African American Research Center, Library, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Notes:
166 p., Gives a comprehensive analysis of the literary and theoretical discourse on race, culture, and identity by Francophone and Caribbean writers beginning in the early part of the twentieth century and continuing into the dawn of the new millennium. Examining the works of Patrick Chamoiseau, Raphael Confiant, Aime Cesaire, Leopold Senghor, Leon Damas, and Paulette Nardal, the author traces a move away from the preoccupation with African origins and racial and cultural purity, toward concerns of hybridity and fragmentation in the New World or Diasporic space.
Las mujeres negras y mulatas de La Habana de las décadas de 1830 y 1840 "negociaron" su lugar en la sociedad Habanera. Ellas negociaron su inserción en todos los espacios de la ciudad, desde los públicos, como los espacios de la ley, hasta los más íntimos, como los espacios que forjaron con su propia sexualidad. En gran parte estas negociaciones estuvieron enmarcadas dentro de su papel decisivo como agentes mediadoras entre negros y blancos: como esposas, amantes, maestras, nodrizas, cuidanderas y sirvientas, pero también como dueñas de propiedad, empresarias y perseguidoras de sus propias causas legales. Ellas negociaron su participación social y económica en la ciudad a través de sus prácticas diarias, a menudo al margen de reglas urbanas y de tradiciones sociales. Estas prácticas estuvieron en tenso y continuo diálogo con los discursos de las elites modernizadoras tanto criollas como peninsulares. Tales reformadores, que consideraron la creciente participación de estas mujeres en la vida diaria como uno de los aspectos más desordenados de la ciudad, desarrollaron fuertes discursos de orden social y reformas urbanas con el propósito de disciplinar la ciudad en crecimiento. Muchos de estos discursos estuvieron orientados a establecer límites sociales y raciales más claramente delineados (y racionalizados) que trataran de contener, si no las actividades mismas de estas mujeres, por lo menos su influencia en la población capitalina. Fue en este diálogo, siempre desigual y muchas veces violento, que se fue dibujando la geografía moderna de La Habana. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR];
"On the basis of Bastide's Les Amériques noires, this book review dwells on the memory of slavery and of African origins among black people in the New World. It focuses on the everyday as well as literary identity constructs presented in two recent books about Afro-Colombians and Creoles in Martinique." (author)
"Any attempt to trace the many resonances that historically have been attached to the creole figure in Caribbean literature and culture will be inflected by the long and pervading presence of colonialism in the region and its attendant corollary of hierarchical social separation and difference based on perceptions of race. Indeed, the ambivalent desire and subjective misrecognition that lay at the heart of historical writing about colonialism and racism have tended to frame the issues of monstrosity and exclusion that produced the creole as part and parcel of wider colonial discourses. Thus, the shifting and increasingly unstable inscription of the creole figure echoes, in a certain sense, certain critical ambiguities of politics and temporality that color the colonial encounter and its aftermath. Specifically, in the contemporary English- and French-speaking Caribbean, the multiplicity, displacement, and creative instability that undergird creole-driven theories of postcolonial performance have supplanted this category's suspect beginnings as colonialism's model for the fearfully unnameable and unplaceable hybrid monstrosity, and now increasingly shape the substance of much of the artistic and creative work emerging from the region." --The Author
African American Research Center, Library, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Notes:
v, 174 leaves ; 29 cm., This novel is a contemporary novel that deals with the history of france; "UMI:9959638."/ Includes bibliographical references ( 167-174)./ Reproduction: Photocopy./ Ann Arbor, Mich. :/ UMI,/ 2000./ v, 174 ; 21 cm.
African American Research Center, Library, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Notes:
309 p., Drawing from Haitian Vodou and New Orleanian Voudou and from Cuban and South Floridian Santería, as well as from Afro-Baptist (Caribbean, Geechee, and Bahamian) models of encounters with otherness, this book reemplaces deep-southern texts within the counterclockwise ring-stepping of a long Afro-Atlantic modernity. Includes "Down to the Mire : Travels, Shouts & Fe Chauffe, Balanse, Swing : Saint Domingue Refugees in the Govi of New Orleans."
409 p., By exploring how colonists and enslaved folk migrated across island boundaries, manipulated imperial tensions, and organized acts of collective dissent, this dissertation attempts to demonstrate the relationship between space, power, and imperial governance in the British Leeward Islands from the time of transnational colonization through their ascendency as black majorities. It examines the ways British empire makers struggled to turn a series of closely interlinked islands stretching from Guadeloupe to the Virgin Islands into a unified colony and how this effort was challenged by the development of a regional black identity that linked slaves across island and imperial boundaries in the early eighteenth century.
The work of Haitian author Jacques Stephen Alexis is replete with examples of characters caught in the dilemmas of exile. The author focuses on Alexis's characters who go through a "true" expatriation, a movement out of Haiti and into another country, and considers how the various experiences of expatriation are represented, as well as how the presence of the Haitian exiles impacts the host country. Taking examples from Alexis's novel Compère Général Soleil, Monro argues that the Haitian exiles unwittingly, though inevitably, disrupt the illusion of oneness of national identity and culture and become a subversive force, creolizing culture in the place of exile, the Dominican Republic. This cultural creolization in turn is a threat to the monocultural, totalizing political discourses of the host country, it is argued.;
