Browsing by Author "Baker, Lee"

At the heart of "American Realities, Diasporic Dreams" lies the following question: How and why do people generate longings for diasporic experience, and what might this have to do with nationally-specific affective and political economies of race, gender, and age? This dissertation focuses on the women of Girlfriend Tours International (GFT), a regionally and socio-economically diverse group of Americans, who are also members of the virtual community at www.Jamaicans.com. By completing online research in their web-community, and multi-sited ethnographic research in multiple cities throughout the U.S. and Jamaica, I investigate how this group of African-American women makes sense of the paradoxical nature of their hyphenated-identities, as they explore the contentious relationship between "Blackness" and "Americanness."

This dissertation examines how these African-American women use travel and the Internet to cope with their experiences of racism and sexism in the United States, while pursuing "happiness" and social belonging within (virtual and territorial) diasporic relationships. Ironically, the "success" of their diasporic dreams and travels is predicated on how well they leverage their national privilege as (African) American citizens in Jamaica. Therefore, I argue that these African-American women establish a complex concept of happiness, one that can only be fulfilled by moving--both virtually and actually--across national borders. In other words, these women require American economic, national, and social capital in order to travel to Jamaica, but simultaneously need the spiritual connection to Jamaica and its people in order to remain hopeful and happy within the national borders of the U.S. Their pursuit of happiness, therefore, raises critical questions that encourage scholars to rethink how we ethnographically document diasporic longings, and how we imagine their relationships to early 21st century notions of the "American Dream."

This dissertation is the first study of this length to examine the ways adult African American men build community. It is also a new attempt to describe the pedagogical approaches these men use as educators, and to theorize how their life experiences and personal style impact their work in the classroom. The study centers on a group of African American football coaches, and expands from that critical site to the personal and professional lives of the educators on that staff.

Though Black men are often assumed to be emotionally inexpressive, I find that the coaches I work with expressed their most intimate emotion to select groups of trusted partners. These individuals actively built communities of love and support through processes of racial vetting and personal character evaluation, and took extended periods of time to develop close friendships. After reviewing the ways in which the social sciences have generally regarded Black males with varying degrees of contempt, fear and pity, I examine the ways the game of football and the "consensual violence" the football community fostered help build, rather than deconstruct, personal bonds. I use examples of roughhousing and interpersonal confrontation as ways to talk about how, contrary to much of the scholarship on violence in sports, aggression can lead to intimacy.

In similar fashion, the coach-educators of Eastside High approached teaching as an exercise underpinned by a need to be brutally honest, or "real," with their "kids." I found that these coaches were critical of their colleagues that insisted upon anything but honesty with students, and championed realistic expectations for students as a key to effective pedagogy. These educators also articulated the importance of engaging students from a communal perspective, particularly in an educational environment that at times can be openly hostile to "at risk" students. While these teachers and staff were often critical of youth culture in very specific ways, they also tried to create spaces for their students to express themselves, even in counter-cultural ways. Lastly, the coaches of Eastside High postulated teacher burnout as a pressing issue that should be at the center of considerations for educational reform. They argued that the testing regime had reduced their work as teachers to a numbers game, and insisted that the support of teachers should be central to systemic reform.