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.
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.
African American Research Center, Library, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Notes:
517 p., Written specifically to satisfy the syllabus requirements of the Caribbean Advanced Proficiency Examinations (CAPE) and in particular the unit Development and Social change.
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.
Elaborates one Black queer subject's sense of self and gestures toward the potential theoretical intervention this subjectivity poses. It approaches a wider geo-conceptual metaphor for the transdisciplinarity required in order to speculate Black and queer at once.
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.
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.
85 p., This thesis is an attempt to explore the role that musical texts and physical spaces played in the development of a Rastafari public in post-colonial Jamaica. By examining theories of public formation outlined in Jürgen Habermas' The Structural Transformation The study positions the Rasta text (through Nyahbinghi ceremonies and the act of 'reasoning') as a self-authenticating, oppositional discourse which functions as a critique of normative constructions of reason. By tracing the musical text through Pinnacle, grounation ceremonies in Trenchtown yards, Soundsystems and Dancehalls, and recording studios, an understanding of the ways in which the Rasta text occupies both self-authenticating and oppositional positions simultaneously can be achieved.
Focuses on discourses of queer subjectivity, Maroon identity, and their relationship to Caribbean nationalism. A key aspect of the argumentis the idea that both queerness and marronage are marked by complex insider/outsider identity positions that resist and complicate binarist discourses of belonging and unbelonging.
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.
