"A single highway connects the Caribbean province of Limón to mainstream society in the highlands of Costa Rica. This paper explores the ways in which that highway affects the status hierarchy of mainstream society in Costa Rica, and how the construction of whiteness as an unexamined racial qualifier for total social incorporation constrains the perception of blacks as social liminars and blackness as a state of communitas. The argument elaborates the work of Victor Turner on ritual liminality to suggest the structural ambiguity of Afro-Latin Americans in the context of Costa Rica." (author"
Focuses on black women's experiences of the annual African-Caribbean carnival in St. Paul's, Bristol, as a potential site of resistance. Looks at how black women challenge conceptions of space on three levels: nationally, locally and within the street. These three spatial levels are permeated by notions of resistance: resistance to dominant notions of Englishness, to representations of place, and to gender roles. Focuses on carnival's potential to contest hegemonic discourses, to denaturalise them and to expose them as partial.
"This research paper investigates the effect political institutions have on black racial identity. In particular, I study individual inculcation in contexts where political institutions institutionalize either of two forms of racial social structures - a pigmentocracy (the Dominican Republic), or the rule of hypodescent (the US South), and the effect such inculcation has on black racial identity." [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR];
