This dissertation argues that Black mothering is the re-creation of Black sociability in the African Diaspora in the face of the ways in which genocide attempts to eliminate black existence. Therefore, I argue for an approach to African Diaspora as creating, nurturing, resisting, and recuperative acts as an alternative to genocidal practices, which constitutes black mothering. Concerning genocidal practices, this dissertation focuses mainly on anti-black violence, specifically male-on-male and state-sponsored violence; although with an understanding that genocide also manifests itself through many other ways. The choice to focus on male-on-male and state violence is because I understand them as being the ultimate alternative to put forward genocidal ideologies when others fail. Thus, understanding the violent killing of the black population as the most visible expression of genocide in the African Diaspora, I want to confront them with their alternative, which is the given social, cultural, and biological significance of motherhood, i.e., to generate and nurture life. Therefore, my ethnographic project explores Black mothers’ experiences of violence in Rio de Janeiro’s poorest areas. Their struggle to survive encompasses not only their own fight against poverty, racism, patriarchy, and gender discrimination but also entails the consequences of violent acts perpetrated or facilitated by the state upon their families. Engaging with the analytical concept of Outraged Mothering, this dissertation builds bridges between African Diaspora Studies and the Anthropology of Emotions by applying a Black Feminist perspective in order to perceive Black mothers’ social-political insertion in society as well as their pedagogies of resistance. My research methods include participant observation, semi-structured interviews, oral histories, and documentary photography conducted in an extended period of seventeen months of fieldwork research between 2011 and 2012. This project embraces activism as a learning experience in the collaboration with the mothers in struggle, and employs auto-ethnography as a way to think critically through the researcher’s emotions while conducting and writing the project. This project aims to enhance developing literature on Black motherhood in Brazil and explores Black lives in the African Diaspora through an analytical framework that presents emotion as a catalytic stimulus for the rise of radical political projects. / text

The aim of this essay is to explore motherhood in two postcolonial literary works by African American author Toni Morrison and British author Caryl Phillips, who was born in the Caribbean. The essay is based on Morrison’s award winning novel Beloved, which was published in 1987 and was inspired by the escaping African American slave Margareth Garner. It is set just after the American Civil War and the novels deals with the trauma of slavery from the perspective of Sethe, a slave who kills her own daughter to save her from slavery. The second novel on which this essay is based is Caryl Phillips’ novel Crossing the River, which was published 1993 and focused on the African diaspora from different perspectives. Crossing the River is a non-chronological narrative covering four different characters (three African American people and one white slave trader during the eighteenth century). This essay, however, only deals with the last of the four narratives depicting white British Joyce who mothers a child with African American soldier Travis. The hypothesis on which the essay is based is that the institution of American slavery has denied the female protagonists in the two novels, Sethe and Joyce, their maternal selves. The analysis revealed that both women suffer from racial domination, and race, or simply skin color, is what leads to the maternal loss of the two protagonists. Both authors depict the world of the colonizer and the colonized and they address the common pain and guilt shared by black as well as white people.

In the first chapter of Crossing the River (1993), Caryl Phillips depicts the dilemma of a fluid identity for the peoples of the African diaspora and their descendants by using ambiguity to simulate feelings of contradiction, liminality and a double consciousness. The first character, Nash Williams, struggles with his cultural identity as an emancipated, black slave and missionary who is repatriated in Africa to convert the pagans of Liberia. A postcolonial reading of Nash’s hybrid position illustrates his experiences of unhomeliness, of religious doubt and realisation in the shortcomings of mimicry. The second character, Amelia Williams is divided by her dual identity as the wife of a slave owning-slave liberator in antebellum America. Via a contrapuntal reading of Amelia as the antagonist of the tale, her hostile manner supports the suggestion that she sought to control the peculiar situation which was threatening her livelihood, depreciating her social status and debasing her imperialist values. Her proslavery standpoint could not, however, be established unequivocally. Nevertheless, both Amelia and Nash are unmistakably troubled by inner conflicts engendered through slavery and polarised ideologies.

“Sovereignty in the City” contributes to the historiography of African-American and African Diasporic life an account of how twentieth century black migrant communities’ practices and politics around place shaped the social geography of Philadelphia—a primary testing ground for urban policies, sociological and historical inquiry, and social experiments of reform up through the twenty-first century. The manuscript charts a history of alternative land stewardship and governance in Philadelphia’s black working class communities from 1941 to 1991, which I set in contrast with the urbicidal practices of reformers who worked to enhance the profitability of the region at the expense of black and working class neighborhoods and communities. I name these two very different visions of social affiliation and obligation sanitized citizenship and black vitality respectively. Building on methods and practices that Progressive social reformers, eugenicists, and sociologists co-produced, local housing reformers sought to enforce the normative patriarchal family as the ideal of health and order. This in turn, shaped their assessment of black migrants as potential vectors of biological and social contagion and justified segregation before federal policy insured it. On the other hand, from the margins black working class communities articulated new modes of sociality from within cordoned-off communities, which they refitted to the metropolis from their collective history in the agrarian and mill town South. Although otherworldliness and the tendency to participate in non-normative or queer social affiliations outside the home, often marked working class black migrant communities as criminal or odd, being out of time with the logics of patriarchy and racial capitalism also represented an important, if underappreciated, basis for envisioning a different city and world. In place of dominant conceptions of the normative family as an anchor of orderly governance and investment, black migrant communities re-imagined human belonging and practiced new modes of radical inclusivity in the city. I make the case for a landscape approach to black history, there and in the wider diaspora, in order to bring the methods developed by social, environmental, and architectural historians as well as geographers, to bear in excavating histories of black social activism, in turn, elaborating an idiom of urban ecology in which practices of place and belonging, which are often dismissed or invisible, call into question the notions of urban life and health organized around the individual and the normative patriarchal family.

Forging connections across the fields of American, French, and African diaspora history, this dissertation traces the emergence of the Hip Hop cultural movement in New York City's African American and Latino neighborhoods in the 1970s and its globalization to a postcolonial France. Drawing on previously untapped archival sources in the U.S. and France, as well as dozens of original, in-depth oral histories with key figures (including musicians, journalists, dancers, visual artists, deejays, and businesspeople), "Between New York and Paris" uncovers the roots and routes of this trans-Atlantic history. Organized around a series of transnational encounters, the study examines how Hip Hop's various cultural practices (rapping, deejaying, graffiti, breakdancing) traveled first from New York's outer boroughs to the downtown Manhattan arts scene at the turn of the 1980s, and then spread to and became rooted in the disproportionately immigrant, working-class suburbs of France. This dissertation argues that the globalization of this (African)American cultural movement radically altered the terrain on which postcolonial Afro-French youth's national and diasporic membership was lived, contested, policed, and performed. Over the course of the last quarter of the twentieth century, as France was becoming home to the largest African-descended population in Europe as well as the second largest market for the production and consumption of Rap music in the world (behind only the United States), Hip Hop fostered a deep, transnational engagement--both by the movement's adherents and its critics--with the meanings of (African)Americanness and Frenchness, of citizenship and belonging, and of diaspora and democracy.

This thesis explores the relationship between development representations and diaspora audiences. It brings together literature on representations, with concepts of audience, diaspora and identity to provide an in-depth study of how and with what effects, visual representations of development in NGO fundraising campaigning that depict Africa, impact on Nigerian diaspora audiences. This study challenges the tendency in much of development literature in this field to homogenise British audiences of NGO communication. This has imagined audiences as some form of monocultural Western-situated community, coextensive with the 'general' British public. It further assumes audiences read, interpret and are impacted by NGO representations in very similar ways. This assumption precludes critical engagement with the complexities and particularities of audiences and is unable to reflect the multiple and differentiated ways in which audiences think, feel and behave in response to development representations. By using focus group discussions with UK Nigerian diaspora audiences, one-to-one interviews and online-ethnography as the methodological tool, and postcolonialism as an analytical framing, this thesis reveals the complex and contested ways that individual diaspora subjectivities, positionalities and life experiences are implicated in their construal of development representations and the perspicuity of their impact. One of the key findings of this study is that development representations impact African diaspora audiences in diverse and complicated ways, that both reproduce and contradict negative and, stereotypical 'ways of seeing' and knowing Africa. Furthermore, it highlights how diaspora ethno-racial/cultural identities affect, and are implicated in, the reading and interpretation of development representations of Africa. Indeed, diaspora audiences affirm and challenge their connections or, lack thereof, with their country of origin through these representations. Moreover, the study shows how NGO development representations provide symbolic spaces from which diaspora audiences can articulate their identities as well as, forge relationships among themselves and with their wider communities. This study builds on Stuart Hall's ([1973]1980) Encoding/Decoding theorisation on audiences, by demonstrating that Nigerian diaspora audiences of development representations are sophisticated, varied and paradoxical in how they interpret and decipher media representations. Indeed, their socio-cultural positioning, personal histories and lived-experiences inform and shape how they discursively construct perceptions and knowledge of their place of origin through representations. Furthermore, it contributes to postcolonial theorisations of hybridity in diaspora identities, by showing that Nigerians strategically adopt new and preferential ethnosymbolic identities, in response to representations. These re-configurations of the Diaspora 'Self' are neither stable or consistent but are nonetheless utilised by Nigerians to subvert development representations and harmful public perceptions and stereotypes about Africans that they shape.

acase@tulane.edu

This dissertation presents findings from ethnographic research conducted with members of the Sociedad La Unión Martí-Maceo, established by segregated Black Cuban cigar workers in Ybor City in 1904. For decades, Tampa officials have initiated numerous urban revitalization projects aimed at developing a world-class tourist destination and metropolitan center. Often, these efforts have centered on highlighting the ethnic history of Ybor City, from which the participation of Black Cubans and the Martí-Maceo Society have been actively excluded or ignored. The main issues related to contemporary Afro- Cuban identity in Tampa and which will be examined in my dissertation, include the changing nature of the Afro-Cuban community in Tampa in light of increases in migration of Cubans and other Latinos of color to the area; Martí-Maceo members’ struggle to reclaim an Afro-Cuban heritage within Tampa’s larger historic preservation efforts over the past decade; and an examination of the Martí-Maceo Society as a voluntary association that appears to have outlived its usefulness in present-day Tampa despite efforts by elderly members to sustain and expand it.

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The interlocked social struggles waged by overlapping and diverse Britons of color for racial and social equality and everyday survival is the dynamic corollary of the contradictions engendered by the ruling relations of racial differentiation and racism in Britain. Grassroots struggles against routine racist violence and state violence, conceptualized as politically interlinked, are the critical sites that contribute to the recursive racial domination experienced by Britons of color in contemporary Britain, and forms the key ethnographic research focus of this study. Prior studies have already critiqued the dominant state framework of viewing racist violence as random, de-racialized and nonpolitical events – as individual incidents, neighborhood disputes, inter-personal conflict, and robberies gone wrong. These studies have alternately identified the social dehumanizing functions of racist violence, the possessive local white territorialism that they materially support and their relationship with macro-level socio-economic crises and changing racial exclusion ideologies of the liberal democratic nation. What I add to these studies is the argument that the racial subordination and ruling relations inherent in the social processes of racist violence and, by formal extension, state violence are not only derivative of broader ideological forces or local social relations but are in fact constitutive of white racial state formation in Britain’s postcolonial era. I argue that the processes of racist violence and state violence are productive of the domination and hierarchy that is secured for whites, through unevenly empowered and routinized contestations within the re-configurations of white racial state formation and an emergent neoliberal-multicultural national security state. It is within this framework of analysis that the politics of black mobilization by Britons of color and their allies, in the context of contemporary multiculturalism’s contradictions, and against the many-sided form of racial subordination is made legible -- not as an anachronism -- but as socially meaningful, interlocked and politically urgent. / text