Browsing by Subject "Caribbean studies"
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Item Open Access Anticipating Freedom: Slave Rebellion, Amelioration, and Emancipation in Barbados, 1816-1838(2022) Williams, KristinaAnticipating Freedom explores the numerous ways enslaved and freedpeople shaped the politics and policies of gradual emancipation in the British Empire, using Barbados as a case study. It binds antislavery debates, legislative reforms, and slave resistance into one conceptual frame to reveal the processes that informed the British Parliament’s decision to pass the Emancipation Act of 1833, thereby conditionally freeing thousands of enslaved men, women, and children across the British Caribbean. As a major sugar-producing colony for the British Empire, Barbados offers a unique context for studying emancipation in the Atlantic World. At first glance, the prospect of freedom seemed impossible due to the planters' utter dependence on slave labor. Still, emancipation in Barbados was achieved through the unyielding determination of enslaved people to resist their captivity and the antislavery legislation initiated by abolitionists in the British Parliament. Hence the project is arranged both chronologically and thematically. It begins with Bussa’s Rebellion of 1816 — the only large-scale slave insurrection in the history of Barbados — and its impact on British Parliamentary reforms designed to lessen some of the coercive aspects of slavery during the 1820s. Then, I examine the rise of slave resistance in the months leading up to Emancipation Day and their effect on the Emancipation Act of 1833. My dissertation concludes with a discussion on the implementation of conditional freedom known as ‘Apprenticeship’ in 1834 and the factors that led to its premature demise in 1838. Anticipating Freedom argues that the covert and explicit means through which men and women of African descent resisted enslavement influenced the British Parliament’s decision to implement an intermediate period between slavery and absolute freedom in Barbados. This revelation is significant because it broadens our understanding of what factors were taken into consideration during the antislavery debates between the abolitionists, planters, Members of Parliament, and Barbados legislators. Moreover, by prioritizing the wants, needs, and desires of enslaved and freedpeople in Barbados, we step away from romantic notions often associated with emancipation to focus on the quotidian realities of a society no longer ruled by slave labor.
Item Open Access Caribbean Iconographies of Cultural Nationalism: Haiti, Cuba, Puerto Rico(2020) Dulceany, Roger DavidCaribbean Iconographies of Cultural Nationalism: Haiti, Cuba, Puerto Rico traces a chronological evolution of images circulating between the Caribbean and the United States demonstrating the intersection of religion and politics. I argue that these representations constitute prime examples of the Caribbean struggle for decolonization and self-determination. I focus my investigation on select examples from three Antillian nations to theorize the iconophilic and affective dimensions of their corresponding cultural nationalisms, especially in relation to resisting colonialism and imperialism. From the Haitian Revolution to the first US occupation of Cuba to the current aftermath of Hurricane María in Puerto Rico, I examine the mechanisms of power relations at play in the region as understood through the lens of iconography and Caribbean thought. I accomplish this through an analysis of particular images and related texts, a foundational novel, a painting, a series of photographs and postcards, and contemporary public murals with the use of methodologies related to cultural and visual studies, Caribbean and decolonial thought, theories of affect and iconography, historical and archival analysis, and theologies of Afro-Caribbean religions.
Item Open Access Carnival Is Woman!: Gender, Performance, and Visual Culture in Contemporary Trinidad Carnival(2009) Noel, Samantha A.While great strides have been made in the study of Trinidad Carnival, there has yet to be a robust inquiry into how women have contributed to its evolution. One major reason for this shortcoming is that the dominant cultural discourse relies on a reductive
dichotomy that recognizes the costumes created prior to the 1970s as creative and those made after the 1970s as uncreative. This arbitrary division of the costume aesthetic reflects a distinct anti-feminist bias that sees women's spirited emergence in Carnival
territory in the 1970s as apolitical.
My dissertation exposes this dilemma, and seeks to undermine this
interpretation, by its focus on how women's bodies, their presentation, and their acknowledgment of the body's potential for non-verbal articulation impacted the evolution of performance practices and the costume aesthetic in Trinidad Carnival. I
explore how the predominance of women in Carnival since the 1970s and the bikinibased costume aesthetic that complements this change is suggestive of women's urgent need to manipulate the body as an aesthetic medium and site of subversion. Critical to
this argument is a close examination of certain female figures who have had a sustainable presence in Trinidad Carnival's history. My project acknowledges the jamette, a working class woman who defied Victorian tenets of decorum in preindependence
Trinidad. This figure has been overlooked in the predominant scholarship of Trinidad Carnival history. Another section of my dissertation explores the influence of the Jaycees Carnival Queen competition. Women of mostly European descent participated in this Carnival-themed beauty pageant that remained popular until the
1970s. I also examine the legend of soucouyant (an old woman who turns into a ball of fire at night and sucks the life blood from unsuspecting victims) and how this figure can be deployed to reinterpret Jouvay (the ritual that marks the beginning of Trinidad Carnival).
Item Open Access Imaginario Erótico Decolonial Kairibeafroxeri(2016) FerreraBalanquet, RaulLa disertación no define un campo disciplinario, ni una construcción formal, ni una metodología que intente llegar a una verdad racional. Se desobedece la linealidad epistémica occidental y el enfoque en un tema específico. El manuscrito opta por navegar a través de rutas relacionales en conversación desde, con y entre varios saberes y experiencias personales, tribales y comunitarias. Localizamos el andar decolonial en un territorio expandido donde incorporamos una geo-‐‑política trazada en la continuidad que ofrece la ancestralidad lingüística y cultural entre maya, seminole y loko, esta última conectada a la lengua madre arahuaca que se extiende desde la región amazónica del este de Los Andes, norte de Argentina y Paraguay desde 9000 A.C.
Al hilvanar experiencias y saberes otros, se establecen conexiones y rupturas más cercanas a los que entendimos como cosmos-‐‑existencia y cosmoconvivencia en los imaginarios indígenas, afro y US latinxs. La disertación no podrá abarcar todas las rutas y encrucijadas que propician la decolonialidad del imaginario erótico kairibe, pero transito caminos sacbes desde donde los trazos de la memoria y la experiencia sanan la opresión colonial y nutren el andar del espíritu por los saberes inscritos en los relatos de creación indígenas y afro caribe, la oralidad de las lenguas maya yucateca y loko, la expresión de varixs creadores decoloniales, y las conversaciones e intercambios sociales con algunos de los miembros del proyecto decolonial.
A partir de la propuesta metodológica de Linda Tuhiwai Smith, en la cual se afirma que las metodologías indígenas son el resultado de la elaboración de un tejido, este manuscrito entrelaza una plataforma crítica, una encrucijada de saberes donde confluyen la variabilidad de los proyectos metodológicos propuesto por Tuhiwai Smith (1999), el pensamiento fronterizo de Gloria Anzaldúa (1987), la corpo-‐‑política de Frantz Fanon (1987), la poética relacional de Edouard Glissant (1997), las pedagogía sagrada de Jacqui Alexander (2005), el desprendimiento, delinking de Walter D. Mignolo (2007), el poder erótico de Audre Lorde (1986), la transmodernidad de Enrique Dussel (2005) y la geopolítica del pensar propuesta por Catherine Walsh (2007).
Desde esta encrucijada de saberes, la disertación navega el racismo cognitivo eurocentrado, al mismo tiempo que efectúa el desligue epistémico y creativo hacia locaciones otras donde las experiencias y aprendizajes, conectados a las memorias ancestrales de lxs abuelxs, propician la decolonización del imaginario erótico kairibeafroxeri.
Item Open Access Imagined Islands: A Caribbean Tidalectics(2012) Llenín-Figueroa, Carmen BeatrizImagined Islands: A Caribbean Tidalectics confronts islands -at once as a problem, a concept, and a historical and mythical fact and product- by generating a tidalectical encounter between some of the ways in which islands have been imagined and used from without, primarily in the interest of the advancement of western capitalist coloniality, and from within, as can be gathered from Caribbean literatures. The perspective from without, predominantly based on negation, is explored in Section 1 using examples of islands in the Mediterranean, the Pacific, and the Atlantic, as well as a few canonical texts in various academic discourses. Section 2 discusses the perspective from within, an affirmative and creative counter-imagination on/of islands. Emerging from literary work by Derek Walcott, Edgardo Rodríguez Juliá, Édouard Glissant, and Alejo Carpentier, the chapters in Section 2 are organized around three key concepts associated with insularity -tropical light, the coast, and the sea/ocean- and the ways in which they force a rearrangement of enduring philosophical concepts: respectively, vision and sense perception, time and space, and history.
Imagined Islands' Introduction establishes, (1) the stakes of a project undertaken from an immanent perspective set in the Caribbean; (2) the method, inspired chiefly by Kamau Brathwaite's concept of tidalectics; (3) the epistemological problems posed by islands; (4) an argument for a different understanding of history, imagination, and myth inspired by Caribbean texts; and, (5) an overview of the academic debates in which Imagined Islands might make a significant contribution. The first section, "Islands from Without," comprising Chapter 1, provides an account of a few uses and imaginations of islands by capitalist coloniality as they manifest themselves both in the historical and the mythical imaginary realms. I focus on five uses and imaginations of islands (entrepôt island, sugar island, strategic island, paradise island, and laboratory island), with specific examples from the Mediterranean, the Pacific, and the Atlantic, and from five canonical texts ascribed to different disciplinary discourses: Plato's "Atlantis," Thomas More's Utopia, Daniel Defoe's Robinson Crusoe, Charles Darwin's The Origin of the Species, and Margaret Mead's Coming of Age in Samoa. I argue, on the one hand, that a dominant idea of the island based on negation (lack, dependency, boundedness, isolation, smallness, remoteness, among other characteristics) has coalesced in the expansionist and exploitative interests of capitalist coloniality, despite the fundamental promiscuity of the concept of "island." On the other hand, I find in the analyzed examples, especially in those of the mythical imaginary, residues in flight that remain open for creative reappropriation.
Imagined Islands' second section, "Islands from Within," encompassing Chapters 2 through 5, relocates the discussion within the Caribbean in order to argue that some of the region's literatures have produced a counter-imagination concerning insularity. This counter-imagination, resulting from an immanent and affirmative engagement with Caribbean islands, amounts to a way of thinking about and living the region and its possibilities in terms other than those of the dominant idea of the island. Each chapter opens with a historical and conceptual discussion of the ways in which light (Chapter 2), the coast (Chapters 3 and 4), and the sea/ocean (Chapter 5) have been imagined and deployed by capitalist coloniality, before turning to Caribbean literary texts as instances of a re-conceptualization of the aforementioned insular features and their concomitant rearrangement of apparently familiar philosophical concepts. Chapter 2 focuses on tropical light, vision, sense perception, Walcott's book-length poem Tiepolo's Hound, and Rodríguez Juliá's novel El espíritu de la luz. Chapter 3 turns to the insular coast, time, space, and the novels El siglo de las luces by Carpentier and The Fourth Century by Glissant. Chapter 5 goes out to sea and history with the help of Rodríguez Juliá's chronicles "El cruce de la Bahía de Guánica y otras ternuras de la Medianía" and "Para llegar a Isla Verde," as well as of sections from Glissant's Poetics of Relation and some of his poems from The Restless Earth. Finally, Imagined Islands' Coda points to some of the ripples this project produces for future study, and defends the urgent need to "live differently" the Caribbean archipelagoes.
Item Open Access Laboratorios-isla: Monstruos, enfermedades y farmacopeas literarias en el Caribe hispano(2018) Ugarte, Ana I.This dissertation examines how fiction from the 1950s to the present exposes the historical functioning of Caribbean territories as laboratories for political, economic, and scientific experimentation. Through close-readings of Puerto Rican and Cuban literary texts, I argue that the laboratory, as a biopolitical system of power legitimation, operates on the levels of knowledge, affect, and subjectivities. First, the authors I study denounce how medical and literary discourse intersect to create eugenic, homophobic, and patriarchal diagnoses, proposing instead counter-hegemonic forms of imagining (and experiencing) mental and physical health, corporeal difference, and healing processes. Second, the diverse works of fiction I examine revolve around the shared affect of fear, which is heightened through the anticipation of further testing. Ultimately, I show how the laboratory produces paradoxical forms of alterity for the test subjects—a method of trial and error relies on an othered subject who, at the same time, must be sufficiently similar to the experimenter in order to function as a reliable testing object. This investigation contributes to and opens up new interpretative frameworks for the fields of Caribbean and postcolonial studies by examining an understudied form of subalternity—i.e., the test subject—through a connection between literary genres, geographies, and historical periods, which are often explored in isolation. Chapters 2 and 3 identify several forms of monstrosity and illness in the narrative fictions of Virgilio Piñera and José Lezama Lima. I show how these authors foreground the monstrous body in order to problematize the cycles of political experimentation in Cuba, as well as the medical nature of the US occupation and interventionism in the first decades of the 20th century. Chapter 4 explores the narrative work of Puerto Rican-Dominican author Pedro Cabiya, proposing the category of “hypochondriac fiction,” which names an aesthetic space for the destabilization of biopolitics in the context of repeated medical experimentation on human beings in Puerto Rico. Chapter 5 looks into the work of Rafael Acevedo, José (Pepe) Liboy, and Jorge Enrique Lage. I address the role of paranoia in Cuban and Puerto Rican novels by revealing the counterintuitive transformation of science fiction—in many senses, the epitome of fantastic fabrications—into the ultimate guarantor of credibility. In the epilogue I explore the representation of healing processes in Mayra Santos Febres’ La amante de Gardel (2015).
Item Embargo “Make Me Live Long Enough to See Such Things”: Citizenship, Labor, and Population Politics in the Nineteenth-Century French Caribbean(2023) Allain, JacquelineThis dissertation centers on Antillean women’s brushes with the French colonial state in nineteenth-century Martinique and Guadeloupe. It argues that while nineteenth-century French Caribbean of African descent women were, by and large, ignored by colonial authorities—unsurprisingly, considered less-than-citizens and, more surprisingly, seldom targeted for or involved in interventions aimed at ‘moral uplift’—they found myriad ways to enact citizenship and forms of belonging. Close analysis of women’s encounters with colonial power in the French Antilles reveals the ways in which gender shaped the contours of women’s political subjectivities. Anchored and intervening in the broad, overlapping fields of Caribbean history, French imperial history, women’s and gender history, and labor history, this dissertation examines subaltern women’s political praxis as they engaged in the realm of reproduction writ large in the midst of their work in both plantation labor and non-plantation waged labor. I argue that, through these engagements, women often offered visions of home and citizenship that transcended the commodifying logics of slavery, racial capitalism, and colonialism.
Item Open Access Mapping Manioc: Grounded Relations in the Caribbean(2023) Bradley, Isabel“Mapping Manioc” looks in the ground, taking the dense, starchy, and lively materiality of a root tuber as a lens through which to read human relations of domination and reciprocity in the French colonial Caribbean. Borrowing fertile and intersecting methodologies from French and Francophone studies, Africana studies, ecopoetics, decolonial ecologies, food studies, geography, historical anthropology, and history of science, the project divests the vegetal of its connotations of lethargy to frame the manioc root as an active “plant witness” to historical tensions between colonial exploitation and practices of earth-based sustenance. In dialogue with anglophone theorists of the “Plantationocene,” recent criticism from France’s Outre-mer regions contends that present-day extractivist paradigms producing differential vulnerability to environmental harms stem from the racial taxonomies of plantation societies. This dissertation returns to the epochal shifts at the heart of French colonization in the Caribbean to uncover how one plant was harnessed to feed both the plantation’s devaluation of life and thriving configurations of human and nonhuman being beyond its reach.“Mapping Manioc” relies on a reading practice that breaches the surface of colonial archives to excavate the frictions between Indigenous and Afro/descended peoples’ nonextractive relations with a nurturing earth, on the one hand, and the exploitation of manioc’s carbohydrate calories to fuel settler colonialism and chattel slavery, on the other. This corpus attuned to plant liveliness spans a long eighteenth century, and consists of missionary accounts by Raymond Breton, Jean-Baptiste Labat, and others; lay travel narratives such as that of the anonymous mariner of Carpentras; botanical treatises and natural histories by figures like Guillaume Silvestre Delahaye; planters’ manuals, ships’ logbooks, habitation daybooks, and legal ordinances; and visual materials including engravings, watercolors, "plans d’habitation," and cartography. To evoke counterhistorical visions of human freedoms grounded in ecological flourishing, the project interweaves the colonial archive with Caribbean and Black feminist theorizations of geography and subjectivation; with perspectives from anthropology “beyond the human” and sensory ethnobotany; and with Caribbean literary and visual engagements, including novels by Édouard Glissant. Engaging these sources and artifacts, “Mapping Manioc” tracks embodied meetings of skin and starch across colonial Martinique, Guadeloupe, Saint-Domingue, and French Guiana. This approach routes ancestral life through plant life, attending to the patterns of existence of subjects who forged solidarities with nonhuman beings against plantation epistemologies and their devastating afterlives. By illuminating a genealogy of earthy resistance to colonial extractivism and dispossession, the project points to the role of ancestral food plants in resurgence, solidarity, and self-determination in the Outre-mers, foregrounding the contributions of French and Francophone studies to planetary climate justice, Caribbean climate resilience, and climate cuisine movements.
Item Embargo Representations of Black Womanhood in Cuban Literature (1882-1976)(2024) Lopez Madrigal, Ofelia del CarmenThis dissertation examines how Black womanhood has been reinscribed and used in Cuban literature to articulate ideas of race and nation across different historical periods and literary genres. I argue that political and literary elites reproduced stereotypical images of Black women rooted in the nation’s history slavery and nationalist ideologies of blanqueamiento (whitening) and mestizaje (miscegenation), while Afro-Cuban female authors who assumed a Black and female perspective contested this legacy by challenging dominant ideas of nation, race, and gender, and attributing agency and historical participation to women of African descent. Through a close-reading of narrative, poetry, and journalism, I analyze the reproduction and evolution of constructions and representations of the mulata and mujer negra in six works that follow a progression of time as Cuba goes through different historical periods: Cecilia Valdés (1882), Motivos de Son (1930) Songoro Cosongo (1931), West Indies Ltd. (1937) Parajes de una época (1976), and Minerva: Revista quincenal dedicada a la mujer de color (1888-1889). This research contributes to the field of race and literary studies in Cuba and the Hispanic Caribbean by situating the male, patriarchal, and hegemonic perspective of canonical authors in dialogue with the perspective of Afro-Cuban women authors who claimed their own voice as feminine and black. This subaltern perspective has been neglected in relation to the historical periods, literary genres, and canonical authors that I address in this dissertation, which scholars, until now, have solely analyzed in isolation. Chapter one studies the relationship between nation and black femininity in Cirilo Villaverde's novel Cecilia Valdés. I argue that the figure of the mulata fictionally recreates the rejection of racial heterogeneity, at a moment in the national-building process when reformistas and Creoles imagined a white Cuba free of the “black threat,” the African descendant population, prior to the rise of mestizaje as a nationalist discourse. Chapter two studies the figures of the mulata and the mujer negra in Nicolás Guillén’s Afrocubanist poetry collections, Motivos de Son, Sóngoro cosongo, and West Indies Ltd. I argue that the figures of the mulata and the mujer negra in Guillén’s poetry reproduce nineteenth-century portrayals of Black women by white and male writers embedded in the ideology of the mestizo nation. Chapter three examines the magazine Minerva: Revista quincenal dedicada a la mujer de color, and the poem “Mujer negra” by Nancy Morejón. I argue that the Black women writers of Minerva and Morejón’s poetry not only challenge long-standing patriarchal constructions of Black womanhood rooted in colonialism and enslavement, but attribute to Afro-Cuban women an active and leading role in the nation. While Minerva’s post-abolition texts re-imagine Black female identities outside of the prescribed roles of laborer and concubine, the protagonist of Morejón’s poem powerfully imagines an Afro-feminine subject who recovers lost memories of the African diaspora and repositions Black women from the margins to the very center of Cuban history.
Item Open Access Revolutionizing Modernities: Visualizing Utopia in 1960s Havana, Cuba(2015) Rivera, AlfredoIn 1967 a massive graphic print based on Cuban photographer Alberto Korda’s world famous image of Che Guevara was draped over the five-story Ministry of Interior Building in Havana’s Plaza de la Revolución. The print became the iconic image of the Cuban Revolution, reaching beyond its architectural surface into an international market of consumer-based goods. My dissertation is concerned with the ways in which Cuba’s architectural past was put to very different use by the Cuban Revolution, and how Cuban modernity was re-imagined in new architectural projects, in the governmentally supported visual arts, and in curatorial work which brought the fine and popular arts into Cuba’s new and re-inhabited spaces. Drawing from critical theory, formal analysis, and methodologies of art and architectural history along with visual studies, I explicate the ways in which art, design and architecture play a significant role in mediating a revolutionary mythology. I argue that national identity, or cubanidad, becomes reliant on such a mythology of revolution, defined by a Third World solidarity and Cuba’s position within a broader socialist world as much as it is by local elements.
My dissertation explores the history of the Cuban Revolution’s visual culture in six thematic chapters, looking at themes such as modernities, revolution, appropriation, utopia, propaganda, and postmodernity. Each chapter explores developments in the relationship between art and architecture, and situates 1960s Havana within Cuba’s broader history as a republic and a colony. Concerned with the role the visual and spatial played within a socialist setting, Cuba became a productive platform to engage in international debates regarding modernity at the height of the Cold War era. My dissertation examines how Cuba deliberately projected its modernity to the world via architecture and the arts, and how these visual and spatial manifestations speak to the utopic character of modernity within Latin America and the Caribbean.
Item Open Access Shifting Loyalties: World War I and the Conflicted Politics of Patriotism in the British Caribbean(2011) Goldthree, Reena NicoleThis dissertation examines how the crisis of World War I impacted imperial policy and popular claims-making in the British Caribbean. Between 1915 and 1918, tens of thousands of men from the British Caribbean volunteered to fight in World War I and nearly 16,000 men, hailing from every British colony in the region, served in the newly formed British West Indies Regiment (BWIR). Rousing appeals to imperial patriotism and manly duty during the wartime recruitment campaigns and postwar commemoration movement linked the British Empire, civilization, and Christianity while simultaneously promoting new roles for women vis-à-vis the colonial state. In Jamaica and Trinidad and Tobago, the two colonies that contributed over seventy-five percent of the British Caribbean troops, discussions about the meaning of the war for black, coloured, white, East Indian, and Chinese residents sparked heated debates about the relationship among race, gender, and imperial loyalty.
To explore these debates, this dissertation foregrounds the social, cultural, and political practices of BWIR soldiers, tracing their engagements with colonial authorities, military officials, and West Indian civilians throughout the war years. It begins by reassessing the origins of the BWIR, and then analyzes the regional campaign to recruit West Indian men for military service. Travelling with newly enlisted volunteers across the Atlantic, this study then chronicles soldiers' multi-sited campaign for equal status, pay, and standing in the British imperial armed forces. It closes by offering new perspectives on the dramatic postwar protests by BWIR soldiers in Italy in 1918 and British Honduras and Trinidad in 1919, and reflects on the trajectory of veterans' activism in the postwar era.
This study argues that the racism and discrimination soldiers experienced overseas fueled heightened claims-making in the postwar era. In the aftermath of the war, veterans mobilized collectively to garner financial support and social recognition from colonial officials. Rather than withdrawing their allegiance from the empire, ex-servicemen and civilians invoked notions of mutual obligation to argue that British officials owed a debt to West Indians for their wartime sacrifices. This study reveals the continued salience of imperial patriotism, even as veterans and their civilian allies invoked nested local, regional, and diasporic loyalties as well. In doing so, it contributes to the literature on the origins of patriotism in the colonial Caribbean, while providing a historical case study for contemporary debates about "hegemonic dissolution" and popular mobilization in the region.
This dissertation draws upon a wide range of written and visual sources, including archival materials, war recruitment posters, newspapers, oral histories, photographs, and memoirs. In addition to Colonial Office records and military files, it incorporates previously untapped letters and petitions from the Jamaica Archives, National Archives of Trinidad and Tobago, Barbados Department of Archives, and US National Archives.
Item Open Access "So many schemes in agitation": The Haitian State and the Atlantic World(2012) Gaffield, JuliaThis dissertation examines Haiti's crucial role in the re-making of the Atlantic World in the early 19th century. The point of departure for this work is Haiti's Declaration of Independence in 1804 and my research explores how events in Haiti raised profound questions about revolutionary legitimacy and national sovereignty. The emergence of Haiti as an independent nation fueled unprecedented international debates about racial hierarchy, the connections between freedom and sovereignty, and the intertwining of ideological and political relationships among nations and empires. While these debates came to be resolved in part during the next two centuries, they remain alive today both for specific nations and for the international community.
Item Open Access The City and the State: Construction and the Politics of Dictatorship in Haiti (1957-1986)(2018) Payton, Claire A“The City and the State: Construction and the Politics of Dictatorship in Haiti (1957-1986)” charts a new history of place-making in the Caribbean. It analyzes construction practices in the Haitian capital of Port-au-Prince—ranging from slum clearance, transportation infrastructure, to the political economy of cement—to reveal the multifaceted relationship between the Duvalier dictatorship and rapid urban transformation in the mid-20th century. It argues that through the patterns and practices of building Port-au-Prince, the social, political and economic dimensions of the Duvalier regime became embedded in material space of the city. At the same time, the nature of these spatial and material changes informed the regime’s tumultuous internal dynamics. This thesis also situates these intertwined themes within a broader context of uneven geographies of power produced through the country’s long transition from slavery to freedom.
Item Open Access The Kongolese Atlantic: Central African Slavery & Culture from Mayombe to Haiti(2015) Mobley, Christina FrancesIn my dissertation, "The Kongolese Atlantic: Central African Slavery & Culture from Mayombe to Haiti," I investigate the cultural history of West Central African slavery at the height of the trans-Atlantic slave trade, the late eighteenth century. My research focuses on the Loango Coast, a region that has received little scholarly attention despite the fact that it was responsible for roughly half of slave exports from West Central Africa at the time. The goal of my dissertation is to understand how enslaved Kongolese men and women used cultural practices to mediate the experience of slavery on both sides of the Atlantic world. To do so, I follow captives from their point of origin in West Central Africa to the Loango Coast and finally to the French colony of Saint Domingue in order to examine these areas as part of a larger "Kongolese Atlantic" world.
My dissertation begins by exploring the social and political history of the slave trade in the Loango Coast kingdoms, charting the structural changes that took place as a result of Atlantic trade. Next, I use historical linguistics to investigate the origins of captives sold on the Loango Coast. I find that the majority of captives came broadly from the Kongo zone, specifically from the Mayombe rainforest and Loango Coast kingdoms north of the River Congo. I then use a sociolinguistic methodology to reconstruct the cultural history of those groups in the near-absence of written documents. In the last chapter of the dissertation, I follow enslaved Central Africans from the Loango Coast to Saint Domingue, examining how they used specific and identifiable north coast cultural practices in the context of slavery. I find enslaved Central Africans used north coast spiritual tools such as divination, possession, trance, and power objects to address the material problems of plantation life. Finally, I argue the persistence of these spiritual practices demonstrates a remarkable durability of Kongolese ontology on both sides of the Kongolese Atlantic world.
My research produces new information about the history of the Loango Coast as well as the colony of Saint Domingue. The north coast origin of captives which I establish using historical linguistics contradicts earlier arguments that slaves traded on the Loango Coast originated from Kingdom of Kongo or from the inland Malebo Pool or Upper River Congo trade. I show inhabitants of the coastal kingdoms and Mayombe rainforest were not mere middlemen in the interior slave trade as previously thought, but were the victims of new mechanisms of enslavement created as a result of the erosion of traditional political institutions due to the trans-Atlantic slave trade. The north coast origin of Loango Coast captives has repercussions for the cultural history of the Americas. It means that captives were not "Atlantic Creoles" with prior knowledge of European culture and religion. I argue historians can only understand the meaning of the cultural practices of Africans in the Americas by understanding where Africans came from and what cultural and linguistic tools they brought with them. The use and transmission of Kongolese ritual knowledge and spiritual technologies in Saint Domingue challenges historians of slavery to move beyond the false dichotomy that culture originated in either Africa or on the plantation and forces a fundamental reassessment of the concept of creolization.
Item Open Access The Rule of the Lash and the Rule of Law: Amelioration, Enslaved People's Politics and the Courts in Jamaica, 1780-1834(2021) Becker, Michael JohnThis dissertation examines amelioration – the effort to create a more “humane” or reformed version of slavery – as it intertwined with enslaved people’s everyday conflicts and the legal system of the Jamaican colonial state. In the context of a rising anti-slavery movement in metropolitan Britain, some pro-slavery advocates adopted colonial legal reform as a strategy to present slavery as redeemable and colonial governments as capable of restraining slaveholders’ worst impulses. While these reformers were often cynical in their aims, enslaved people took these proclaimed legal rights seriously and strategically mobilized their rhetoric to secure a semblance of justice and redress within – and without – the legal system. Whether through fighting in court for the return of their stolen possessions, or seeking justice for a friend brutally murdered by an overseer, enslaved people were savvy and calculated legal actors who stretched the modest reforms conceded by the state. Each dissertation chapter develops a thematic approach to a key area of the law of slavery– enslaved people’s flight, property ownership, maltreatment by enslavers, and criminal procedure – and examines enslaved peoples’ attempts to strategically mobilize reformist legal principles to secure rights and justice within the legal system. In the process, the centrality of the legal system to the maintenance of the broader edifice of white supremacy and plantocracy is also considered.
Item Embargo The Space in Between: Middle Passage Movement and Black Women's Literature(2020) Panaram, Sasha Ann“The Space in Between: Middle Passage Movement and Black Women’s Literature” explores renderings of the Middle Passage in literature by African American and Caribbean writers. Departing from the premise that the term “Middle Passage” is insufficient where it concerns describing the massive forced migration that occurred during this trans-Atlantic catastrophe, I look to black women writers in order to build a different vocabulary to depict that which has no beginning, middle, or end; that which is not confined to a narrow strait but whose nomenclature suggests otherwise. Bringing together Caribbeanist philosophical treatises on crossing with the dynamic work in black geography studies and black feminist literary criticism, I argue that black women writers intervene in what has previously been a male dominated field of criticism on the Middle Passage and use their literature to retell Middle Passage stories anew and isolate specific forms of movement such as holding, landing, and crawling, that outlive the period of trans-Atlantic slavery.
Across four chapters, this dissertation addresses the challenges of writing about the Middle Passage for which there is no set of identifiable ruins before turning specifically to three works of literature – M. NourbeSe Philip’s Zong! (2008), Paule Marshall’s Praisesong for the Widow (1983), and Toni Morrison’s Beloved (1987). Each of the works I study either recreates or takes inspiration from a historical event that occurred during the Middle Passage or a subsequent crossing such as the 1781 Zong massacre, the 1803 Igbo Landing drowning, and the 1856 infanticide committed by Margaret Garner. Heeding to the motion necessary for this particular trans-Atlantic event ultimately allows us to reckon with what I call “Middle Passages” or “Middle Passings” – the multiple crossings that ensue in the wake of this unparalleled event. Tracing how black women move inevitably reveals where they move to and through putting pressure on the term “middle” that precedes “passage” identifying multiple mid-spaces while also calling for an expansion of critical “sites of slavery” and afterlives of slavery, more generally.
Item Open Access Toxic Narratives: the Role of Poisoning in Contemporary Caribbean Novels(2024) Vargas, LauraThis dissertation explores the concept of toxicity through the lens of literature. It takes the Plantationocene on the Hispanophone, Francophone, and Creolophone Caribbean experiences as the starting point to understand how the period and location circumstances affect the narratives we create around biological exposure to toxins and ideas of immunity and biological harm. Through the analysis of six contemporary novels, drawing from health humanities, biopolitics, and ecocriticism, it offers an understanding of what toxicity entails in contemporary imaginaries of the Caribbean and what kind of narratives are born from the need to make sense of an existence surrounded by discourse about climate collapse, pandemics, and extinction. The three chapters delve into intoxication in sacred spaces, the visual politics of infection using the zombie trope, and the role of storytelling in the transmission of abstract and material toxicity. They show how authors of this era offer alternative narratives of human existence in our current context that stray away from conservationist and purist ideas of ecology and planetary balance. The study aims to enhance our understanding of the centrality of toxicity in the Plantationocene context as well as the counterplantation practices that arise as alternatives for survival, contributing valuable insights into our post-pandemic world.
Item Open Access Transnational Trickster: Publishing, Representing, and Marketing Dany Laferrière(2019) Blaise, SandieThis dissertation uses Haitian-Canadian writer Dany Laferrière’s transnational trajectory as a focal point for a study of the relationship between literature, marketing, power, and creative agency. It analyzes Laferrière’s literary career over the span of thirty years (1985-2018), his portrayal in the press and his work’s packaging and reception in the three places the author has been published in the original French language: Quebec, France, and Haiti. Located at the intersection of cultural studies, literary theory, and postcolonial studies, my study explores the ways in which global migration has changed literary production and consumption, and shaped ideas about nationalism. In this analysis, I argue that Laferrière contributed to reshaping national definitions of literature in all three spaces, and that his work’s marketing and reception have revealed political, social, and cultural changes as well as manifestations of identity politics in all three contexts. Through combined analysis of Laferrière’s novels, film adaptations, interviews in the press, book covers, as well as personal interviews that I conducted with his publishers, this study offers a holistic analysis of the cultural, political, and economic dimensions of literary production and circulation in the French-speaking world and contiguous languages like Haitian Creole. Drawing from Laferrière’s packaging in Quebec and France, the study sheds a new light on the way images of Haiti are constructed in the Western imaginary and how paratext mediates discourses about Caribbean writers. Through the study of the writer’s Haitian publication and Creole translation, my work also offers critical insights into the dynamic power of the Haitian book industry, which scholars have largely overlooked. Finally, by tracing the various factors that enabled Laferrière to emerge and paying particular attention to his recent election to the French Academy, this dissertation illuminates the mechanisms of literary consecration as well as his own creative “trickster” strategy to position himself in the global marketplace. Ultimately, I argue that Laferrière’s transnational trajectory offers a unique lens into the interconnected relationships between literature, markets, postcolonial authors, and nationalism.
Item Open Access Virgin Capital: Foreign Investment and Local Stratification in the US Virgin Islands(2010) Navarro, TamishaVirgin Capital explores the impact of the Economic Development Commission (EDC) program in the US Virgin Islands and asks, "How do contemporary circulations of capital and people alternately build upon and complicate long-present hierarchies?" This dissertation approaches the EDC, a tax holiday program that has attracted a number of primarily American bankers to the island of St. Croix, as a space in which struggles over quasi-offshore capital produces tensions rooted in race, class, color, gender, and generation. These clashes surrounding `appropriate' financial and social investment have both integrated St. Croix into the global financial services market and produced a great deal of tension between EDC community and residents of St. Croix. Moreover, the presence of this program has generated new categories of personhood that in turn have sparked new debates about what it means to `belong' in a territory administered by the United States. These new categories of personhood are particularly gendered and alternately destabilize and shore up long-standing hierarchies of generation, gender, and place.
The ethnographic basis of Virgin Capital is 16 months of fieldwork I conducted on St. Croix, USVI. Throughout the dissertation, I bring academic writing together with the perspectives of Crucians and `EDC people.' These interviews, both formal and informal, are central to this project as they make clear the ambivalent positioning of the EDC program and its participants in the current moment of increasingly global circulations.
Item Open Access Whosoever Doubts My Power: Conjuring Feminism in the Interwar Black Diaspora(2017) Magloire, Marina SofiaThis dissertation uses the revolutionary potential of Caribbean religion to theorize black feminism between the two World Wars. It argues that women artists and performers across the diaspora produced ethnographic and creative representations of Haitian Vodou (and its sister religions) in order to formulate a radical and pan-African feminism. Unlike accounts of the savagery and hedonism of a sensationalized “voodoo” perpetuated by white male travelers to Haiti, black women’s narratives of Vodou focused specifically on its status as a theology of resistance. By re-animating apolitical narratives of “voodoo” with their original spiritual provenance in Vodou, women of color laid claim to the political force of the religion behind the largest successful slave revolt in the Western hemisphere.
Over four chapters, the Vodou lens of “Whosoever Doubts My Power” shows that black feminism and black radicalism are inextricable. Following the tradition of Karen McCarthy Brown and Natasha Omi’seke Tinsley, I take the religious forms of the African diaspora as potential sources of feminist political mobilization. Haitian Vodou, hoodoo of the American South, and other Afro-diasporic cosmologies allow women to attain the highest positions of leadership (Marie Laveau), and to follow the example of powerful female spirits (Ezili). My dissertation unpacks the radical underpinnings of Afro-Caribbean religious symbology in works by and about black women. In doing so, I address the gender imbalance in scholarship on interwar figures such as Marcus Garvey, W.E.B. Dubois, Aimé Césaire, and Léopold Sédar Senghor, which often portrays the black radicalism of the interwar period as an endeavor crafted solely by men. If, as Brent Edwards argues, “black radicalism is an internationalization,” I seek to call attention to the transnational movements of women in this time period, despite their more limited access to international circuits. “Whosoever Doubts My Power” bridges the works of Anglophone, Francophone, and Creolophone women whose paths crossed, collided, or simply ran parallel in the shared transnational dream of the voodoo queen. I also include the life and travels of little-researched figures like the essayist Suzanne Césaire and the performer Florence Emery Jones in order to correct the archival elisions of black women’s contributions to the construction of a Pan-African radical tradition.
At times metaphorical, at other times quite literal, this dissertation argues that Black female artists deployed African-derived religious practice in order to intentionally blur the line between cultural inheritance and invention. These practices were not just a means of deflecting or circumventing racism and misogyny; rather, engagements with New World religions became a world ordering system, a cosmology meant to replace the traditions that had been lost over time and in the Middle Passage. Often, these practices were processes of invention as much as they were processes reclamation. In fact, the power of the voodoo/Vodou lens lies precisely in its liminal status between factuality and invention, between myth and history. In a lacunar archive of the Middle Passage that makes past African traditions unknowable and Pan-African solidarity untenable, Afro-diasporic artists must come to terms with the lost of their histories and communities. However, rather than succumbing to the loss of that realization, Black artists of the interwar period used the idea of Vodou to conjure imagined histories and mobilize imagined communities in the present. It was not so much the end of a worldview as the beginning of one.