African American Research Center, Library, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Notes:
203 p., Argues for grounding the concept of global subaltern resistance in the legacy of the 1966 Tricontinental in which delegates from the liberation movements of 82 nations came together in Havana, Cuba to form an alliance against imperialism. This alliance, called the Organization of Solidarity of the Peoples of Africa, Asia and Latin America (OSPAAAL) quickly became the driving force of international political radicalism and the primary engine of its cultural production. Because the Tricontinental represents the extension into the Americas of the anti-imperialist union of Afro-Asian nations begun at the 1955 Bandung Conference, it points to a moment in which a diverse range of radicalist writers and artists in the Americas began interacting with its discourse. By tracing the circulation of the Tricontinental's ideology in its cultural production and in related texts from Third Cinema, Cuban Revolutionary film, the Nuyorican Movement, and writings by Young Lords and Black Power activists, Beyond the Color Curtain outlines how tricontinentalists laid the groundwork for a theory of power and resistance that is resurfacing in the contemporary notion of the Global South.
227 p., Considers the often-silenced, tangible traces that the Haitian Revolution and radical anti-slavery have left in the greater Caribbean as they emerge in contemporary cultural productions. The author looks at national trends in the Dominican Republic, Cuba and Jamaica in order to formulate an understanding of the uses of gendered images of slavery and blackness in modern nation-building campaigns. Critically assesses what is left out of these narratives and how these gaps serve specific purposes. Argues for the centrality of the Caribbean in any true understanding of the history of modernity and the contemporary nation-state by investigating the after-shocks of the Haitian Revolution and of radical anti-slavery.
75 p., The aim of this project is two-fold: to discuss the limits of Frantz Fanon's postcolonial theories, and to then present a possible model for turning "the `thing' colonized [into] a new man" (Wretched 2) by liberating "him" from Fanon's desire for inclusion. Or, to put this in other terms, this investigation seeks to highlight one of the most limiting factors in Fanonian postcolonial theory: Fanon's grounding in European humanism.
205 p., Analyzes the poetry of the African American Langston Hughes and the Jamaican Louise Bennett during the 1940s. Through an examination of the unique similarities of their poetic projects, namely their engagement of performance to build their audiences, their experiments with poetic personae to represent vernacular social voices, their doubleness as national and transnational figures, their circulation of poetry in radio and print journalism and their use of poetry as pedagogy to promote reading, this dissertation establishes a new perspective on the role of poetry in decolonizing language practices. While Hughes and Bennett are often celebrated for their representation of oral language and folk culture, this project reframes these critical discussions by drawing attention to how they engage performance to foster an embodied form of reading that draws on Creole knowledge systems.
