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.
African American Research Center, Library, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Notes:
196 p., Argues that cultural and literary expressions of illness, suffering, and subjectivity in the postcolonial context are always in dialogue with seemingly external discourses and practices of health. Thus, through sustained analyses of historical, biomedical and sociocultural currents in the context of eight Francophone novels from 1968 to 2003, the book advances a new theory of critical conditions. These critical conditions represent the conjunction of bodily, psychic, and textual states that defy conventional definitions of health and well-being.
African American Research Center, Library, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Notes:
196 p., Focuses on Francophone women writers who offer striking commentaries on the experience of illness and/or disability and its attendant discourses: Haitian writer Marie Chauvet; Guadeloupian-Senegalese writer Myriam Warner-Vieyra; Guadeloupian writer Maryse Condé; Senegalese writers Ken Bugul, Fama Diagne Sène, and Fatou Diome; and Swiss-Gabonese writer Bessora.
African American Research Center, Library, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Notes:
196 p., Argues that cultural and literary expressions of illness, suffering, and subjectivity in the postcolonial context are always in dialogue with seemingly external discourses and practices of health.
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.
Authors conducted a thematic analysis of 650 photographs of Haitian women in the Associated Press Photo Archive in the years 1994–2009. Emphasizes the impact of these images on the identity of Haitian women and Women of Color, as well as on the attitudes and behaviors of media consumers toward these groups.
Conde,Maryse (Author) and Richard Philcox (Translator)
Format:
Book, Whole
Publication Date:
2000
Published:
New York: Soho
Location:
African American Research Center, Library, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Notes:
260 p., Desirada is the story of Marie-Noelle and her quest to understand the mother who abandoned her and to discover the identity of her father. It is also the story of generations of island women and the pursuit of a meaningful life despite a tainted personal history.
Provides a brief background of Haiti's economic development over the last several decades, along with the status of women's rights and gender-differentiated socioeconomic outcomes. Analyzes how policy neglect of gender equity in Haiti has contributed to failed economic development and identifies ways that other developing countries have successfully incorporated a focus on gender equity in their development strategy, particularly in the face of natural disaster and financial crisis.
