Discusses the relationship between economic conditions and discourses surrounding partner choice in Cuba. Holds that economic changes caused by the collapse of the Soviet Union have necessitated strategies economic survival which differ from previously-held ideals of romantic partnerships. Suggests that anxieties surrounding changes in gender and kinship relations also reflect broader concerns about Cuba's social and economic hierarchies and the future of socialism.
Considers how dance, rhythm and the body become forces of social differentiation. In Cuba, many Afro-Cuban cultural practices, such as rumba, have been subject to social and spatial exclusion. In this context, sites such as the home, the street and the family emerge as highly significant for the learning and performance of Afro-Cuban music and dance.
"[Examines] le développement historique et socio-économique des Caraïbes dans le roman de Paule Marshall: The Chosen Place, The Timeless People (publié en 1963), à travers la relation de deux femmes, l'une noire, l'autre blanche, dont les destins et l'héritage sont liés à l'histoire particulière des relations de genre caractéristiques de l'esclavage et de la vie sur les plantations." (Refdoc.fr)
Looks at the performance of tomboy identity in Joan Anim-Addo's collection of poetry Janie, Cricketing Lady and Margaret Cezair-Thompson's novel The Pirate's Daughter. Argues that the ongoing affects of colonialism and patriarchy in the islands of Grenada and Jamaica, shape the life narratives. To understand the way in which affect can be expressed through tomboyism in Caribbean societies, it is necessary to look at color and class alongside gender in the context of Caribbean creolization.
"In this paper the process of creolisation will be considered through analysis of the wills and testaments of African, black and mixed-race women in nineteenth-century Salvador da Bahia, Brazil. As primary sources these will and testaments provide evidence concerning material, social and cultural markers of creolisation." [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR];
An essay on the gendered aspects of war and revolution in Cuba and Nicaragua. According to the author, militarized violence in these states was hierarchical and ultimately created alternative privileged masculinities despite revolutionary movements' ideological commitments to equality. Details related to racial and gender binaries are also presented.
Beauty is constantly lived and incorporated as a meaningful social category in Brazil and intersects with racialised and gendered ways of belonging to the Brazilian nation. Article shows how middle-class women self-identifying as black embody and experience beauty and how, through practices and discourses centered on physical appearance, they both reinforce and challenge broader social and racial inequalities in Brazil.
The sexualisation of racially subordinated people has been linked to the exercise of power. This article focuses on an aspect of subordination related to the condition of being a servant, and the ‘domestication’ and ‘acculturation’ that domestic service implies in societies where black and indigenous people are often linked to ‘backwardness’. Perceived racial otherness, class subordination, gender, age and domesticated servitude together reinforce an erotic image of sexual availability, particularly in younger women.
Focuses on the role of women and women's bodies in Trinidad Carnival. Information on the book 'Afro-Creole: Power, Opposition and Play in the Caribbean; Views on the Janus-faced effect of women's bodily performance; Collusion of global capitalism in the marketing and commodification of Caribbean popular culture.
203 p., This research sterns from twelve months of ethnographic research with Haitian migrant women who reside in Batey Sol , a former sugar-company labor camp located along the Línea Noroeste (northwest line) linking the Dominican Rebulic's border town of Dajabón with the urban center of Santiago. The multi-sited study considers the larger network of political, social, and economic structures and relations of power in which these women are positioned in their daily lives and through their livelihoods as market women.
Explores contestations over the reality and complexity of educational underachievement and whether this relates to broader political–economic marginalization (or privileging) of boys. Argues that boys’ underachievement should neither be ignored nor be the exclusive focus of attention and that a move from ‘boys’ underachievement’ to a broader analysis of ‘gender and education’ is needed, to place the debate in a gender relational context.
"This paper examines the tradition of misogynistic picong or satire in calypso songs recorded as artists moved from Trinidad to Britain during the period immediately after World War II. I argue that, while these traditions of anti-woman representation began in conflicts around race and class inequalities within Caribbean culture during the Depression, they came to take on an anti-colonial animus when translated to the mother country. Calypso singers' tales of their exploits with hapless wealthy Englishwomen thus functioned not simply to express superiority over other men from the Caribbean, but to challenge the forms of racial subordination that black male migrants encountered in Britain during the 1940s and 1950s." --The Author
"Cuba has represented metaphorically the ability of an oppressed people to challenge imperialism and colonialism," Marable explained. "In the political imagination of Black America, Cuba represents the radical possibility of fundamental social change. One of the key questions now is -- what does Cuba represent for Black America in this period of political transition?"
391 p., Argues for a revisionist periodization of neo-slave literature as well as a reorientation away from a US-based literary history that has been dominated by the mode of realism and toward a more comparative view defined by the geography, history, and aesthetics of the Caribbean. The canon of slave narratives was first dominated by the assumption both of narrative as the major and sometimes only genre of slave writing and of a linear temporality emplotting the journey from slavery to an attenuated freedom. In contrast, most twentieth-century neo-slave narratives rethink the genre from the twin standpoints of temporality and narratology: how both the "neo" and "narrative" descriptors have produced an entrenched and unnecessarily restrictive view of this evolving archive.
344 p., Explores continuities and transformations in the construction of Afro-Cuban womanhood in Cuba between 1902 and 1958. A dynamic and evolving process, the construction of Afro-Cuban womanhood encompassed the formal and informal practices that multiple individuals--from lawmakers and professionals to intellectuals and activists to workers and their families--established and challenged through public debates and personal interactions in order to negotiate evolving systems of power. The dissertation argues that Afro-Cuban women were integral to the formation of a modern Cuban identity. Studies of pre-revolutionary Cuba dichotomize race and gender in their analyses of citizenship and national identity formation. As such, they devote insufficient attention to the role of Afro-Cuban women in engendering social transformations.
Addresses the place of Carnival in the creation of a national cultural narrative in Trinidad and Tobago and examines the role that such a narrative plays in the formation of a coherent national cultural identity
221 p., Carmen (Mérimée 1845, Bizet 1875), the story about the (in)famous Gypsy dancer from Spain, is the second most adapted narrative in the history of world cinema, with over eighty global versions officially recognized to date. Despite the global reach of the Carmen phenomenon, many scholars claim that this tale has hardly been reworked in Spanish America and never in the Caribbean. Following Carmen from Spain to Spanish America, the author shows how the template of Carmen (a love story that reveals the racio-ethnic and gender stratification in Spain) has been artfully but unsuspectingly reappropriated and "creolized" in postcolonial Cuba in the controversial film María Antonia (1991) by Afro-Cuban filmmaker Sergio Giral, based on the landmark play María Antonia (1964) by Afro-Cuban playwright Eugenio Hernández Espinosa.
