African American Research Center, Library, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Notes:
135 p., Examines Caribbean cultural identities along the lines of race, class, nationalism, and history. Contents include: Remembering Toussaint, rethinking postcolonial: the Haitian revolution and the writing of historical trauma in the Caribbean / Li-Chun Hsiao --
Unveiling the mask: race, nationhood, and caribeñidad in "La tierra y el cielo" / Sheree Henlon -- The music, the artist, and the aficionado: tracing the role of race and class in Caribbean popular music through literature / Kathleen Costello -- Negrismo and négritude in the reshaping of Caribbean cultural identity / Mamadou Badiane.
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.
270 p., Juxtaposes the novels written by Merle Collins (Grenada) and Lakshmi Persaud (Trinidad and Tobago), which are classified as Caribbean-based novels in which the characters do not leave the island of their birth until they have attained womanhood, against those of Edwidge Danticat (Haiti) and Paule Marshall (Barbados) which depict their protagonists' emotional and geographical displacement between the United States and the Caribbean.
African American Research Center, Library, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Notes:
Originally presented as the author's (Luiz Silva's) thesis (doctoral)--Universidade Estadual de Campinas, 2005., 294 p, Cruz e Souza and Lima Barreto works evince similar strategies to face historical circumstantial challenges relevant to the end of the 19th Century. Concerning the racial exclusion processes enrooted in the preceding centuries due to slavery, the authors developed the collective trauma consciousness and its further consequences on daily lives within the poetical and fictional areas.
333 p., Examines both historical and contemporary attempts by the people of Ouidah, Benin Republic in West Africa and in the Caribbean country of Haiti to confront and reconcile their relationship via the transatlantic slave trade. Oral and visual narrative have been central to this process as people represent, reflect and interpret a past that is fraught with gaps, silences and erasures. Proposes that the process of remembrance mirrors a traditional rites of passage whereby one lives as part of a community, dies to the past and then is reborn anew in the community. Both Ouidahans and Haitians now occupy a liminal space--an exilic space--in which they struggle to remember a past that was for many years repressed and suppressed.
164 p., Traces the journey of blacks from the Middle Passage through urban migration northward in black fiction. Argues that the historical use of religious rhetoric is transcended in black writing of the 20th century in order to recast black victimization during slavery, counter the progress of turn-of-the-century white supremacy, and chronicle the rise of economic racism which created the 20th century black ghetto. The religious doctrines discussed in this study include Puritan missionizing and heretical purges in I, Tituba, Black Witch of Salem , the social work of the Catholic church in Contending Forces: A Romance Illustrative of Negro Life North and South , and the cultural intensity of the Pentecostal/Apostolic church in Go Tell It on the Mountain.
African American Research Center, Library, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Notes:
Papers presented at the conference organized by the European Association for Commonwealth Literature and Language Studies held in 2005 in Sliema, Malta., 412 p., Includes Jogamaya Bayer's "Crossing the borders in Monica Ali's Brick lane and V.S. Naipaul's Half a life," Gen'ichiro Itakura's "Jewishness, goyishness, and blackness : Zadie Smith's The autograph man," and Lourdes López-Ropero's "The pleasures of slave food : the politics of creolization in Austin Clarke's Pigtails 'n breadfruit."
270 p., This dissertation focuses on women voices in Black British Literature between the period 1980 and 2005 - specifically in the works of Monica Ali, Zadie Smith, Joan Riley, Ravinder Randhawa, Meera Syal and Gurinder Chadha - and seeks to understand how women who are of Caribbean and South Asian descent form and reform their identities in their new home as immigrants or first-generation Britons and why their stories make a valuable and essential contribution to Black British Literature.
This paper explores the African Diaspora and the psychological, social, political, and economic effects of the Atlantic slave trade on people of African descent in the historical fiction text The Farming of Bones by Edwidge Danticat and the travel narrative The Atlantic Sound by Caryl Phillips. By examining the complex history of the British and French slave trade and its later consequences in the twentieth century, this paper examines the connection between the evidence of displacement and the search for identity coupled with the idea of healing in regards to trauma suffered by the spirits of Danticats' and Phillips' characters symbols of those in the African Diaspora.
242 p., As a feminist approach which takes into consideration how gender collides with race, national origin, and class in the context of neo-colonial imperialisms, transnational feminist studies attempt to bridge the gap left by these theories that either look at gender or at race. This dissertation examines the work of Dionne Brand, Marlene Nourbese Philip, and Makeda Silvera in the light of these recent transnational feminist developments. By insisting on a fluid and multiply positioned self, these writers enact a transnational feminist identity that repudiates simplistic notions of gender oppression at the same time as it challenges masculinist notions of home.
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).
African American Research Center, Library, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Notes:
226 p., Investigates how these entrenched notions of paradise, which islands have traditionally represented metonymically, are contested in the works of four postcolonial authors: Jamaica Kincaid, Lawrence Scott, Romesh Gunesekera, and Jean Arasanayagam, from the island nations of the Caribbean and Sri Lanka.
African American Research Center, Library, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Notes:
312 p., Argues for inclusion of more Afro-Hispanic poets in the Caribbean literary canon. This book offers an introductory overview of the literary tradition of Black writing in the Hispanic Caribbean. It also provides a survey of black poets.
African American Research Center, Library, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Notes:
211 p., Surveying three novels written by writers of diasporic literature -- Zadie Smith's White Teeth, Jessica Hagedorns's Dogeaters, and Michelle Cliff's No Telephone to Heaven, the dissertation discusses how these novels function as narratives and provide cognitive maps which help us re-conceptualize social and political structures and women's places within them.
108 p., Investigate how contemporary fiction written by mixed race North American authors challenges theories of cultural and racial fluidity. Specifically looks at the works of Lawrence Hill, Shani Mootoo, and Danzy Senna, because their work uses similar conditions of hybridity in identity, through the lens of cultural performance. These authors represent my politics of an inclusionary mixed race theory by representing differences amongst themselves that resolve into a focus on language, as it reflects on mixed race literature.
