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2. From Marxist guerrillas to Rastafari warriors: The rise, fall, and reinvention of the National United Freedom Fighters
- Collection:
- Black Caribbean Literature (BCL)
- Contributers:
- Alvare,Bretton T. (Author)
- Format:
- Dissertation/Thesis
- Publication Date:
- 2011
- Published:
- Pennsylvania: Temple University
- Location:
- African American Research Center, Library, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
- Journal Title:
- ProQuest Dissertations and Theses
- Notes:
- 292 p., Based on multi-sited ethnographic fieldwork in the United States and Trinidad and Tobago, examines the process by which the members of the National United Freedom Fighters (NUFF) initially resorted to violent political tactics and later abandoned them to adopt a state-sanctioned, self-funded "development" approach to their ongoing pursuit of social justice. The two different phases of the NUFF' social movement were led by the same actors, in the same impoverished region, with the same material development goals. Through comparative analysis of these two phases, and the material and discursive conditions characteristic of the two different historical moments in which they emerged, this study teases out the specific contextual variables that provoked the NUFF's initial commitment to and subsequent renunciation of violent political action.
3. Coloring the Caribbean: Agostino Brunias and the painting of race in the British West Indies, c.1765-1800
- Collection:
- Black Caribbean Literature (BCL)
- Contributers:
- Bagneris,Amanda Michaela (Author)
- Format:
- Dissertation/Thesis
- Publication Date:
- 2009
- Published:
- Massachusetts: Harvard University
- Location:
- African American Research Center, Library, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
- Journal Title:
- ProQuest Dissertations and Theses
- Notes:
- 261 p., Italian painter Agostino Brunias first traveled to the Caribbean sometime around 1770 in the employ of Sir William Young, First Baronet, a British aristocrat who had been charged with overseeing the sale of lands in the islands won by Britain from France at the end of the Seven Years War. Working primarily on the islands of Dominica and St. Vincent, as Young's official painter, Brunias was ostensibly charged with documenting the exotic bounty and diversity of the islands. For roughly the next quarter century, he painted for plantocrats and the colonial elite, creating romanticized tableaux that featured Caribbeans of color--so called "Red" and "Black" Caribs, dark-skinned Africans and Afro-Creoles, and people of mixed race. Examines how the artist's images reflected and refracted ideas about race commonly held by Britons in the colonial Caribbean during the late 18th century.
4. Work experiences of professional West Indian immigrant women in the United States: An exploratory study
- Collection:
- Black Caribbean Literature (BCL)
- Contributers:
- Barrett,Kyla-Gaye Simone (Author)
- Format:
- Dissertation/Thesis
- Publication Date:
- 2010
- Published:
- New Jersey: Rutgers The State University of New Jersey
- Location:
- African American Research Center, Library, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
- Journal Title:
- ProQuest Dissertations and Theses
- Notes:
- 203 p., Explores the work experiences of professional Caribbean immigrant English-speaking women in the United States. Much study has been dedicated to the experiences and success of Caribbean immigrant women and men in service and domestic roles. The study explores these professional immigrant women's experiences attaining career success in the United States racial society. Data was obtained from 12 professional Caribbean immigrant women using semi-structured interviews conducted by the researcher.
5. Neocolonialism, migration, and Black women's bodies: Transnational experiences in African-American and Afro-Caribbean women's fiction
- Collection:
- Black Caribbean Literature (BCL)
- Contributers:
- Barrio-Vilar,Laura (Author)
- Format:
- Dissertation/Thesis
- Publication Date:
- 2011
- Published:
- Kentucky: University of Kentucky
- Location:
- African American Research Center, Library, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
- Journal Title:
- ProQuest Dissertations and Theses
- Notes:
- 217 p., A comparative study of late 20th-century migration narratives by African American and Afro-Caribbean women, such as Paule Marshall, Toni Morrison, Jamaica Kincaid, and Loida Maritza Pérez. Informed by critical race theory, postcolonial, and feminist approaches to literature, this dissertation intervenes in literary studies of the African diaspora by underscoring the cultural and political implications that class and national differences have on intra-racial relations among Blacks.
6. "In Plenty and In Time of Need": Popular Culture and the Remapping of Barbadian Identity
- Collection:
- Black Caribbean Literature (BCL)
- Contributers:
- Bascomb,Lia Tamar (Author)
- Format:
- Dissertation/Thesis
- Publication Date:
- 2013
- Published:
- California: University of California, Berkeley
- Location:
- African American Research Center, Library, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
- Journal Title:
- ProQuest Dissertations and Theses
- Notes:
- 225 p., This dissertation is a cultural history of Barbados since its 1966 independence. As a pivotal point in the Transatlantic Slave Trade of the 17th and 18th centuries, one of Britain's most prized colonies well into the mid 20th century, and, since 1966, one of the most stable postcolonial nation-states in the Western hemisphere, Barbados offers an extremely important and, yet, understudied site of world history. Barbadian identity stands at a crossroads where ideals of British respectability, African cultural retentions, U.S. commodity markets, and global economic flows meet. Focusing on the rise of Barbadian popular music, performance, and visual culture this dissertation demonstrates how the unique history of Barbados has contributed to complex relations of national, gendered, and sexual identities, and how these identities are represented and interpreted on a global stage. This project examines the relation between the global pop culture market, the Barbadian artists within it, and the goals and desires of Barbadian people over the past fifty years, ultimately positing that the popular culture market is a site for postcolonial identity formation.
7. Afro-Caribbean women teachers recruited for U.S. urban schools: A narrative analysis of experience, change, and perception
- Collection:
- Black Caribbean Literature (BCL)
- Contributers:
- Beck,Makini (Author)
- Format:
- Dissertation/Thesis
- Publication Date:
- 2010
- Published:
- New York: University of Rochester
- Location:
- African American Research Center, Library, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
- Journal Title:
- ProQuest Dissertations and Theses
- Notes:
- 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.
8. Metamorphic literatures: Voicing a new movement
- Collection:
- Black Caribbean Literature (BCL)
- Contributers:
- Bidell,Heather Naori (Author)
- Format:
- Dissertation/Thesis
- Publication Date:
- 2012
- Published:
- New York: State University of New York at Buffalo
- Location:
- African American Research Center, Library, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
- Journal Title:
- ProQuest Dissertations and Theses
- Notes:
- 159 p., Metamorphic literatures is both the identification of a cohesive group of texts, as well as the assertion that these particular texts are part of a global literary movement. The literatures coming out of this movement fundamentally seek to (1) resist colonization and enslavement, (2) re-vision history and resurface figures of redress, and (3) reimagine gender, sexualities, and the queer diasporic body. The tropes of this new literary movement that are expanded upon in the following work will organize the language, characteristics, and outlines of this movement of contemporary diasporic writers.
9. The Mother's Mark: Matrilineal inscription, corporeality, and identity formation in mother-daughter relationships in black women's literature
- Collection:
- Black Caribbean Literature (BCL)
- Contributers:
- Birdsong,Destiny O. (Author)
- Format:
- Dissertation/Thesis
- Publication Date:
- 2012
- Published:
- Tennessee: Vanderbilt University
- Location:
- African American Research Center, Library, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
- Journal Title:
- ProQuest Dissertations and Theses
- Notes:
- 216 p.
10. Making dead and barren: Black women writers on the Civil Rights Movement and the problem of the American dream
- Collection:
- Black Caribbean Literature (BCL)
- Contributers:
- Bolton,Philathia R. (Author)
- Format:
- Dissertation/Thesis
- Publication Date:
- 2012
- Published:
- Indiana: Purdue University
- Location:
- African American Research Center, Library, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
- Journal Title:
- ProQuest Dissertations and Theses
- Notes:
- Examines death and barrenness images prevalent in literature produced by black women during the 1970s and 1980s, taking for study the novels Bluest Eye (1970), Praisesong for the Widow (1983), Corregidora (1975), and Mama Day (1988). Argues that images in these narratives represent contemporary manifestations of social death that directly relate to what belief in the American dream, and that these images symbolize the ways in which decisions made had a deadening effect on black communities, primarily experienced as a loss of social sensibility and vitality of relationships.
11. How eastern Afro-Caribbean women report about their intimate relationships: A descriptive and correlational study
- Collection:
- Black Caribbean Literature (BCL)
- Contributers:
- Brathwaite,Migdalia G. (Author)
- Format:
- Dissertation/Thesis
- Publication Date:
- 2010
- Published:
- Pennsylvania: University of Pittsburgh
- Location:
- African American Research Center, Library, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
- Journal Title:
- ProQuest Dissertations and Theses
- Notes:
- 101 p., Little published research describes views of intimate heterosexual relationships among non-Western samples of women. This study represents a first attempt to document Afro-Caribbean women's views about their intimate relationships. A small sample of 53 Afro-Caribbean women from the island of Barbados were interviewed in their homes for a larger study of body image. Included in the measures were questionnaires about the extent to which women's expectations were or were not met in their current heterosexual relationships and if symptoms of depression were experienced. The women in this study generally reported, like Western women, that their relationships met their expectations (whatever those expectations may have been), that they contributed more positive than negative behaviors to the relationship, and that they experienced mostly mild or infrequent depressive symptoms. Unlike findings for Western samples, however, neither relationship duration, women's level of education, nor the extent to which they reported depressive symptoms covaried with whether they reported that their expectations were met or not. In summary, this study did not shed light on possible sources of Afro-Caribbean women's relationship satisfaction, although it potentially ruled out a few.
12. The Making of the Jamaican National Body: Colonialism and Public Health, 1918--1944
- Collection:
- Black Caribbean Literature (BCL)
- Contributers:
- Briggs,Jill Catherine (Author)
- Format:
- Dissertation/Thesis
- Publication Date:
- 2013
- Published:
- California: University of California, Santa Barbara
- Location:
- African American Research Center, Library, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
- Journal Title:
- ProQuest Dissertations and Theses
- Notes:
- 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.
13. Black Masculinities as Marronage: Claude McKay's Representation of Black Male Subjectivities in Metropolitan Spaces
- Collection:
- Black Caribbean Literature (BCL)
- Contributers:
- Brown,Jarrett Hugh (Author)
- Format:
- Dissertation/Thesis
- Publication Date:
- 2011
- Published:
- Virginia: The College of William and Mary
- Location:
- African American Research Center, Library, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
- Journal Title:
- ProQuest Dissertations and Theses
- Notes:
- 209 p., Explores the representation of black masculinities in Claude McKay's novels, Home to Harlem (1928), Banjo (1929) and Banana Bottom (1933). I use the trope of marronage to theorize McKay's representations of black male subjectivities across a range of African diasporan spaces in the Caribbean, the USA and Europe, arguing that McKay's male characters negotiate these diasporan spaces with the complex consciousness and proclivities of maroons. Through the trope of marronage, the project will demonstrate how McKay's male characters use their maroon conditions to map, explore and define a black diasporan experience -- one, moreover, that is shaped by "creolizations"-- the various pushes and pulls of multiple forms of psychological and cultural crossover. The Introduction places marronage in its historical and cultural contexts and defines who the Maroons were and what particular characteristics managed their existence. The trope of marronage, as an organizing frame for McKay's texts, is intricately tied to the understanding of how "creolization," a term that is integrally associated with the Caribbean experience of hybridity, as both an experience and a concept, structures McKay's sensibility and representations.
14. "This bad business": Obeah, violence, and power in a nineteenth-century British Caribbean slave community
- Collection:
- Black Caribbean Literature (BCL)
- Contributers:
- Browne,Randy M. (Author)
- Format:
- Dissertation/Thesis
- Publication Date:
- 2009
- Published:
- Chapel Hill, NC: The University of North Carolina
- Location:
- African American Research Center, Library, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
- Journal Title:
- ProQuest Dissertations and Theses
- Notes:
- 85 p., This thesis examines the practice of Obeah--an Afro-Caribbean system of healing, harming, and divination through the use of spiritual powers--within two slave communities in Berbice and Demerara (British Guiana). This study is based primarily on legal documents--including testimony from more than a dozen slaves--generated during the criminal trials of two men accused of practicing Obeah in 1819 and 1821-22. In contrast to most previous studies of Obeah, which have been based largely on descriptions provided by British observers, this project takes advantage of this complex, overlapping body of evidence to explore the social dynamics of Obeah as experienced by enslaved men and women themselves, including Obeah practitioners, their clients, and other witnesses. This study reveals that Obeah rituals could be extremely violent, that Obeah practitioners were feared as well as respected among their contemporaries, that the authority of Obeah practitioners was based on demonstrable success, and that slave communities in general were complex social worlds characterized by conflict and division as well as by support and unity--conclusions that combine to produce a fresh, humane vision of Afro-diasporan culture and community under slavery.
15. Constructing Afro-Cuban Womanhood: Race, Gender, and Citizenship in Republican-Era Cuba, 1902--1958
- Collection:
- Black Caribbean Literature (BCL)
- Contributers:
- Brunson,Takkara Keosha (Author)
- Format:
- Dissertation/Thesis
- Publication Date:
- 2011
- Published:
- Texas: The University of Texas at Austin
- Location:
- African American Research Center, Library, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
- Journal Title:
- ProQuest Dissertations and Theses
- Notes:
- 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.
16. 'It will be social': Black women writers and the postwar era 1945--1960
- Collection:
- Black Caribbean Literature (BCL)
- Contributers:
- Caldwell,Katrina Myers (Author)
- Format:
- Dissertation/Thesis
- Publication Date:
- 2009
- Published:
- Illinois: University of Illinois at Chicago
- Location:
- African American Research Center, Library, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
- Journal Title:
- ProQuest Dissertations and Theses
- Notes:
- 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.
17. "De Understadin to Go 'Long wid It": W.E.B. Du Bois, Zora Neale Hurston, and the Black Diaspora in the Americas
- Collection:
- Black Caribbean Literature (BCL)
- Contributers:
- Cantave,Sophia (Author)
- Format:
- Dissertation/Thesis
- Publication Date:
- 2011
- Published:
- Massachusetts: Tufts University
- Location:
- African American Research Center, Library, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
- Journal Title:
- ProQuest Dissertations and Theses
- Notes:
- 263 p., Focuses on the writing and thinking of W.E.B. Du Bois and Zora Neale Hurston in order to explore the continuing effects of the legacy of enslavement as well as question the need for entre nous black spaces in the twenty-first century. In pairing Du Bois with Hurston, the author considers the difficulties of entre nous speaking along generational lines, gender differences, and regional affiliations. Though their writing and speaking differed, as scholars and artists they resisted the demands of the minstrel mask to produce a body of work that subverted dominant culture's devaluation of black folk responses to ongoing racial terror and dehumanization. Hurston and Du Bois did this while trying to conceptualize what a black "us" in the United States and in the black diaspora in the Americas entailed and what, if anything, exists between the "us."
18. The Rastafari presence in Toni Morrison's "Tar Baby", "Beloved", and "Song of Solomon"
- Collection:
- Black Caribbean Literature (BCL)
- Contributers:
- Carr,Nicole Racquel (Author)
- Format:
- Dissertation/Thesis
- Publication Date:
- 2010
- Published:
- Florida: Florida Atlantic University
- Location:
- African American Research Center, Library, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
- Journal Title:
- ProQuest Dissertations and Theses
- Notes:
- 117 p., Literary scholars frequently analyze the allusions to Western Christianity apparent in Toni Morrison's novels, but these studies overlook the ways in which some of her novels are informed by a Caribbean presence. This study argues that Rastafari themes, symbols, and ideologies are recurrent in Toni Morrison's Tar Baby, Beloved, and Song of Solomon. Rastafari is a social movement primarily concerned with restoring the image of Africa to a holy place. A Rastafari analysis of these texts broadens the literary spectrum to suggest that these novels highlight Morrison's attempt to write about the multifaceted element of the black community, which remains deeply connected to its American, African, and Caribbean roots.
19. Revaluing the Dynamics of Orality in the Continental Caribbean Literature of Colombia
- Collection:
- Black Caribbean Literature (BCL)
- Contributers:
- Castillo,Marisol (Author)
- Format:
- Dissertation/Thesis
- Publication Date:
- 2011
- Published:
- California: University of California, Los Angeles
- Location:
- African American Research Center, Library, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
- Journal Title:
- ProQuest Dissertations and Theses
- Notes:
- 152 p., Sheds light on the importance of orality as it is embedded in the cultural traditions of the Colombian Caribbean. Examines the different ways in which orality is manifested and produced in Colombian popular culture and literature. Also explores the dynamics of "primary orality," in which orality compensates for the absence of knowledge or usage of a written alphabet, and "secondary orality," in which orality is sustained by a technological device, in this case the cassette.
20. Queerly straight, racially queer: Constructions of masculinity in Samuel Selvon's "The Lonely Londoners"
- Collection:
- Black Caribbean Literature (BCL)
- Contributers:
- Catalan,Linnea Maureen (Author)
- Format:
- Dissertation/Thesis
- Publication Date:
- 2012
- Published:
- Canada: Trent University
- Location:
- African American Research Center, Library, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
- Journal Title:
- ProQuest Dissertations and Theses
- Notes:
- 116 p., Using Trinidadian writer Samuel Selvon's 1956 novel The Lonely Londoners as a textual example, argues that Selvon's presentation of the experiences of migrant working-class Afro-Caribbean men in post-war London opens up space for an unconventional reading of "queer masculinity" as shaped by the intersections of gender, race, class and sexuality under the influence of the socio-political ideology of the period both in the Caribbean and in Britain. The resulting form of masculine identification for these Afro-Caribbean migrants is constructed through an expression of hypersexuality where the pursuit of pleasure becomes an act of resistance to social marginalization.