same-sex desiring peoples in the twin-island Republic of Trinidad and Tobago, but it focuses in upon the artistry and community-building techniques of these subjects as part of a paradigmatic shift in Caribbean cultural analysis. By foregrounding the work and the perspectives of same-sex desiring Trinbagonians in an analysis of Carnival masquerade, Calypso music and HIV/AIDS activism, this project also proposes a novel theoretical framework for the study of subjectivity.
