Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Texas at Austin, 2002. / Vita. Includes bibliographical references. Available also from UMI Company.

For years Black women’s subjectivity in the use of their bodies and movements has been overshadowed or completely erased by dominant hegemonic systems that created its own narrative of Black women, their bodies, and their movement. This thesis works to acknowledge and analyze the dialogic relationship among the narratives of Black women, Black women’s performances of their “theories of the flesh” through dance as well as their everyday activities, and the race, gender, and class conditions that inform said “theories of the flesh.” During football season, everyone in the African-American community of Jackson, Mississippi is looking at and talking about the dance company, the Prancing JSettes. There are audience members who critique their movements and costumes and there are those who view the group as a vital part of the community. Either way every audience member is captivated by the J-Settes because their cultural history is depicted by the women’s performance. How does this work? How is the Prancing J-Sette image constructed and by whom, and why and how does it persist? These are the questions I ask to examine the gender, class, and racial relations that are inscribed upon the movements of Black women in the African Diaspora. For a group whose African ancestors viewed dance as very spiritual, with such activities as the ring shout, it is interesting to note the ambivalence that surrounds the public dancing body in Jackson, Mississippi. While some Jacksonians view the female body in the public sphere with a Protestant Christian lens, they also enjoy the Africana aesthetics and aggressive energy of the J-Settes’ performances. Also, while the J-Settes buck their society’s hegemonic system of propriety, they also comply with some of these standards in their performance. I examine this ambivalence through the discourses of critical race theory, Black feminism, the social significance of African Diaspora dance conventions and HBCUs, and the classed, racial, and gendered power relations in the African Diaspora. I argue that the stories about the Prancing J-Settes can be expanded to present a genealogy and present state of contradictory values and issues of visibility affecting all Black women.

Thesis (M.M.) Florida State University, 2005. / Advisor: Frank Gunderson, Florida State University, College of Music. Title and description from dissertation home page (viewed 5-14-2007). Document formatted into pages; contains 195 pages. Includes biographical sketch. Includes bibliographical references.

This report is an assessment of archaeological research conducted on sites related to African American history that have been examined within the state of Texas. The research conducted had four broad research goals. The first goal was to understand the nature of African American archaeology in Texas. The second goal was to compare African American archaeology as practiced in the state of Texas to that of the wider discipline of African American archaeology as practiced within academia. The third goal was to integrate data of historic sites that have an African American component to assess sites within the state that hold archaeological promise. Finally, the fourth goal was to compare and contrast between the common types of historic and archaeological sites related to the life and history of Black Texans in order to assess gaps in the archaeological understanding of African American life and history. / text

During eighteen months of ethnographic fieldwork in the suburbs of southwest Houston, Texas I examined the ways in which White upper class students, teachers, administrators, and parents think about race. As a result of exploring racial language, racial discourse, and racial texts in two US history textbooks, classroom lectures and activities, students' conversations and interviews, and local parents' political organizing, I explored the ways in which White people often think about, construct, and employ race. More specifically I learned the ways in which the White elite residents of this particular suburb know race. I am calling their way of knowing race a "White epistemology of race." I demonstrate how this White epistemology of race has informed, shaped, and guided this particular White community's attitudes toward their own education and residential resources as well as the education and residential resources of their Black and Brown intra-district peers. This dissertation aims to theorize the White epistemology of race and show it to be the unyielding source of a White "redemptive" ideology that is supported and created by the deployment of certain racialized discourses that insist and depend upon representations of Black cultural pathology. / text

In 2010, for the first time since 1895, the Argentine census asked those living within its national territory if they were of African descent. While the inclusion of this question followed broader regional shifts to integrate questions on race and ethnicity into national censuses, this historic disjuncture is most astounding in Argentina. No country in Latin America has more successfully constructed itself as a nation donde no hay negros, where there are no blacks, than Argentina. Through a frame analysis of digital texts produced in Argentina between 2010 and 2012 regarding the new census question, this Master's thesis uncovers how government, media and Afro organizational actors understood the meaning of Afrodescendant and the purposes of the census question. As such, this research seeks to expand research on the African diaspora in the Americas by analyzing how racial politics of identification work in a nation-state of hegemonic whiteness. / text

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Oregon, 2004. / Typescript. Includes vita and abstract. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 223-239). Also available for download via the World Wide Web; free to University of Oregon users.

Orientador: Rubens Pereira dos Santos / Banca: Fabiana Miraz de Freitas Grecco / Banca: Altamir Botoso / Resumo: Manuel Lopes (1907-2005), um dos fundadores da revista Claridade, periódico fruto do movimento intelectual de mesmo nome que objetivou valorizar a identidade cabo-verdiana, escreveu Chuva Braba, romance publicado em 1956 e que traduz o sentimento bipartido do homem cabo-verdiano, qual seja, o apego telúrico à sua terra marcada pela estiagem e a necessidade de buscar melhores condições de vida fora do arquipélago. Pretende-se, neste trabalho, analisar a presença dos ideais do movimento Claridade (valorização da terra natal, bem como da língua e da cultura cabo-verdiana) na obra em questão, considerando-se o contexto histórico e social do arquipélago quando da escrita do romance. Uma vez que Lopes considerava-se um observador atento da realidade circundante, busca-se examinar como o dilema partir-ficar cabo-verdiano, representado pela personagem principal Mané Quim, é abordado sob a ótica da geração de Claridade. Este fazer literário, portador de um novo padrão estético e ideológico, direciona-se ao contexto das ilhas não se omitindo acerca de seus problemas econômicos, sociais e políticos, mas assumindo uma postura profundamente telúrica sobre elas, com o objetivo de restaurar a esperança de seu povo e de firmar uma nova identidade nacional / Abstract: Manuel Lopes (1907-2005), one of the founders of the Claridade magazine, a periodical fruit of the intellectual movement of the same name that aimed to enhance the Capeverdian identity, wrote Chuva Braba, a novel published in 1956 and which expresses the bipartite sentiment of Capeverdian man, that is, the telluric attachment to his land marked by the drought and the necessity to seek better living conditions outside the archipelago. It is intended, in this work, to analyze the presence of the ideals of the Claridade movement (valorization of the native land, as well as the Capeverdian language and culture) in the work in question, considering the archipelago's historical and social context when writing the novel. Since Lopes considered himself as an attentive observer of the surrounding reality, it seeks to examine how the Capeverdian leave-stay dilemma, represented by the main character Mané Quim, is treated from the point of view of the generation of Claridade. This literary achievement, bearer of a new esthetic and ideological pattern, is directed to the context of the islands, not omitting about the economic, social and political problems, but assuming a position profoundly telluric about them, with the aim of restoring hope of its people and to establish a new national identity / Mestre

The Lucumi religion was born in Cuba from African and European religious systems. The enslaved Yoruba were brought to the New World through the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade. They were taken from their homes, family, language, and religion and brought to countries like Cuba to provide free labor to growing agricultural markets that benefited European colonizers of the Americas. The Yoruba would hold on to their religion, but in order to keep it alive, they would have to make it into a new religion. This new religion would become the religion known as Lucumi. In Cuba, Lucumi practitioners would hide their religion beneath the facade of Catholicism. The orishas were associated with Catholic saints with similar attributes. The orisha Chango, who governs war and presides over lightning, became associated with Saint Barbara who is the patron saint of artillerymen and is linked to lightning. The Yoruba could be seen praying to a saint but were actually praying to an orisha. This practice became ingrained as a part of Lucumi tradition. Divination and propitiation are at the center of the Lucumi religion. Divination determines the course of a practitioner's life and can reveal whether practitioners are in a good or bad position in their lives. Propitiation will ensure that good fortune will remain or that bad omens will disappear.

The politics of the Middle-Passage and its attendant socio-cultural and historical trauma is the starting point of this study. The dispersal of Africans, or at least people of African origin, to different parts of the world has produced over the past few decades numerous dissertations and theses describing socio-cultural linkages between Africa and the Black diaspora. On the part of creative writers and literary critics of every persuasion, there exists a consensus of creative and critical opinion that seeks to establish that "the history of Africa and the Africans ... is one of iron, blood and tears." (Nkosi, 1981, p.30) The study is in agreement with Omafume Onoge's submission that the cultural imperialist process went beyond mere acts of vandalism to produce a period in the history of Africa and the black diaspora in which "many educated Africans (and their counterparts in the diaspora) required a major act of intellection to ascribe aesthetic value to our traditional arts." (Dnoge, 1984, p.5) The study grapples with the source(s) of this socio-cultural apathy, and how the liberal humanist discourse which replaced the body of the colonialist's mythologies is predicated on what JanMohammed describes as "an ironic anomaly." (JanMohammed, 1985, p.281) My exploration of this ironic anomaly begins from the premise of the myths, legends and traditions that are subsumed, truncated, misread or simply repressed to propound this 'humanist' philosophy. What emerges from this cultural and ideological exploration is a vernacular theory of reading built around the carnivalesque figure of Esu Elegbara (the Yoruba 'trickster' god) whose "functional equivalent in Afro-American profane discourse is the Signifying Monkey." (Gates, 1990, p.287) The study is in two parts. Part One consists of three chapters exploring different aspects of the cultural and ideological discourses between Africa and the black diaspora from historical and theoretical perspectives. Part Two focuses, in four chapters, on the works of five writers from Africa (Nigeria and Ghana), South America (Brazil), the West Indies (St. Lucia) and the United States. These are Ayi Kwei Armah, Wole Soyinka, Jorge Amado, Derek Walcott and Amiri Baraka respectively. The conclusion summarises the major arguments of the thesis.