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.

Essa tese de doutoramento trata principalmente dos estudos sobre a formação do registro arqueológico relacionado ao contexto afrodiaspórico da comunidade remanescente de Quilombo do Boqueirão, no município de Vila Bela, Mato Grosso, região do Alto Vale do Guaporé. Os dados analisados na investigação começaram a ser levantados em 2008 durante o mestrado e abordam aspectos do modo de vida e da transformação da materialidade quilombola, sob a perspectiva da arqueologia do presente. O objetivo central da análise foi discutir (e promover) aspectos da visibilidade arqueológica e social deste coletivo, por meio da prática colaborativa que possibilitou a investigação em três contextos distintos: um sítio arqueológico, dois sítios de abandono recente e dois sítios do presente. Essa tese é também o resultado de múltiplas vozes que que atuaram no desenvolvimento da pesquisa ao longo dos anos e como tal, sua escrita primou por conciliar a escrita acadêmica com uma forma simples, direta e imagética de dialogar os interlocutores, colaboradores e amigos do Boqueirão. / This doctoral thesis consists of studies on the formation of the archaeological record related to the afro-diasporic context of the remaining community of Quilombo do Boqueirão, municipality of Vila Bela, Mato Grosso, Alto Vale do Guaporé region. The data is an investigation initiated in 2008 over a period of one year and addresses aspects of the way of life and transformation of materiality from an archeology perspective. The main analysis site has been published and is available for publication in three distinct contexts: an archaeological site, two sites of recent abandonment and two sites. This is that or is it an action, which writing the knowledge has not interest the media and academic language students, the word to the interest of the academic students, and was of the Boqueirão.

Esta pesquisa analisa a historiografia que abordou a formação das culturas afro-americanas e os intercâmbios culturais entre africanos e euro-americanos, mostrando como ela tem sido marcada por uma coexistência contraditória de premissas universalistas e particularistas a respeito da natureza da cultura. Tais contradições já podem ser observadas na antropologia culturalista de Franz Boas, que desliza entre duas definições de cultura por um lado, como um espírito orgânico e estável e, por outro, como um agregado histórico e dinâmico de costumes e ideias , apontando a permanência e a mudança como aspectos simultâneos dos contatos culturais. Melville Herskovits fundamentou-se na obra boasiana e herdou essas contradições ao realizar seu estudo sobre as culturas afro-americanas, representando-as simultaneamente como uma aculturação, na chave da descontinuidade com o passado, e como uma preservação de africanismos, na chave da continuidade com as culturas africanas. Tais dificuldades desdobram-se até o debate contemporâneo em torno do conceito de crioulização e da obra de Mintz e Price, que descreve das culturas afro-americanas ressaltando ao mesmo tempo a criatividade e a sobrevivência de estruturas africanas. Autores filiados à chamada corrente afrocêntrica tentaram resolver esses impasses minimizando a transformação e privilegiando a continuidade com o passado, no que intensificaram o dualismo implícito na vertente particularista de análises anteriores. Uma outra tradição de estudos sobre os intercâmbios culturais em sociedades coloniais incluindo autores como Gilberto Freyre, Fernando Ortiz e outros associados ao pensamento pós-colonial desenvolveu um modelo conceitual distinto, centrando-se nas ambivalências e inversões presentes na dimensão afetiva dos contatos culturais. Com isso, esses autores compreenderam o intercâmbio cultural a partir de uma lógica dialética, desconstruindo raciocínios dualistas, abraçando o caráter autocontraditório dos fenômenos e propondo, assim, uma alternativa teórica aos modelos herdados do culturalismo antropológico. / This work analyses the historiography which has studied the formation of African-American cultures and the cultural exchange between Africans and Euro-Americans, sustaining that it has been characterized by a contradictory coexistence of universalistic and particularistic presuppositions about the nature of culture. These contradictions can already be observed in Franz Boass Anthropological culturalism, which moves between two definitions of culture on the one hand, as an organic and stable spirit and, on the other hand, as a historical and dynamic aggregate of customs and ideas , indicating permanence and transformation as simultaneous aspects of cultural contact. Melville Herskovits was grounded on Boass ideas and inherited these contradictions when he studied African-American cultures, representing them simultaneously as an acculturation, focusing a discontinuous relation with the past, and as a preservation of africanisms, stressing a continuous relation with African cultures. These difficulties have unfolded themselves up to the contemporary debate about the concept of creolization and Mintz and Prices work, which describes African-American cultures focusing cultural creativity and the survival of African structures at the same time. Authors of the so-called afrocentric perspective have tried to solve this impasse by minimizing transformations and stressing continuity with the past. By doing so, they have intensified the dualism implicit on the particularistic arguments of previous analyses. Another tradition of studies about cultural exchange in colonial societies including authors such as Gilberto Freyre, Fernando Ortiz and others associated to post-colonial thought has developed a different conceptual model, which focuses on the ambivalences and inversions that can be observed on the affective dimensions of cultural contacts. These authors have interpreted cultural exchange through a dialectical logic, deconstructing dualistic thoughts, embracing the self-contradictory nature of the fenomena, and thus indicating a theorical alternative to the models inherited from anthropological culturalism.

Submitted by Filipe dos Santos (fsantos@pucsp.br) on 2018-07-11T12:30:20Z No. of bitstreams: 1 Liliane Pereira Braga.pdf: 5200100 bytes, checksum: e5976fe34dacd65fc0778b11370b86d2 (MD5) / Made available in DSpace on 2018-07-11T12:30:20Z (GMT). No. of bitstreams: 1 Liliane Pereira Braga.pdf: 5200100 bytes, checksum: e5976fe34dacd65fc0778b11370b86d2 (MD5) Previous issue date: 2018-04-06 / Conselho Nacional de Pesquisa e Desenvolvimento Científico e Tecnológico - CNPq / Coordenação de Aperfeiçoamento de Pessoal de Nível Superior - CAPES / The use of cinematographic sources from Haiti, Cuba, Jamaica and Brazil in this research intends to escape the “archival power”, accompanying Michel-Rolph Trouillot (1995) and his questioning, in ways of deconstructing universal metanarratives and de-silencing of History. Challenging images and sounds of the 21st century aims to approach the traditions and ways of life of Afro-Latin American groups. Tracks opened by dimensions of postcolonial studies and cultural studies served as a starting point against the power of discourse, analyzing practices of representation that impose a “regime of truth” and mark cultural difference by signifying "the racialized 'Other' in Western popular culture" (HALL, 2016). While searching for what emerges when the „Other‟ represents his/herself from their own positionality and epistemic perspectives of the South, this work intentionally draws on references that produce knowledge and theories „otherwise‟, decentering Global North‟s instrumental rationalism. Approaching socialized cultures ruled by "regimes of orality" (ANTONACCI, 2016) requires getting close to multifaceted ways of being, living and knowing manifested in cognitive and communicational practices. It requires apprehending distinctions, and considering that the unforeseen of encounters / confrontations in the so-called New World have resulted in a plurality of Afrodiasporic cultures. As paradigms are being redefined, "musicosmoving afroepistemes" are being surveyed, confronting the concept of literacy and its lack of consideration for the senses. The term coined in this research pluralizes epistemes from a sensory-corporeal-reason standpoint, where the rhythm allows for alignment with the time of the Cosmos, updating and actualizing ideas that do not constitute themselves individually, but as a whole, as performances – “vital acts of transfers" (TAYLOR, 2013) – as seen in cinematographies I have used in this work / Nesta pesquisa, que interpela imagens e narrativas afrodiaspóricas do século XXI, em abordagens relacionadas a tradições e formas de vida de grupos populares de Afro-Latino-Américas, utilizam-se como fontes cinematografias de Haiti, Cuba, Jamaica e Brasil. Intencionando escapar ao “poder do arquivo”, o recurso a imagens, sons, montagens fílmicas acompanha questionamentos de Michel-Rolph Trouillot (1995), em caminhos de desconstrução de metanarrativas universais e de des-silenciamentos da História. Trilhas abertas por vertentes de estudos pós-coloniais e Estudos Culturais serviram de ponto de partida na contramão ao poder do discurso, analisando práticas de representação que impõem “regime de verdade” e marcam diferença cultural ao significar “o „Outro‟ racializado na cultura popular ocidental” (HALL, 2016). Em busca do que emerge quando “o „Outro‟” se autorrepresenta desde suas local-idades ao Sul, tornaram-se necessários referenciais outros, além teorias produzidas em racionalismo instrumental do Norte global. Lidar com culturas sociabilizadas sob “regimes de oralidade” requer acercar-se a modos de ser, viver e saber de práticas cognitivas e comunicacionais, apreendendo suas distinções, uma vez que o imprevisível de encontros/confrontos em terras do chamado Novo Mundo resultou em pluralidade de culturas afrodiaspóricas. Em percepção de paradigmas que se atualizam, na contramão de anulação dos sentidos própria de letramento, sondam-se “afroepistemes musicosmodançantes”. Com expressão cunhada nesta pesquisa, pluralizam-se epistemes desde razão corpóreo-sensorial, onde o ritmo permite alinhamento ao tempo cósmico, atualizando e presentificando pensares que não se constituem individualmente, mas em grupo, a partir de performances – “atos vitais de transferências” (TAYLOR, 2013) – como acompanhado em cinematografias trabalhadas