African American Research Center, Library, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Notes:
63 p., "A comparison of Joyce's Ulysses (1922) and Walcott's Omeros (1990) reveals the similar colonial experiences which were produced by island landscapes. Overall, this thesis will argue that the colonial turmoil which Joyce highlighted in Ulysses becomes mirrored in the postcolonial plot of Omeros." --The Author
330 p., This dissertation examines the major works of Trinidad-born playwright Mustapha Matura, dealing with plays written from 1970 to the present. By considering the relation of Matura's work to Britain and Trinidad, it explores the complexity of identity performance in postcolonial theatre and the ongoing need for agency among diasporic communities. Postcolonial scholarship fully recognizes the significance of writing in the development of postcolonial identities, yet dominant postcolonial theory largely excludes theatre from discussions of that development. Given its aural and visual presentation and its immediate interaction with an audience, theatre provides a unique postcolonial moment through which audience members can survey issues of race and place in their lives.
306 p., This project brings together adventure novels by white British authors, like Frederick Marryat, Mary Elizabeth Braddon and H. Rider Haggard, and African American and Afro-Caribbean texts by authors like Frederick Douglass, Pauline Hopkins, and Maxwell Philip, to argue that the sensational elements of the adventure genre that were so effective in developing British national identity were appropriated by African American and Afro-Caribbean authors to re-imagine national identity as a flexible and multi-ethnic concept.
African American Research Center, Library, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Notes:
212 p., This dissertation project aims to contribute to the current scholarship on transnational black feminisms. The project adds to the refining of nuanced theoretical approaches to specific experiences of black women. The author engages in close readings of four black women writers, Michelle Cliff, Joan Riley, Gayl Jones and Audre Lorde, as well as writings from two Black British collectives, the Organisation of Women of Asian and African Decent (OWAAD), and the Outwrite collective, distributers of Outwrite a Women's Newspaper. The readings result in several tropes within black women's discourse of this period, which include belonging and unbelonging, visitation and dismemberment, and living affectivity. The writings and conscious articulations are critical for locating transnational black feminist discourse as a distinct area of theoretical inquiry.