225 p., This dissertation is a cultural history of Barbados since its 1966 independence. As a pivotal point in the Transatlantic Slave Trade of the 17th and 18th centuries, one of Britain's most prized colonies well into the mid 20th century, and, since 1966, one of the most stable postcolonial nation-states in the Western hemisphere, Barbados offers an extremely important and, yet, understudied site of world history. Barbadian identity stands at a crossroads where ideals of British respectability, African cultural retentions, U.S. commodity markets, and global economic flows meet. Focusing on the rise of Barbadian popular music, performance, and visual culture this dissertation demonstrates how the unique history of Barbados has contributed to complex relations of national, gendered, and sexual identities, and how these identities are represented and interpreted on a global stage. This project examines the relation between the global pop culture market, the Barbadian artists within it, and the goals and desires of Barbadian people over the past fifty years, ultimately positing that the popular culture market is a site for postcolonial identity formation.
268 p., This study used a Black feminist critical framework to examine the conditions that influence the production of black women's fiction during the postwar era (1945-60). The novels of Ann Petry, Dorothy West and Paule Marshall were studied as artifacts that were shaped by the cultural and political climate of this crucial period in American history. A survey was also conducted of their associations with members and organizations in the American Left to determine what impact their social activism had on their lives and art. It was determined that these writers' political engagement played a significant role in the creation of transformative narratives about the power of black women to resist oppression in all of its forms. As a consequence of their contribution to a rich black feminist literary tradition, these postwar black women fiction writers serve as important foremothers to later generations of black women artists.
220 p., Employs a black feminist diaspora literary lens to identify, define, trace, and speak to the African Diaspora as it functions in black women's diaspora fiction and informs our understanding of black women's diaspora identity. Considers three authors and novels by women of, in, and across the African Diaspora. The study centers on Sandra Jackson-Opoku's The River Where Blood Is Born as a primary site of analysis of diaspora formation and theorization, Dionne Brand's At the Full and Change of the Moon and Maryse Condé's Desirada as comparative textual and theoretical sites.
Kingston, Jamaica: University of the West Indies Press
Location:
African American Research Center, Library, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Notes:
252 p., Contents: Arriving, departing and arriving again -- In search of gender trails : archive, folklore and cultural memory -- Laying foundations : a patchwork gendered history of Frankfield -- The rural black Jamaican gender system : case study, Frankfield -- Storying gender through personal narratives -- A metaphor comes to life : service learning, HIV/AIDS and cross-cultural knowledge -- Reflections on the culture-gender spiral.
113 p., This action-oriented study explored the impact of creating residential learning communities at the University of the Virgin Islands (UVI) on the St. Croix campus. The focus of the study was whether academic and social success can be established through the development and design of residential learning communities. UVI is the only Historically Black College and University in the Caribbean. It offers undergraduate and graduate courses on all three of the islands within the United States Virgin Islands. The population of residential students on the St. Croix campus for fall 2011 was 80. In the fall 2011 four residential learning communities (male, female, leadership, math and science) were placed on the drawing board. This study involved 11 residential students who participated in three of the four communities as members of a focus group. Surveys and interviews made up the research method used in order to gather specific data and general information from the participants. It is concluded that the development of residential learning communities on the St. Croix campus of the University of the Virgin Islands is necessary, vital, and beneficial to the students and faculty.
This study examines the identity categories of gender and race in the Cuban context of the first thirty years of the Revolution and focuses on black and mulata women, in which both categories converge. In this work I analyze the literary discourse of the Afro-Cuban female poets between the 1960s and 1980s and discern the role of self-representation that each of these poets constructs within the framework of "being black" or "mulata" woman. Also, since gender and race are redefined by the dominant power, this project analyzes the political hegemonic discourse of the period in relation to race and gender, and illuminates its role in preserving racial stereotypes as well as the patriarchal normatives of gender.
Over the last two decades, scholars have investigated the two-way relationship between gender inequality on the one hand, and economic development and growth on the other. Research in this area offers new ways to address the economic stagnation and crisis developing countries have experienced over the last two decades. , and in important ways, constrains economic development and growth in the Caribbean region. It further explores the endogeneity of gender inequality to the macroeconomic policy environment. The article concludes with a discussion of economic policies that can promote a win-win outcome-greater gender equality and economic development and growth.
306 p., Investigates the shifts in gender constructions currently taking place in Jamaica, a peripheral nation-state, during a period which is characterized by hegemonic dissolution in the world-system. These shifts are defined by class- and gender-based conflicts over the norms, values and aesthetics associated with the traditional bourgeois classes. The fulcrum for investigation is Jamaica's Dancehall culture, which currently exhibits changes in the field of masculinity, in which clashes over the body occur constantly. These conflicts center around dress, gendered dancing styles and adornment.
116 p., Using Trinidadian writer Samuel Selvon's 1956 novel The Lonely Londoners as a textual example, argues that Selvon's presentation of the experiences of migrant working-class Afro-Caribbean men in post-war London opens up space for an unconventional reading of "queer masculinity" as shaped by the intersections of gender, race, class and sexuality under the influence of the socio-political ideology of the period both in the Caribbean and in Britain. The resulting form of masculine identification for these Afro-Caribbean migrants is constructed through an expression of hypersexuality where the pursuit of pleasure becomes an act of resistance to social marginalization.
Considers the extent to which feminism and gender studies courses adequately explore diverse erotic desires in the Caribbean region. It offers a comparative investigation of questionnaire responses from Black female undergraduate students in England and Jamaica to assess the connections between their perceptions about sexual differences.
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.
This article discusses different views about sustainable development, emphasizing -- on the basis of a survey conducted in Brazil, Mexico, and Cuba -- the role of rural women in food production and natural resource management, the strength of the rural women's movement in the conquest of rights, and the decisive participation of women in defining proposals for public policies that guarantee gender equality in rural areas. A brief comparative analysis leads us to conclude that the development model in the three countries still prioritizes the male figure in relation to land tenure, access to credit and purchase of equipment or other material resources, it is suggested that both in Cuba, a socialist country, and in Mexico and Brazil, capitalist counties, the assumptions of social policies directed to rural female workers should take into account the basic needs of rural women to guarantee a more humane and sustainable development. Adapted from the source document.
277 p., Afro-Cuban (Santería ) drummers are trained ritual specialists in minority religious communities, initiated through secret rites into homosocial community groups. Historically, women and non-heteronormative men have been excluded from playing consecrated batá drums. This dissertation investigates how drummers construct the sensual and physical essence of musical sound around gender and sexual hierarchies in Afro-Cuban diasporic contexts (Havana, Miami, New York, and New Jersey). Drummers possess a theory of power based on concepts of how the feeling of aché (from Yoruban language, "the power to make things happen") is channeled during performance. Considers colonial-period Afro-Cuban social societies (cabildos ) as a source of possible residual patriarchal authority in the current male drumming cult community.
112 p., On Wednesday October 11th, 1865, a group of malcontented men and women in Jamaica, a British colony, began a rebellion whose aftershocks echoed well beyond the confines of Morant Bay, the small town where it started. Although the initial rebellion lasted for just a few days, its brutal suppression and the implications that it held for the British Empire sparked a controversy that touched on some of the deepest fissures in British society at that time. At its heart, the rebellion highlighted the contested notions of power within the British imperial system. In Jamaica, disenfranchised local peasants rebelled to challenge a political system that excluded and oppressed them.
250 p., This dissertation has focused on the intertextual relationship between Tituba in I, Tituba...Black Witch of Salem and Veronica in Waiting for Happiness by Maryse Condé, primarily around different figures of otherness such as birth, race, sexuality, and space in which Tituba and Veronica are victims, according to their respective reference groups. Tituba is a child born out of wedlock because Abena, her mother, was raped by an English sailor on the Atlantic coast. This would rightfully translate into the hatred her mother has for her. Veronica was born into a family of two girls when her parents were in fact expecting a boy. Race and space are also lacking elements with the protagonists. This would explain their spatial instability depending on the course of the novels. Enslaved in different families, Tituba was imprisoned for witchcraft in Salem and was later hanged in her native Barbados due to lack of real space. Veronica on the other hand sought asylum in France where she returns after her disappointment of wanting ancestral roots in Africa.
155 p., Explores the interweaving of colonial and post-colonial British and Jamaican Laws and the interpretive legalities of sexuality, compulsory heterosexuality, and queerness. The research project begins by exploring the ways in which the gendered colonial law produces black sexualities as excessive and in need of discipline while also noticing how Caribbean peoples negotiate and subvert these legalities. The work then turns to dancehall and its enmeshment with landscape (which reflects theatre-in-the round and African spiritual ceremonies), psycho scape (which retains African uses of marronage and pageantry as personhood), and musicscape (which deploys homophobia to demand heterosexuality), in order to tease out the complexities of Caribbean sexualities and queer practices.