African American Research Center, Library, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Notes:
;, 300 p., Examines how Haitian diaspora writers, artists, and musicians address black masculinity through the Haitian Creole concept of gwo negs, or "big men". This work confronts the gendered, sexualized, and racialized boundaries of America's diaspora communities and openly resist "domestic" imperialism that targets immigrants, minorities, and gays.
500 p., Explains the rise of a culture of racial silence in a time of heightening racial exclusion in Cuba at the turn of the twentieth century. Employing a case study of Cienfuegos, a port city on the south-central coast of the island, the author examines gendered articulations of inequality among Cuban separatists between the outbreak of the war of independence in 1895 and the inauguration of the Cuban republic in 1902. It is argued that Cuban struggles for political power in the wake of the American military intervention (1898) and military occupation (1899-1902) fundamentally transformed separatist visions of citizenship, increasingly restricting its boundaries along racial lines.
Quito, Ecuador: Abya-Yala : Agence canadienne de développement international
Location:
African American Research Center, Library, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Notes:
436 p., Cómo han construido y construyen sus identidades étnicas y de género las mujeres y hombres negros del norte de Esmeraldas?, es la pregunta central de investigación que se plantea la autora. Sobre la base de un enfoque integrado de varias corrientes críticas del pensamiento social y combinando la investigación bibliográfica y el trabajo de campo en dos comunidades representativas, la autora resuelve la pregunta planteada inicialmente.
Around the beginning of the 20th century the codes for representing masculinity in opera began to change. This essay focuses on how the changing codes of masculinity in leading male roles are calibrated differently for white European characters and nonwhite characters with non-European ancestry (for example, African American, Caribbean, Moorish, or African) and shows how masculinity and heroism are brought together differently for black and non-black characters. The first section examines Giuseppe Verdi's Otello (1887) and focuses on a critical moment near the end of the opera that links orchestral developments in Italy at the end of the 19th century with the way Verdi dramatizes Otello's vicious murder of Desdemona. A broader overview considers four operas written in the first half of the 20th century: Berg's Wozzeck (1925), Krenek's Jonny spielt auf (1927), Gershwin's Porgy and Bess (1935), and Britten's Peter Grimes (1945). Two of these operas (Wozzeck and Peter Grimes) feature white European title characters, while the other two feature African American protagonists.
448 p., This applied anthropology study, guided by a feminist perspective and in particular, Black Feminist Thought is an outgrowth of an evaluation study of the Partnership for Peace Program (PFP) in Grenada, West Indies. The PFP is a Caribbean-specific model that was built into a sixteen-week cycle program by the United Nations Entity for Gender Equality and Empowerment of Women (UNWomen). Since 2005, the PFP has been geared towards Grenadian men, who have used violence against women to express their masculine identities. PFP focuses exclusively on rehabilitating male perpetrators with a goal to protect the human rights of women. This research evaluated the PFP program, using qualitative and quantitative methods to measure the program's impact based on the behavioral changes that male participants adopted to avoid violence against women.
African American Research Center, Library, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Notes:
229 p, Incorporating postcolonial theory, West Indian literature, feminist theory, and African American literary criticism, Making Men carves out a particular relationship between the Caribbean canon--as represented by C. L. R. James and V. S. Naipaul, among others--and contemporary Caribbean women writers such as Jean Rhys, and Jamaica Kincaid, Paule Marshall, and Michelle Cliff, who now live in the United States.
African American Research Center, Library, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Notes:
188 p., Explores Jamaican masculinity through the male-dominated dancehall space that is at once a celebration of the marginalized poor and also a challenge to social inequality. Using the major masculine debates that are articulated in dancehall music and culture, Donna Hope explores the transition of Jamaican masculinity in the 21st century.
St. Augustine, Trinidad and Tobago: University of the West Indies
Location:
African American Research Center, Library, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Notes:
252 p., Traces the construction of diverse masculinities in the fictional representations of post-colonial Anglophone Caribbean literature focusing on Afro-, Indo-, and Eurocentric ethnicities and subjectivities.
The links between social connectedness and the health experiences of men have been a neglected focus for research. Findings indicate that African-Caribbean and white working-class fathers, in the United Kingdom, were involved in solitary ways of feeling, thinking, and acting to deal with the vulnerability associated with health concerns, the psychological experience of stress, and difficulties in personal relationships. Those solitary experiences were associated, within men's stories, with conservative and complicit forms of masculinity.
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.
200 p., An interdisciplinary project that combines cultural studies, film, gender, and postcolonial studies to investigate Afro-Caribbean models of masculinity in film and literature. The project details the ways in which imperialist phallocentric masculinity is valorized within African American cinema and exported to the Caribbean where it is mimicked and valorized. Secondly, it introduces Afro-Caribbean masculinity into the scholarly discussion of African American masculinities started by several African American cultural critics such as Mark Anthony Neal and bell hooks. Both of these prominent scholars in African American studies criticize the construction of African American masculinity as presented in African American culture. They, and others, call for a more progressive Black masculinity, one that supports Black feminism and fights homophobia. Much of their critique also applies to Afro-Caribbean culture, which has been strongly influenced by African American culture in regard to the traumatizing transition between boyhood and manhood which has great influence on Black males perspectives on feminism and homophobia. hook's critique in particular challenges the passive acceptance of "soul murder" or, in other words, silent acceptance of trauma as rites of passage into manhood for African American men.
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.
Examines how Connecticut-born reggaetón artist Notch incorporates oratorical, visual, and musical cues in his music video, Qué te pica (What's itching you?), to establish connections between Latino and Caribbean communities in the U.S. These communities have typically been disavowed by hegemonic racial categories that distinguish between them. While Notch’s music disrupts these particular racial hierarchies, he also maintains hetero-normative patriarchal relations in his video. An analytic, Afro-Latino space is proposed to account for the ways that reggaetón as a musical genre, and Notch more specifically, unsettle certain distinctions between blackness and Latinidad, while simultaneously relying on stereotypes of black hypermasculinity.
