African American Research Center, Library, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Notes:
238 p., Study of the relations between Haiti and black America from the colonial period to the present, the author shows how historical ties between these two communities of the African diaspora have affected their respective histories, cultures and community lives. R
African American Research Center, Library, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Notes:
204 p., International adoptions are both high-profile and controversial, with the celebrity adoptions and critically acclaimed movies such as Casa de los babys of recent years increasing media coverage and influencing public opinion. Neither celebrating nor condemning cross-cultural adoption, the author considers the political symbolism of children in an examination of adoption and migration controversies in North America, Cuba, and Guatemala. The book tells the interrelated stories of Cuban children caught in Operation Peter Pan, adopted Black and Native American children who became icons in the Sixties, and Guatemalan children whose 'disappearance' today in transnational adoption networks echoes their fate during the country's brutal civil war. Drawing from extensive research as well as from her critical observations as an adoptive parent, the author aims to move adoption debates beyond the current dichotomy of 'imperialist kidnap' versus 'humanitarian rescue.'.
The number of black Caribbean immigrants in America is growing with the most prevalent countries of origin being the Bahamas, Haiti, Colombia, the Dominican Republic, and Trinidad and Tobago.
Looks at the attempts of the Communist international to organise amongst African and Caribbean workers in Europe, and particularly in France and Britain during the inter-war period. It locates these attempts within the overall objectives of the Comintern to organise all workers, to organise in the colonies and to address what was referred to at that time as the 'Negro Question' - that is the liberation of all those of African descent. The paper particularly highlights the role of communists of African and Caribbean origin and the organisations they formed.
Examines Caribbean representations of race, gender and ethnicity, and how these influenced the labor allocations of female migrant workers in St Maarten's tourism economy. From the late 1970s to the 1990s, thousands of poor women from Haiti and the Dominican Republic worked in the service sector of St Maarten's tourism economy. St Maarten's black population, and especially its male residents, interacted with the migrant women, and created gendered and social-sexual images that privileged the Latina/mulatta women over the black Haitian women. These gendered/racial stereotypes helped to incorporate the Haitian and Dominican women into specific and different labor sectors of the tourism economy.
African American Research Center, Library, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Notes:
303 p, A book containing over 500 rare photographs which give a visual picture of a Caribbean society in the process of change in the years after Emancipation.
Kingston, Jamaica: University Of West Indies Press
Location:
African American Research Center, Library, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Notes:
292 p, Presentation of empirical historical data on Britain’s transatlantic slave economy and society supports the legal claim that chattel slavery as established by the British state and sustained by citizens and governments was understood then as a crime, but political and moral outrage were silenced by the argument that the enslavement of black people was in Britain’s national interest. Slavery was invested in by the royal family, the government, the established church, most elite families, and large public institutions in the private and public sector. Citing the legal principles of unjust and criminal enrichment, the author presents a compelling argument for Britain’s payment of its black debt, a debt that it continues to deny .
Argues that the emergence of hip hop in the South Bronx can be explained by the way in which several social-political factors dictated by the needs of the world economy converged with the resistance and labor of black people in the United States and the Anglo-Caribbean in the late 1960s and early 1970
African American Research Center, Library, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Notes:
250 p, Illuminates the dynamic complexity of Caribbean culture and traces its migratory patterns throughout the Americas. Both a memoir and a scholarly study, Caribbean Spaces: Escapes from Twilight Zones explores the multivalent meanings of Caribbean space and community in a cross-cultural and transdisciplinary perspective. From her childhood in Trinidad and Tobago to life and work in communities and universities in Nigeria, Brazil, England, and the United States, Carole Boyce Davies portrays a rich and fluid set of personal experiences.
Reports on the researchers' findings 20 years after Lord Gifford's inquiry into race relations in the city after the 1980s Toxteth riots. Gifford reported on the prevalence of racial attitudes, racial abuse, and racial violence directed against the Black citizens of Liverpool. The authors' research focused on education and specifically the low percentage of Black teachers compared to the whole teaching workforce and the percentage Black population in the city.
Examines if commonly used distress measures, rates of psychiatric disorders, and chronic health conditions are affected by alternate measures of race-ethnicity for African Americans and Caribbean blacks.
African American Research Center, Library, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Notes:
241 p, In the Caribbean colony of Grenada in 1797, Dorothy Thomas signed the manumission documents for her elderly slave Betty. Thomas owned dozens of slaves and was well on her way to amassing the fortune that would make her the richest black resident in the nearby colony of Demerara. What made the transaction notable was that Betty was Dorothy Thomas’s mother and that fifteen years earlier Dorothy had purchased her own freedom and that of her children. Although she was just one remove from bondage, Dorothy Thomas managed to become so rich and powerful that she was known as the Queen of Demerara.
An accumulation of research evidence suggests that early pubertal timing plays a significant role in girls' behavioral and emotional problems. If early pubertal timing is a problematic event, then early developing Black girls should manifest evidence of this crisis because they tend to be the earliest to develop compared to other girls from different racial and ethnic groups. Given the inconsistent findings among studies using samples of Black girls, the present study examined the independent influence of perceived pubertal timing and age of menarche on externalizing behaviors and depressive symptoms in a nationally representative sample of Black girls (412 African American and 195 Caribbean Black; M = 15 years). Path analysis results indicated that perceived pubertal timing effects on externalizing behaviors were moderated by ethnic subgroup. Caribbean Black girls' who perceived their development to be early engaged in more externalizing behaviors than Caribbean Black girls' who perceived their development to be either on-time or late. Age of menarche did not significantly predict Black girls' externalizing behaviors and depressive symptoms. The onset of menarche does not appear to be an important predictor of Black girls' symptoms of externalizing behavior and depression. These findings suggest ethnic subgroup and perceived pubertal timing are promising factors for better understanding the adverse effects of early perceived pubertal timing among Black girls. Adapted from the source document.
Chivallon,Christine (Author) and Alou,Antoinette Tidjani (Author)
Format:
Book, Whole
Publication Date:
2011
Published:
Kingston Jamaica: Ian Randle Publishers
Location:
African American Research Center, Library, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Notes:
231 p, The forced migration of Africans to the Americas through the transatlantic slave trade created primary centres of settlement in the Caribbean, Brazil and the United States - the cornerstones of the New World and the black Americas. However, unlike Brazil and the US, the Caribbean did not (and still does not) have the uniformity of a national framework. Instead, the region presents differing situations and social experiences born of the varying colonial systems from which they were developed.
Explores dynamic changes in network size and composition by examining patterns of older adults' social network change over time, that is: types of movements; the reason for the loss of network members; and the relation of movement and composition in concert. This study is a 6-year follow up of changes in the social networks of U.S.-Born Caucasian, African-American, and Caribbean older adults.
For women writers of the Caribbean as well as for larger marginalized communities, the relationship between oral traditions and written texts is a part of the defining thread of Caribbean historiography. This article draws on Waugh and Hutcheon to examine the use of such texts by women writers of the Hispanophone Caribbean in order to highlight narrative strategies of historically marginalized groups to contest hegemonic constructions of the nation.
Several theories of stress exposure, including the stress process and the family stress model for economically disadvantaged families, suggest that family processes work similarly across race/ethnic groups. Much of this research, however, treats African-Americans as a monolithic group and ignores potential differences in family stress processes within race that may emerge across ethnic groups. This study examines whether family stress processes differ intraracially in African-American and Black Caribbean families.
Uses data on both region and country of birth for black immigrants in the United States and methodology that allows for the identification of arrival cohorts to test whether there are sending country differences in the health of black adults in the United States. Results show that African immigrants maintain their health advantage over U.S.-born black adults after more than 20 years in the United States. In contrast, black immigrants from the Caribbean who have been in the United States for more than 20 years appear to experience some downward health assimilation.
Hill,Robert A. (Author) and Garvey,Marcus (Author)
Format:
Book, Edited
Publication Date:
2011
Published:
Durham, NC: Duke University Press
Location:
African American Research Center, Library, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Notes:
845 p., "Though not an exhaustive compilation of documents from the period, the historical commentaries, chronologies, and primary documents in this volume serve as a thorough introduction to this important period in history and successfully integrates the history of Garvey and his impact on the global African diaspora into world history." -- Glenn A. Chambers, Journal of World History
African American Research Center, Library, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Notes:
v, 174 leaves ; 29 cm., This novel is a contemporary novel that deals with the history of france; "UMI:9959638."/ Includes bibliographical references ( 167-174)./ Reproduction: Photocopy./ Ann Arbor, Mich. :/ UMI,/ 2000./ v, 174 ; 21 cm.
African American Research Center, Library, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Notes:
268 p., In an examination of the fiction of contemporary women writers of the African Diaspora, these writers engage important texts from writers in Africa, the Caribbean, and the United States, largely ignored by mainstream literary scholars. They employ fresh and poignant critical perspectives accessible to both scholars and students. Includes Carolyn Cooper's
"Sense make befoh book": Grenadian popular culture and the rhetoric of revolution in Merle Collins's Angel and the Colour of forgetting," Paula C. Barnes "Meditations on her/story: Maryse Conde's I, Tituba, Black Witch of Salem and the slave narrative tradition," and Erna Brodber's "Guyana's historical sociology and the novels of Beryl Gilroy and Grace Nichols."
Explores the relationship of family and demographic factors to the frequency of receiving emotional support and the frequency of engaging in negative interactions with family members (i.e., criticism, burden, and being taken advantage of). Overall, no significant differences were found between African Americans and Caribbean Blacks in the frequency of emotional support or negative interaction; several significant correlates (e.g., age, family closeness) were found for both groups.
Lucea,Marguerite B. (Author), Stockman,Jamila K. (Author), Mana-Ay,Margarita (Author), Bertrand,Desiree (Author), Callwood,Gloria B. (Author), Coverston,Catherine R. (Author), Campbell,Doris W. (Author), and Campbell,Jacquelyn C. (Author)
Format:
Journal Article
Publication Date:
May 2013
Published:
Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications
Location:
African American Research Center, Library, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Explores the relationship between intimate partner violence (IPV) and resource use, considering sociodemographics and aspects of IPV by presenting results from a study conducted with African American and African Caribbean women in Baltimore, Maryland, and the U.S. Virgin Islands.
Discusses perspectives in Africana feminist thought. While, not an exhaustive review of the entire diaspora, three regions are discussed: Africa, North America, and the Caribbean.
Palmer,Steven Paul (Editor) and Molina Jiménez,Iván (Editor)
Format:
Book, Edited
Publication Date:
2009
Published:
Durham, NC: Duke University Press
Location:
African American Research Center, Library, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Notes:
383 p., Includes more than fifty texts related to the country's history, culture, politics, and natural environment. Most of these newspaper accounts, histories, petitions, memoirs, poems, and essays are written by Costa Ricans. Includes Jose Cubero's "A slave's story"; Cabildo of Cartago's "Free blacks, mulattoes, and mestizos seek legitimacy"; and Clodomiro Picado's "Our blood is blackening."
Reads Carnival-related performances in relationship to the colonial and national histories of the circulation of Indian and black women's bodies in Trinidad and Tobago, asking what is at stake in these occupations of genre, form, and performative presence in the latest global scenes of late capitalism (where image and sound, as cultural productions, are always in circulation beyond the scope of the nation, and their own "original" referents).
Quirke,Ellen (Author), Potter,Robert B. (Author), and Conway,Dennis (Author)
Format:
Internet resource
Publication Date:
2009
Published:
Reading, England: Geography, the University of Reading
Location:
African American Research Center, Library, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Notes:
37 p., Whilst research on second-generation return migration to the Caribbean from the UK has identified transnational practices among a cohort of individuals, there is considerable scope for further research examining transnational practices, inter-generational transfers and intention to return among the 1.5-, second- and third-generation Black Caribbean community in situ in the UK.
The United States Virgin Islands (USVI) is a complex society with multiple diverse ethnic groups: Black Virgin Islanders, Eastern Caribbean islanders, Puerto Ricans, Spanish Dominicans, French Islanders, Americans (Continentals), Arabs and Asians. These ethnic differences as well as United States cultural imperialism have stymied any uniform Virgin Islands identity. Nonetheless, social identity in the USVI can be conceptualized into the bi-level structural analysis of national and trans-Caribbean.
African American Research Center, Library, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Notes:
1 vol., A demonstration and defense of the continuity and centrality of the Afro-Caribbean consciousness in the anti-colonial and anti-imperialist struggles of the Caribbean peoples. The author uses a variety of disciplines, history, politics, psychoanalysis, to bring a new way of looking at the history of Caribbean literature, from the predominance of the European preoccupation with their Europe in the 19th century, to the focus of early Caribbean writers in reproducing a colonially influenced literature in the late 19th and early 20th century.
On Christmas Day 1521, in the Spanish colony of Santo Domingo, the first recorded slave revolt in the Americas occurred. A group of African, likely Wolof, slaves came together with native Indians led by the Taino cacique Enriquillo to assert their independence. Beyond being the first slave revolt in the Americas, it was also one of the most important moments in Colonial American history because it was the first known instance when Africans and Indians united against their Spanish overlords in the Americas.
African American Research Center, Library, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Notes:
294 p, Discusses key individuals (George Padmore, Eric Williams, C.L.R.James among others) and organizations (particularly Labor and liberation movements)in the Anglophone Caribbean world from the perspective of contemporary political and economic Caribbean realities. Particular attention is paid to the Pan-African Movement and its linking of Black Africa and the diasporic Black world of the British West Indies. Colonial Office policies of the period are discussed along with attempts by local and international economic interests during and after both World Wars to control events and thwart labor and independence movements. African American influence in popular political culture and its political and social effect on organizations in the islands is discussed along with key African American newspapers such as The Crisis, Chicago Defender, The Negro Worker, and the Baltimore Afro-American.
African American Research Center, Library, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Notes:
294 p., Documents the lives and work of black individuals and organizations in the West Indies from 1900 to 1989, centered on the worlds of labor and black journalism. The French Caribbean is not covered here. Focuses on historical information as well as information on relationships between the two main "servant" minorities of the British Empire: Caribbeans originally from Africa and from India/Pakistan.
Examines the depiction of first-wave West Indian immigrants to the United States in Black print culture in the early 20th century. The authors conduct a series of content analyses of four newspapers that had wide circulation in the Black community between 1910 and 1940. Each content analysis serves as an empirical test one of four common hypotheses about ethnic differentiation between West Indians and African Americans: (a) the group consciousness hypothesis, (b) the racial nationalism hypothesis, (c) the radical politics hypothesis, and (d) the model minority hypothesis. The authors find very little empirical support for either the group consciousness hypothesis or the racial nationalism hypothesis and find only a modicum of support for the radical politics hypothesis. Finally, the authors find evidence confirming the model minority hypothesis. They also find that the Black press presented an accurate portrayal of the West Indian immigrants' socioeconomic advantages to native-born Blacks.
The combination of rice and beans was introduced in the nineteenth century by Afro-Caribbean migrant railroad workers. Notwithstanding elite self-perception of Costa Rica as a white, European nation, economic necessity during the Great Depression helped gallo pinto gain middle class acceptance. This case illustrates both the importance of social and economic history in shaping cultural symbols and also the ways that lower-class foods can become central to national identities.
Develops a theoretical framework of biopolitical performance with which to approach the 1957 televised broadcast of Duke Ellington and Billy Strayhorn's A Drum Is a Woman. Presented on the drama anthology program The United States Steel Hour, this theater-music-dance suite fused elements of Afro-Caribbean rhythm with swing and bebop to tell a history of jazz, featuring acclaimed performers such as Carmen de Lavallade, Margaret Tynes, Joya Sherrill, and Talley Beatty. Argues that through their experimentation Ellington and Strayhorn created a hybrid performance in the mode of "calypso theater": a formal and thematic engagement with an Afro-Caribbean performance history.
West,Michael O. (Editor), Martin,William G. (Editor), and Wilkins,Fanon Che (Editor)
Format:
Book, Edited
Publication Date:
2009
Published:
Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press
Location:
African American Research Center, Library, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Notes:
318 p., Focuses on three moments in global black history: the American and Haitian revolutions, the Garvey movement and the Communist International following World War I, and the Black Power movement of the late twentieth century.
For most Ghanaians, the tenets of Pan-Africanism are remote principles that bear little relevance in daily life, in which kinship, linguistic, ethnic, and national affiliations are primary markers of identity. This presents challenges for repatriated Rastafarians from the Caribbean, United States, and Europe, who attempt to establish a home and a place within Ghanaian society while retaining Rastafarian ways of living and spiritual philosophies drawn from a Pan-African ethos.
[Stephanie Balmir-Villedrouin] said the site of the village is known for its historic values to Haiti "and the idea is to create another form of attraction and give a value to the visitors when they go to the destination".
Poverty and suffering are nothing new to the brave Haitian people. They have survived the hellish reign of the murderous dictator Francois "Papa Doc" Duvalier and, later, his son, Jean-Claude "Baby Doc" Dulavier. They have lived through the nightmare of one military coup after another, barely existing at lower than subsistence levels. They have had to pay ransom money to France because they dared to fight for their freedom.
The head of Citizenship and Immigration Services, Alejandro Mayorkas, says his agency can't eliminate its fees, but it has the power to waive them for people who can prove they are poor. He has promised that his employees will treat applicants with a "generosity of spirit." This would be a refreshing change for an agency notorious for bureaucrats expert in finding a way to say no.
While helping applicants take their place on the line, Richard Champagne, current President of the Haitian Lawyers Association (HLA)stated, "This is an opportunity for the HLA and participating attorneys to give back to our community. Haitian immigrants have been suffering for a long time, and after the Obama administration granted TPS, it was our duty to assist. It has been a great opportunity to partner with the city of North Miami, given the concentration of Haitian nationals in the city.
Florida-based [Andre Berto], holder of the World Boxing Council (WBC) welterweight title, announced in a press release last month that he was ""physically and emotionally unable to prepare" for his clash with [Shane Mosley] and withdrew from the Jan. 30 main bout in Las Vegas. "I'm sorry for the losses that Andre and all of the Haitian people are suffering. I have everyone in my prayers," Mosley added.
In creating Scourge, a full-length work of hip hop theater, Joseph digs into his ancestral roots to tell the story of Haiti, the poorest nation in the Western hemisphere with a long and violent history. The piece's main characters are two Haitian-American kids who are torn between their Caribbean roots and urban America where they have grown up.
Bennie G. Rodgers left us recently. Bennie G. Rodgers, 86, longtime executive editor and columnist for the St. Louis American, one of the leading black community newspapers in America. Jean Leopold Dominique (1930-2000) was violently snatched from our lives. Jean Léopold Dominique was a Haitian journalist who spoke out against successive dictatorships. He was one of the first people in Haiti to broadcast in Haitian Creole, the language spoken by most of the populace.
This year's Miami concert is a continuation of this ongoing goodwill project, bringing together a host of internationally renowned celebrities, reggae, R&B, and hip-hop artists in an all-day Carnival event with food, arts, crafts, and a vast array of entertainment. Proceeds from the event will benefit the Wyclef Jean Foundation and be donated to charitable organizations. Proceeds from last year's Miami Carnival were given to VHI's "Save The Music" and Oeuvres de Petites Ecoles de P. Bohnen (through Fondation Artistes Creation, a not-for- profit Haitian organization). "Guantanamera," a single from "Wyclef Jean Presents the Carnival," featuring Celia Cruz and Jeni Fujita, was nominated for the Best Rap Performance By A Duo or Group. The following year, Wyclef Jean's single, "Gone Till November," was nominated for a Grammy in the Best Rap Solo Performance category.
African American Research Center, Library, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Notes:
187 p., Looks primarily at Negrismo and Negritude, two literary movements that appeared in the Francophone and Hispanic Caribbean as well as in Africa at the beginning of the twentieth century. It draws on speeches and manifestos, and use cultural studies to contextualize ideas.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Blanes,Ruy Llera (Editor) and Espirito Santo,Diana (Editor)
Format:
Book, Edited
Publication Date:
2014
Published:
Chicago: University of Chicago Press
Location:
African American Research Center, Library, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Notes:
305 p., By stripping symbolism from the way we think about the spirit world, the contributors of this book uncover a livelier, more diverse environment of entities--with their own histories, motivations, and social interactions--providing a new understanding of spirits not as symbols, but as agents.
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.
Boyce Davies,Carole (Editor) and Savory, Elaine (Editor)
Format:
Book, Edited
Publication Date:
1990
Published:
Trenton NJ: Africa World Press
Location:
African American Research Center, Library, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Notes:
399 p, "This first collection of critical essays on Caribbean women’s literature created a field of literary criticism which engaged the absence of women writers from the Caribbean literary canon as it established the presence of these writers historically. Using the metaphor of the “Kumbla” or “calabash” used to protect precious objects, first used by writer Erna Brodber, coming “Out of the Kumbla” then signified a movement from confinement to visibility, articulation, process which allowed for a multiplicity of moves, exteriorized, no longer contained and protected or dominated." --Carole Boyce-Davies
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.
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.
African American Research Center, Library, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Notes:
274 p., Explores a broad range of power relationships and struggles for authority in the early 19th century British Atlantic, focusing on the Caribbean colony of Berbice. I aim to understand how enslaved people and their enslavers negotiated their relationships and forged their lives within multiple, interconnected networks of power in a notoriously brutal society. Focuses on politics and culture writ large and small, zooming in to see the internal conflicts, practices, and hierarchies that governed individual plantations, communities, and families; and zooming out to explore the various ways that imperial officials, colonial administrators, and metropolitan antislavery activists tried to shape Caribbean area slavery during the era of amelioration-a crucial period of transformation in the Atlantic world. Sources used include travel narratives, trial records, missionary correspondence, and official government documents. Most important are the records of the Berbice fiscals and protectors of slaves, officials charged with hearing enslaved peoples' grievances and enforcing colonial laws.
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.
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.
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.
After [Jean-Jacques Dessalines]' death, [Henri Christophe] assumed leadership of Haiti, but the mulatto minority South set up its own republic under Pétion. Christophe committed suicide in 1820 amid an uprising over his forced labor policies. Pétion's successor, JeanPierre Boyer, reformed the two republics into one Haiti. Boyer ruled until his government collapsed in 1843 due to political rivalry. Until 1915, only two of the 21 governments since 1843 were not dismantled by coups d'états or political in-fighting. Except for agreement on the abolition of slavery, the state and nation were headed in opposite or different directions before the L'Ouverture adherents took over in 1804. The literature on Haiti, from Trinidadian C. L. R. James' classic book The Black Jacobins, to TransAfrica founder Randall Robinson's An Unbroken Agony, all tell the awful consequences of the "color curtain" in claustrophobic Haiti.
The French called the Island St. Domingue, and began importing thousands of African slaves to clear much of the land and build plantations. By the late 1700s, there were over half a million African slaves in St. Domingue, and dose to 40,000 whites, as well as almost as many "mulattos." (The word "mulatto" derives from the Spanish term meaning a young mule.) They were the "free people of color," the result of white men taking many slave women. [Adam Hochchild] goes on to tell us how very rich France became through its plantocracy on St. Domingue alone: "The colony's eight thousand plantations accounted for more than one third of France's foreign trade, and its own foreign trade equaled that of the newly born United States." White planters and merchants on the island lived a life of luxury unrivaled in "the New World." Hochchild tells us that on that fateful August night "a large group of slaves representing many plantations met under the night sky in a remote spot called Alligator Woods..." and these are the words reportedly shouted to the throng by a revolt leader: '"Throw away the image of the god of the whites who thirsts for our tears, and listen to the voice of liberty which speaks in the hearts of all of us."
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."
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.
African American Research Center, Library, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Notes:
309 p., Drawing from Haitian Vodou and New Orleanian Voudou and from Cuban and South Floridian Santería, as well as from Afro-Baptist (Caribbean, Geechee, and Bahamian) models of encounters with otherness, this book reemplaces deep-southern texts within the counterclockwise ring-stepping of a long Afro-Atlantic modernity. Includes "Down to the Mire : Travels, Shouts & Fe Chauffe, Balanse, Swing : Saint Domingue Refugees in the Govi of New Orleans."
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.
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.
180 p., The articles, lectures, popular and professional histories, travelogues, and ethnographies of John B. Russwurm, Samuel M. Cornish, James McCune Smith, Augustus Straker, T.G. Steward, Ana Julia Cooper, James Weldon Johnson, Langston Hughes and Zora Neal Hurston, stakes claims about the capacity of black people for liberty, citizenship, and self-determination. Current historians of Haiti's legacy must contend with the historiographies of early black scholars in order to fully appreciate the way the Haitian revolution was not silenced, but remained intimately present for writers and scholars trying to develop a unified black identity.
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.
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.
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.
276 p., A critical examination of Haitian migration and displacement in North America that engages both a theoretical and literary analysis of exile and diaspora as consequences of migration and displacement. Argues that Haitian writers in North America inscribe migration by troping exile and diaspora to speak of the predicament of displaced migratory subjects and their inevitable crossings of places, landscapes, borders, cultures, and nations. Analyzes three novels by Haitian-American writer Edwidge Danticat: Breath, Eyes, Memory (1994), The Farming of Bones (1998), and the Dew Breaker (2004); and two novels by Haitian Canadian writer Myriam Chancy: Spirit of Haiti (2003) and The Scorpion's Claw (2005).
"Gonaives... my heart is being torn apart, too many mothers have lost too many children," [Wyclef] sings in Creole, while distributing WFP food rations. "We wanted to capture the raw essence of Gonaives and give people inspiration. Not like: 'Be sad for us,' but asking how can we as people really help Gonaives," he said.
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.
Denying Haiti credit where credit is due is an established tradition. In 1893, at the end of the century that started with Haitian Independence and the Slave Trade Act, the orator, statesman and emancipated slave Frederick Douglass told an audience at the Chicago World's Fair how Haiti "taught the world the danger of slavery and the value of liberty." He pointed out that: The world had a chance to recognize Haiti three years ago, during the celebration of Haiti's bicentennial. But once again, Haiti was penalized. On the big day, January 1, 2004, Thabo Mbeki, President of the most powerful African nation, South Africa, came to celebrate. But the former slaveholding nations, led by the United States, boycotted the events, and forced the less powerful countries of Africa and the Caribbean to stay away. Instead of sending congratulations to the Haitian people's elected representatives, the United States sent guns and money to those trying to overthrow the government. When the international spotlight came to Haiti in 2004, it was to witness the return to dictatorship rather than to celebrate freedom from slavery.
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.
351 p., Explores the racial and gender decolonization of New York and Curaçaoan women in a select group of novels, paintings and performance text by women from Curaçao and New York City. The Curaçaoan novels are: Aliefka Bijlsma's Gezandstraald [Sandblasted] (2007); Loeki Morales' Bloedlijn Overzee: Een Familiezoektocht [Overseas Bloodline: A Family Search] (2002); Myra Römer's Het Geheim van Gracia [The Secret of Gracia] (2008). The Curaçaoan painters are: Jean Girigori (1948), Minerva Lauffer (1957) and Viviana (1972). The New York novels and performance text are: Black Artemis' Picture Me Rollin' (2005), Angie Cruz's Soledad (2003) and Nelly Rosario's Song of the Water Saints (2002) and Josefina Báez's Dominicanish (2000). The ways the women characters, figures, images and voices align to subvert gendered delineations as well as the stifling cultural and colonial imprints on their bodies and their selves in Curaçao and New York are central to the decolonizing project explored here.
207 p., Explores the expression of Afro-Cuban identity and its illustration by Afro-Cuban writers and filmmakers within the context of the Cuban Revolution. It answers two questions. First, how does Afro-Cuban artistic expression of Afro-Cuban reality change from the 1970s to the 1990s? and second, how can we reread works from Afro-Cuban writers and filmmakers within the context of the Cuban Revolution in light of the ideological disconnects between Revolution, racial discourse, and artistic expression? To answer these questions the author looks to a diverse group of Afro-Cuban artists who produced groundbreaking works during the 1970s and 1990s. Beginning with Nancy Morejón as an example of a well-known literary figure in Afro-Cuban arts, the dissertation delves deeper into the evolution of Afro-Cuban aesthetics with the cinematic works of Nicolas Guillen Landrian in the 1960s, Sara Gómez and Sergio Giral in the 1970s and finally Gloria Rolando in the 1990s. These are all artists whose work has previously never been considered in concert, but together, their works engage in an interesting dialogue and provide a collective answer to the research questions on which this project is based.
363 p., investigates the pre- and post- migratory experiences of working-class African-Caribbean women from the English-speaking Caribbean who left their children in their home countries while pursuing better economic opportunities in Canada from the 1970s to the early 1990s. The author problematizes the intersectional relationship between female migrant labor, transnationality and motherhood within the rubric of globalized gender, race and class relations. Given the centrality of African-Caribbean women's worker-mother role in their societies, further exploration of this role within global migration is important in order to recognize its significant gendered impact on women's labor and familial relations on a transnational level.
473 p., Demonstrates that the figure of the trickster is a key trope for the achievement of agency by the narrators of the three slave narratives Autobiografia de un esclavo, "Routes in North Africa by Abú Bekr es[dotbelow] s[dotbelow]iddik" [sic], and Biografia de un cimarrón. Also shows how both the realization of the trickster's role and the achievement of agency to which such a role is oriented are dependent on the use of the four Afro-Caribbean meta-tropes ndoki, nkisi, nganga, and simbi.
220 p., Employs a black feminist diaspora literary lens to identify, define, trace, and speak to the African Diaspora as it functions in black women's diaspora fiction and informs our understanding of black women's diaspora identity. Considers three authors and novels by women of, in, and across the African Diaspora. The study centers on Sandra Jackson-Opoku's The River Where Blood Is Born as a primary site of analysis of diaspora formation and theorization, Dionne Brand's At the Full and Change of the Moon and Maryse Condé's Desirada as comparative textual and theoretical sites.
Patrick Rouzier, a housing and reconstruction adviser for the government, acknowledged the plan in a text message. He said [Jean Yves Jason] wants to move the families to Morne Cabrit, a mountain north of the capital, and house them in temporary shelters. The government has reservations about the approach, Rouzier added, but he did not elaborate. He said he was traveling with President Michel Martelly.
409 p., By exploring how colonists and enslaved folk migrated across island boundaries, manipulated imperial tensions, and organized acts of collective dissent, this dissertation attempts to demonstrate the relationship between space, power, and imperial governance in the British Leeward Islands from the time of transnational colonization through their ascendency as black majorities. It examines the ways British empire makers struggled to turn a series of closely interlinked islands stretching from Guadeloupe to the Virgin Islands into a unified colony and how this effort was challenged by the development of a regional black identity that linked slaves across island and imperial boundaries in the early eighteenth century.
369 p., Reconstructs the process of migration, assimilation, and the realization of full sociopolitical participation in the United States in terms of the relationship between peoples of African descent--who were compelled to migrate as slaves across the Middle Passage, and who also voluntarily immigrated from various localities within the Black Atlantic--and select groups of immigrants from other locations around the globe. The author concentrates on novels by William Faulkner, Paule Marshall, James Baldwin, and cartoonist Chris Ware, and examine closely how these authors, in their respective texts, work to restructure, reimagine, and thereby challenge the enshrined American narratives of national belonging and acculturation through literary constructions of the identities and experiences of peoples of African descent, as migrants themselves, in tandem with their social, political, economic, sexual, racial, and cultural engagements with other immigrants to the nation-state.
186 p., Preacher's Cave, an archaeological site in North Eleuthera, Bahamas, is arguably one of the most important historical places in that country. This large cave, isolated in a natural setting, has long been associated in the popular imagination with the first English colonists who shipwrecked in the Bahamas in 1648 and laid the foundation for the modern nation. Before the present work, no systematic scientific archaeological work had ever been conducted at this site. These excavations, in conjunction with the written record, also suggest that the area surrounding the site is the location of the first free black community in the country.
306 p., Investigates the shifts in gender constructions currently taking place in Jamaica, a peripheral nation-state, during a period which is characterized by hegemonic dissolution in the world-system. These shifts are defined by class- and gender-based conflicts over the norms, values and aesthetics associated with the traditional bourgeois classes. The fulcrum for investigation is Jamaica's Dancehall culture, which currently exhibits changes in the field of masculinity, in which clashes over the body occur constantly. These conflicts center around dress, gendered dancing styles and adornment.
Toussaint L'Ouverture: The Other Bonaparte! When the friction of social injustice and deprivation ignite that fuel, glimmers of hope begin to surface. So it happened with the baby boy who came on the world scene as Toussaint L'Ouverture. Acts such as these stirred [Toussaint]; he felt destined to remedy the societal ills. He also knew the time was not yet right, so he waited and learned. Toussaint became the most humble, obliging slave. He was held up as a model to other slaves.
453 p., Offers an anthropological interpretation of cultural discourses about the body found in literature, visual narratives and archival sources throughout 19th century in Spanish colonial Havana. These discourses show a pressing concern with the "manners" of bodies, the ways they moved, how they occupied space, and how they managed sensations and emotions to negotiate power and prestige in the highly stratified Havana's society. Concerns for the manners of the body became the discursive domain of the rising planter and intellectual elite of Cuban creoles. They often expressed these concerns in normalizing terms such as "good manners," "good taste," and "tone." Argues that these and other highly embodied, interlocking moral, sensory, affective and aesthetic categories such as nobility, respect or " sabor " became focal indexes of the social status of individuals in colonial society.
305 p., Examines how social inequalities, in combination with identified social risk factors, contribute to disparities in the incidence of schizophrenia among individuals of African-Caribbean descent in England. It addresses the psychiatric epidemiological puzzle that indicates African-Caribbbeans in England have significantly greater rates of schizophrenia than the general British population. Based on two years of ethnographic fieldwork with patients diagnosed with schizophrenia, their relatives, and community members in North London, the researcher argued that specific social changes and historical forces interlink to create a toxic environment characterized by negative expressed emotions and social defeat to affect African-Caribbeans' mental health.
225 p., Drawing attention to poets whose writing on this subject has received little critical attention, this study examines contemporary poetry of the black Atlantic in particular focusing on work by Kwame Dawes, David Dabydeen, Lucille Clifton, and Elizabeth Alexander. In exploring poetic treatment of the Middle Passage, primarily through the lyric, epic, and long poem, the author identifies four interrelated poetics that reveal the dynamism of this legacy: lamentation, retribution, rupture, and re-membering. While critical analysis of texts that rewrite slave experiences has tended to focus on narrative, and that primarily on plantation slavery, "Sea of Bones" advocates attention to the way black Atlantic poetry renders the Middle Passage as a complicated and haunting personal heritage.
400 p., This dissertation explores the spread and articulation of Garveyism--the political movement spearheaded by Jamaican activist Marcus Garvey--across Africa, the greater Caribbean, and the United States in the years following the First World War. Scholarship on Garveyism has remained fixed within a conceptual framework that views the movement synonymously with the rise and fall of Garvey's organization, the Universal Negro Improvement Association (UNIA), and which focuses predominantly on the activities of the organization in the United States. This study argues that Garveyism is more fully rendered as a global endeavor of network-building, consciousness-raising, and activism that extended beyond the operational parameters of the UNIA, influenced a diverse array of regionally-constituted political projects, and nurtured the flowering of a profoundly "Garveyist" period in the history of the African diaspora.
480 p., By the end of 1825, 6,000 African Americans had left the United States to settle in the free black Republic of Haiti. After arriving on the island, 200 immigrants formed an enclave in what is now Samaná, Dominican Republic. The Americans in Samaná continued to speak English, remained Protestant (in a country of devout Catholics), and retained American cultural practices for over 150 years. Relying on historical archaeological methods, this dissertation explores the processes of community formation, maintenance, and dissolution, while paying particular attention to intersections of race and nation.
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.
178 p., This dissertation is about the role that conservative religious notions of racial ideology played in the historical origins of black nationalism and pan-Africanism. Focuses on the writings of an African Caribbean, Edward Blyden, as the centerpiece of the study. Blyden, a native of Saint Thomas (Virgin Islands) and considered one of the "fathers" of both pan-Africanism and African nationalism, was a particularly complex diasporic intellectual. Traveling first to the United States in the pre-Civil War period, then to Africa and Britain at the height of the European imperial venture - and Christian missionary efforts - Blyden served as a conduit between the West (the United States and Britain) and both a traditional and a Muslim Africa. He saw his role as one of mediating (critiquing/translating) these divergent voices and ideologies with the object of constituting a "modern," pan-African subject.
112 p., On Wednesday October 11th, 1865, a group of malcontented men and women in Jamaica, a British colony, began a rebellion whose aftershocks echoed well beyond the confines of Morant Bay, the small town where it started. Although the initial rebellion lasted for just a few days, its brutal suppression and the implications that it held for the British Empire sparked a controversy that touched on some of the deepest fissures in British society at that time. At its heart, the rebellion highlighted the contested notions of power within the British imperial system. In Jamaica, disenfranchised local peasants rebelled to challenge a political system that excluded and oppressed them.