[Nicole Brooks] says part of her mission as an artist, whether in film or theatre, is to really uphold looking at stories about her roots. "And so when I discovered that the catalyst of the witch trials was because a slave named Tituba from Barbados was accused of teaching obeah to young white women in the town, I sat back and reflected on how did these Puritans knew the word 'obeah'," says Brooks. Brooks says she is not breaking any rules or being untraditional because the definition of an opera is "a play that's sung." 'It doesn't have any attachment to say it has to be in classical form or that a particular genre of music makes it an opera," says Brooks who is giving a voice to these women. When she held a workshop of Obeah Opera she had to deal with some people who thought she was critical of the Puritan's Christianity and others, including her mother, who were concerned about her exploration of obeah. She answered them by noting that in the contact between captured Africans and white Puritans, there was a connotation that everything African was bad.
282 p., Challenges how critical scholarship on race and racism in Latin America has traditionally understood racial subalterns in Cuba and Puerto Rico as people who are prevented from acting as black political subjects because of the hegemonic power of discourses of nationhood premised on ideas of mestizaje and racial fraternity. By providing an intellectual history of several important yet largely ignored Cuban and Puerto Rican activists intellectuals of color who lived and worked between the Caribbean and the U.S. at the turn of the 20th century, the author shows that instead of being tricked by creole elite national narratives, they attempted to redefine ideas of nationhood to challenge racism, colonialism, and imperialism at local, national, and transnational levels.
237 p., Free people of color held an ambiguous place in Caribbean slave societies. On the one hand they were nominally free, but the reality of their daily lives was often something less than free. This work examines how free people of color, or libres de color , in nineteenth-century Cuba attempted to carve out lives for themselves in the face of social, economic, and political constraints imposed on them by white Cubans and Spaniards living in the island. It focuses on how through different Afro-Cuban associations some libres de color used public music and dance performances to self-fashion identities on their own terms.
Boston, Mass; Enfield : Publishers Group UK distributor], Projected Date: Beacon; 201203
Location:
African American Research Center, Library, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Notes:
After peaking at 27 percent of all major leaguers in 1975, African Americans now make up less than one-tenth--a decline unimaginable in other men's pro sports. The number of Latin Americans, by contrast, has exploded to over one-quarter of all major leaguers and roughly half of those playing in the minors. Ruck explains that integration cost black and Caribbean societies control over their own sporting lives, changing the meaning of the sport, but not always for the better. While it channeled black and Latino athletes into major league baseball, integration did little for the communities they left behind.
African American Research Center, Library, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Notes:
68 p, Traditional Caribbean history has been directed by and focused upon the conquerors who came to the region to colonize and seek profitable resources. Native Caribbean peoples and African slaves used to work the land have been silenced by traditional history so that it has become necessary for modern Caribbean thinkers to challenge that history and recreate it. Alejo Carpentier and Michelle Cliff challenge traditional Caribbean history in their texts, The Kingdom of This World and Abeng, respectively. Each of these texts rewrites traditional history to include the perspectives of natives and the slaves of Haiti and Jamaica. Traditional history is challenged by the inclusion of these perspectives, thus providing a rewritten, revised history.
370 p., Examines three general geographical areas in which people who originated in Africa were dispersed to the West during the Transatlantic Trade in Captured Africans. In Africa there was a process of inculcating cultural values while harnessing skills in an authentic education system called retreat schools. These schools were the original African lodges or secret societies that supported the communal system since they made people indigenous. Everyone in a village had an obligation to become initiated in order to learn the secrets of their society. Those individuals who were not indoctrinated were ostracized because they did not experience transformation and pledged an oath of loyalty. The purpose of this study is to investigate the elaborate infrastructure that was historically an integral part of early African institutional character, and aspects of its presentation among New World Africans.
Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press
Location:
African American Research Center, Library, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Notes:
298 p., Showing how revolutionary and prerevolutionary values coexist in a potent and sometimes contradictory mix, Hamilton addresses changing patterns in heterosexual relations, competing views of masculinity and femininity, same-sex relationships and homophobia, AIDS, sexual violence, interracial relationships, and sexual tourism. Hamilton's examination of sexual experiences across generations and social groups demonstrates that sexual politics have been integral to the construction of a new revolutionary Cuban society.
Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press
Location:
African American Research Center, Library, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Notes:
298 p., Showing how revolutionary and prerevolutionary values coexist in a potent and sometimes contradictory mix, Hamilton addresses changing patterns in heterosexual relations, competing views of masculinity and femininity, same-sex relationships and homophobia, AIDS, sexual violence, interracial relationships, and sexual tourism. Hamilton's examination of sexual experiences across generations and social groups demonstrates that sexual politics have been integral to the construction of a new revolutionary Cuban society.
Ojo,Olatunji (Editor), Lovejoy,Paul E. (Editor), and Hunt,Nadine (Editor)
Format:
Book, Edited
Publication Date:
2012
Published:
London: I.B. Tauris
Location:
African American Research Center, Library, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Notes:
Most of the chapters in this book derive from conference papers presented at the Canadian Association for African Studies (CAAS) Annual Meeting and Conference held at Carleton University, Ottawa in May 2010., 224 p, Based on Jamaican and African archival sources, analysis demonstrates how many Africans coped by adopting a flexible identity in order to negotiate the cultural differences in African, European, and Islamic systems of slavery.
