162 p., The Dominican Republic (DR) and Haiti are two Caribbean countries that share the same island, Hispaniola , and a tumultuous history. Both countries' historical relationship is ridden with geopolitical conflict stemming from the DR creating an unwelcoming environment for Haitian immigrants. This dissertation investigates how Dominican thinkers play a significant role in creating the intellectual impetus that encourages anti-Haitian sentiment throughout Dominican society in the aftermath of the 2010 earthquake. Examines how Dominican anti-Haitian ideals, as delineated by Dominican nationalist intellectuals, continue to resonate amongst "everyday" Dominicans and within the recently amended 2010 Dominican constitution that denies citizenship to Dominicans of Haitian descent in the aftermath of the earthquake.
204 p., This dissertation examines the roles played by jazz and blues in African American fiction of the post-World War II era. The author contends that scholars of jazz and blues fiction generally discuss the authors' treatment of the music in terms of how it shows up, is alluded to, or is played; however, few address performative elements that are central to much African American literature. Their performances, whether as narratives or geosocial movements, often draw upon forms of flight as defining actions that send them into new territories and necessitate acts of improvisation. Forms of flight manifest themselves as improvised solos in numerous ways, including in this dissertation the path of Ellison's narrator going north and ultimately underground in Invisible Man , brothers leaving their Harlem pasts and coming together while on ever-divergent paths in James Baldwin's "Sonny's Blues," Milkman Dead discovering the secret of literal flight by improvising through a journey to his familial past in Toni Morrison's Song of Solomon , or the members of Macon Street's "flesh-and-blood triangle" choosing the expatriate route of Paris instead of America in Paule Marshall's The Fisher King.
Focuses on African American and Afro-Hispanic literature and folklore. Employs Fernando Ortiz's theory of transculturation. Ortiz makes the case that a new Afro-Cuban identity is created with the intermingling of African, Spanish and native inhabitants of Cuba. Using Ortiz's critical framework as the foundation of this study, critiques of Zora Neale Hurston's portrayal of African American identity. Examines the parallel between her work and that of Lydia Cabrera, a Cuban ethnographer whose work represents Afro-Cuban identity as a transcultural one.
287 p., With a focus on cultural memory, this dissertation investigates French Caribbean women's plays and their performance at Ubu Repertory Theater, a pioneering French-American theatre in New York. After a theoretical introduction and a historical chapter investigating slavery and its remembrance in the Francophone Caribbean, each chapter is divided into two sections, the first examining the play, and the second its production at Ubu. The author relies on theories of collective memory and cultural trauma to read Ina Césaire's Fire's Daughters, Maryse Condé's The Tropical Breeze Hotel, and Gerty Dambury's Crosscurrents as plays that dramatize a link between the past (the Middle Passage, slavery, and sexual relations between enslaved women and white men) and present-day behaviors, attitudes, and pain. It is argued that these plays work to revise problematic practices of remembrance in France and the Antilles. These practices dissociate slavery from its local context; make the trauma of enslaved women's rape a secret; divide Antilleans of different races, ethnicities, genders, and social classes; and associate resistance almost exclusively with Haiti. In a second section of each chapter, the production and reception of these plays at Ubu are examined.
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.
245 p., In the Humanities, studies on the legacy of enslaved Black women are often split along ethnic, cultural, linguistic and national lines. This dissertation brings together literatures and visual arts from Puerto Rico, Martinique, Suriname, the Dominican Republic and the U.S. representing a myriad of linguistic and cultural traditions that turn to the legacy of the historical Black female body as their myth of creation. The author positions these works under the heading of Plantation Zone Literatures and Visual Arts, a term used to indicate the centrality of Black women's genealogy in 20th-century and 21st-century works from the Black Diaspora. Once a geographic space where Africans and their heirs were forced to labor, the Plantation Zone serves as a metaphorical site where the legacy of the historical Black female body--in multifarious forms of triumph and pain--is celebrated in Black Diasporic literatures.
284 p., The Garifuna are a diasporic community that positions Yurumein (St. Vincent) at the center of its collective memory, and whose populations primarily reside in Belize, Guatemala, Honduras, Nicaragua, and, more recently, in urban centers in the United States. This multi-sited, historio-ethnographic study traces the group's socio-political struggles over time and space against cultural dislocation, ethnic oppression, and culturally destructive forces.
109 p., Examines the local and global tensions which challenge inculturation in Jamaica, including the role African-derived religions play in that context. The history of Christianity in Jamaica, the development of the Roman Catholic Church's teachings with regards to culture, globalization and its impact on the local Church, and the appropriate method for doing inculturation in the Jamaica in an increasingly global context are examined.
103 p., The goal of this research is to build on the literature concerning presentation practices of racial and national identity. The research examines presentation practices of race and national identity among Haitian heritage residents of the Dominican Republic. This is accomplished through the investigation of hair styling norms of Haitian-Dominican women living in a batey in the Eastern region of the country. The study analyzes data from ten semi-structured interviews, one follow up focus group, and participant observation in Batey El Prado. The research results show that presentation practices of hair styling and hair management reflect race, social class, and nationality. Hair management practices allow women to manage how others perceive their racial and national identity.
