A thesis submitted to the Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences, University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, in the fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy / This thesis is interested in the fiction of Abdulrazak Gurnah, bringing into consideration all the eight novels he has published to date. It explores the representation of human relations, focussing on the theme of power and how it is attained, consolidated, used and contested in the human relations depicted in the novels. A close reading of pre to postcolonial East Africa as well as the regions outside of East Africa in which Gurnah’s novels are also set, through quotidian interactions in micro-spaces, this thesis argues, presents power dealings alternative to one that emphasizes the effect of colonial domination and the failed project of decolonization. The thesis further suggests that inherent in everyday human interactions – whether at home in East Africa or in migrant spaces – are power dealings far removed from macro-political power plays. The interactions to be brought under scrutiny here are those occurring between children and adults, family members, as they interact not only with each other but also with the various environments they occupy. Through a skilful narrative strategy that employs complex narrative perspectives, vivid descriptions, imagery, symbolism and credible characterization, Gurnah affords the reader an opportunity to read East Africa through the basic units of the community, focussing on ordinary everyday lives and interactions. This thesis therefore investigates the different ways in which Gurnah employs narrative strategy in order to depict the various avenues through which power comes into play in diverse areas of human interactions. The focus is on his application of implied authors in the form of multiple narrators and how this technique helps to draw readers in to his texts. It is important to also examine symbolism used especially in the relationship between characters and (mis)use of the spaces they occupy, the significance of rot, filth and squalor in the said spaces as well as the use of irony, coincidences, silences and suppressions. To be specifically interrogated is relations between individuals and the society, parents and children, lovers, employers and employees among others. Even though the dominant theme in Gurnah’s the entire oeuvre is that of migrancy, of characters attempting to construct ideas of home away from home, his treatment of the varied power relationships inherent in the texts warrants investigation. / MT2017

A thesis submitted in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Arts in Journalism at the University of the Witwatersrand, 2016 / Economic migrants to South Africa face a hostile reception; periodic displays of widespread xenophobia have highlighted the myths and stereotypes that still abound about foreigners - that they are job-stealers, criminals and a threat to our nation’s well-being. The Department of Home Affairs recently brought in new immigration laws that raise the barriers to entry and participation in the South African economy and society. Yet a back door has been left wide open for economic migrants, often unskilled and with no other options, to enter South Africa, live and work. For six consecutive years South Africa was the number one destination for asylum seekers globally and the influx has caused the refugee determination process to become clogged and corrupt, leaving genuine refugees vulnerable and hundreds of thousands of foreigners in an unhappy limbo. The accompanying narrative long form journalism piece highlights some of the fault lines in the government’s uncoordinated and inconsistent migration policy. Overall the project seeks to personalize some of the key challenges and contentious issues faced by migrants to South Africa. It aims to puts a human face to a bureaucratic process by accessing the stories of marginalized migrants, giving them a voice to articulate their experiences in South Africa. The accompanying method document outlines some of the academic research underpinning the study. / GR2017

Introduction: The African migrants that arrived in Sweden between 2005 and 2010 experienced a lack of regular contact with relatives and friends back home because of different factors due to the tools of communication during that period. Later, the migrants experienced a transition in tools of communication that allowed transnational communication with African countries, using ICTs tools of communication such as Whatsapp, Facebook, and others. Purpose:This thesis is focused on the digital transition in ICTs and aims to provide a better understanding of digital communication and it's impact on the African diaspora in Sweden. The research analyzes a specific timeline between the 2005-2010 period, which is split in three successive stages by the author ( Pre-transition, The transition and Post-transition). The ultimate goal is to provide a contribution to the existing theoretical knowledge with empirical evidence, thereby replenishing the Comdev academic field of studies. Methodology:To explore these questions, the empirical data was collected through semi-structured interviews with members of the African diaspora in Sweden Conclusion and contribution:The results show that the participants could not afford to buy on a regular basis the prepaid cards that were very expensive and ineffective. Emails were used by a few, also the internet was very expensive back home. The African's diaspora relationships with the homeland suffered negative consequences due to a feeling of abandonment felt by the relatives back home. The transition in communication occured after a few years, leading to a process defined as gradual, the learning of the new tools of ICTs and the cost of the smartphones played a role in the transition period. The following post-transition period allowed an interconnectedness on a global level and improved tremendously the relationships with relatives. Results also show that constant communication is becoming overwhelming on many levels and social aspects. The research revealed that ongoing processes during the transition process of digitalization are a broad field for investigation.

Currently, a permeating ethos of racial transcendence mystifies the perpetuity of institutionalized inequality, restrains the dissolution of discriminatory practices, and renders race-based protest unutterable. Migrant Black Mothers examines how this apparatus of exclusion unfolds in the lives of native and immigrant black mothers of the late twentieth and twenty-first centuries. The study reveals that these women collectively bear visions of freedom that disrupt the normalization of their oppression. It asserts that while navigating a milieu that relegates their lives, and those of their children’s to a precarious existence, black mothers locate resolve on borderlands widely deemed marred by interethnic dissonance. African American, African-born, and Caribbean-born mothers seek one another across ethnic lines and in their migrations jointly resist the co-existing forces of structural and ideological stigmatization. Utilizing documentary evidence and original ethnographic research in Hartford, Connecticut, the dissertation illuminates and traces black mothers’ cross-ethnic ties of resistance over the course of three thematic sections. Part I, “Traversing Borders and Unsettling Distortions,” chronicles native and foreign-born black mothers’ encounters with gendered racism. It traces how controlling images that legitimize the violation of black mothers travels, as well as evolves, across ethnic lines. Further, Part I suggests that native and immigrant black mothers stifle gendered racism by co-creating safe spaces. Part II, “Behind the Netted Veil of Racial Transcendence,” revisits cases involving the state-sanctioned killings of Aquan Salmon, Amadou Diallo, and Trayvon Martin. It charts how in the aftermath of these cases, African American, African, and Caribbean mothers developed collective narratives of trauma as a means to contest the color-blind assessments of the cases. The last section, “A Motherline Conceived from Disparate Roots,” documents black mothers’ efforts to instill a racial consciousness in their children in a climate that promotes race neutrality. Diasporic, communal mothering arises as essential to this process. Fueled by the voices and realities of African American, African, and Caribbean mothers, shaped by interacting systems of power, the dissertation invites the telling of an often unspoken avenue of justice in the face of enduring black disadvantage. / 2023-01-12T00:00:00Z

Capoeira is an African diasporic art form that developed in Brazil during the transatlantic slave trade. This research explores the history of Capoeira and its contemporary engagement through an autoethnographic method. It follows the first-hand experience of being a black female researcher and a Capoeirista both in Europe and Brazil. The purpose of engaging with this particular perspective was to recentre the ways in which we view Capoeira and its history, understanding that it has many embodiments of resistance that also include Black women. Embodiments here are framed as the embedded identities and corporeality affected by culture and society over several generations. Through this process, we open our awareness of further embodiments of the individual, together with that of the practice. Inspired by bell hooks' essay ‘Choosing the Margin as a Space of Radical Openness’, this thesis is a conversation between the past, the present and the future, it interrogates the popular structures in Capoeira that have been upheld or embodied and as a result has separated us from ancestral knowledge and knowledge of self. The ritual of Capoeira is mirrored throughout this thesis in order to engage with the intrinsic values of the practice and bring about transformative ways of seeing and moving in the world around us.

No description available.

The purpose of this study is to produce an Africological model that lends attention to epistemological questions in African diaspora research through theoretical and culturally based analysis, ultimately to aid the historical and psychological restoration of Africans in diaspora. This work reflects the theoretical and historic stream of scholarship that centers geographic Africa as the adhesive principle of study in shaping and understanding the cultural and political ally-ship between different African diasporic communities. My aim is to illustrate what Africa represents in diaspora and how it was shaped in the conscious minds and actions of early Africans in diaspora from their own vantage point. Secondly, through a case study of the intra-diasporic relationship between Haiti and free Africans of Philadelphia following the Haitian Revolution, this work lays precedence for the expansion of an African diasporic consciousness. The significance of the intra-diasporic relationship is in the mutual recognition that Haitians and Africans in North America considered themselves a common people. Moreover, they developed an international relationship during the early 19th century to serve their mutual interest in African freedom and autonomous development despite Western expansion. My research locates Africa as the place of origin for dispersed and migrating African diasporic communities, operating as a binding source. In this study Africa is explored as a cognitive and geo-political cultural location for African people in diaspora. I support that African diasporic communities exist as extended African cultural locations of awareness which can and have been negotiated by communities depending on their agency, support, and circumstance to achieve collective goals. / African American Studies

This dissertation focuses on the African American community of Timbuctoo, Westampton, New Jersey. Timbuctoo was founded circa 1825 by formerly enslaved and free born African Americans. The community operated as a "station" along the Underground Railroad. At its peak Timbuctoo had over 125-150 residents and supported a general store, "colored" school, AMEZ church, cemetery and several homesteads. Today the only standing markers of the nineteenth century community are the gravestones in the cemetery. In 2007, Westampton Township acquired roughly four acres of the nearly forty arces that once comprised Timbuctoo. From 2009-2011, Christopher Barton and David Orr conducted archaeological work at the community. The focus of this dissertation was the excavation and analysis of 15,042 artifacts recovered from the Davis Site, Feature 13. The Davis Site was purchased by William Davis 1879. Davis and his wife Rebecca raised their five children in a 12x16ft home constructed on the 20x100ft property. Between the 1920s to the 1940s the foundation of the Davis home was used as a community trash midden. Specifically, this dissertation looks at the practices of yard sweeping, architecture, construction materials, home canning and the consumption of commodified foods. A practice theory of improvisation is posited as a working model to explaining the reflexive practices used by marginalized residents to contest social and economic repression. This theory of improvisation seeks to complicate narratives of poverty through underscoring the dynamic disposition of material culture and everyday life. / Anthropology

This work addresses the following question: How has the prominent scholarly literature on the Cayman Islands promoted a discourse that serves to undermine the acknowledgment of African contributions as well as African self-identification in the country? Utilizing an Afrocentric inquiry, the method of content analysis was employed to interrogate selected texts using location theory. It was found that the majority of literature on the Cayman Islands, as well as the dominant ideology within the Caribbean has indeed undermined the acknowledgement of African contributions as well as African self-identification in the country. More scholarship is needed that examines the experiences of African descended people living in the Caribbean from their own perspective, and critically engages dislocated texts. / African American Studies

A presente pesquisa buscou compreender os processos históricos relacionados à diáspora africana no litoral Norte paulista a partir de uma perspectiva arqueológica. Com a proibição do comércio negreiro em meados do século XIX, o litoral Norte paulista, tão próximo do Vale do Paraíba onde a cultura cafeeira estava em expansão, foi palco de inúmeros desembarques clandestinos realizados nas praias da região. Por meio da integração de fontes diversificadas, como evidências materiais, indicadores da paisagem, narrativas orais, fontes secundárias e com especial atenção à Historiografia sobre o tema, foi possível traçar possibilidades interpretativas acerca da diáspora africana na região estudada. Destarte, tais levantamentos possibilitaram atribuir ao litoral Norte paulista um alto potencial para o estudo de sítios e vestígios arqueológicos associados à temática, seja em ambiente continental ou insular, em compartimentos emersos ou submersos. / This research aimed at understanding the historic processes regarding the African Diaspora in the north coast of São Paulo from an archaeological perspective. With the prohibition of slave trading in the mid-nineteenth century, the north coast of São Paulo was the scene of countless clandestine landings on the beaches of the region, once it was very close to the Paraíba Valley, where coffee cultivation was expanding. Through the integration of diverse sources such as material hard evidence, landscape indicators, spoken narratives, secondary sources and a particular focus on Historiography, it was possible to draw interpretative possibilities about the African diaspora in the region under study. Therefore, these surveys have made possible for the north coast region of São Paulo to be assigned as a high potential study place of archaeological sites and remains related to the theme, both in the mainland and on the island environment, either as surfaced or immersed compartments.