Quiet Dawn: Time, Aesthetics, and the Afterlives of Black Radicalism traces the unfulfilled utopian aspirations of the revolutionary past that haunt the present of the African diaspora. Taking its name from the final track on famed black nationalist musician Archie Shepp’s 1972 Attica Blues, this dissertation argues that the defeat of black radical and anticolonial projects witnessed during the turbulent years of the sixties and seventies not only represent past “failures” but also point to a freedom that has yet to arrive. Working at the convergence of literature, performance, and visual culture, Quiet Dawn argues that the unfinished projects of black and anticolonial revolution live on as radical potentialities that linger in the archive like a “haunting refrain.” Quiet Dawn offers a theory the haunting refrain of black sociality that emanates across seemingly disparate geopolitical nodes. The concept of the haunting refrain designates an affective register through which otherwise hidden and obscure regions of the past can be apprehended. The dissertation attends to the traces of black sociality that linger in the archive through an examination of the literary and critical works of black intellectuals such as Amiri Baraka, Nikki Giovanni, Kamau Brathwaite, Sylvia Wynter, Frantz Fanon, and Léopold Sédar Senghor. Rather than lay claim to political heroes, Quiet Dawn turns to the past in an attempt to give an account of the dispersed social forces that gathered around the promise of a black world. Each chapter offers an example of the haunting refrain of black social life that lingers in the past. In this way, the dissertation as a whole gives an account of the radical potentialities that register as hums, echoes, muted chants, and shadow songs of the “long sixties.” Quiet Dawn contributes to scholarship on black internationalism and intervenes in current critical debates around race, gender, and sexual violence in the fields of black studies, feminist studies, and postcolonial studies. Its theorization of black social life as a spectral presence is an attempt at attending to the other others that haunt contemporary critiques of power which merely seek redemption in an irredeemable world. To be sure, this project strikes neither an optimistic nor pessimistic note. Rather, it is rooted in the belief that there are infinite amounts of hope that we have yet to apprehend.

This dissertation project examines the Ghanaian state's role in developing a heritage tourism industry that actively manipulates commemorative practices surrounding the legacy of the slave trade to redefine and institutionalize the ambiguous relationship Ghana holds with communities of African descent abroad. Developed in response to the renewed interest in African ancestry following the 1976 release of Alex Haley's novel Roots and its popular television adaptation, Ghana and other states in the region have since sought to incorporate African-Americans into their economic planning by providing them with opportunities to recover their lost heritage through tourism experiences. Not limited to the creation of heritage sites, monuments and museums dedicated to the legacy of slavery and dispersal from Africa, these states have also tailored investment opportunities to reflect a renewed spirit of Pan-Africanism and validate African-Americans' membership within a re-envisioned diasporic African community.

This dissertation is a comparative and transnational study of the techniques of racial impersonation used by white performers to represent black Afro-diasporic people in early modern England, Spain, and France. The racialization of blackness that took place in England at the turn of the sixteenth century has been well studied over the course of the last thirty years. This dissertation expands English early modern race scholarship in new directions by revealing the existence of a multi-directional circulation of racial ideas, lexemes, and performance techniques that led to the development of a vivid trans-European stage idiom of blackness across national borders in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. While early modern race scholarship has traditionally focused on the rhetorical and dramatic strategies used by playwrights to create black characters, this dissertation brings to the fore the ideological work inherent in performance. It does so by arguing that the techniques of racial impersonation used in various loci of European performance culture, such as blackface, blackspeak (a comic mock-African accent), and black dances, racialized Afro-diasporic people as they led spectators in a variety of ways to think of those people as belonging naturally at the bottom of any well-constituted social order. This dissertation shows how the hermeneutic configurations and re-configurations of techniques of racial impersonation such as blackface, blackspeak, and black dance responded to social changes, to the development of colonization and color-based slavery, and to changing perceptions of what Afro-diasporic people’s status should be in European and Atlantic societies across the early modern period.

FundaÃÃo Cearense de Apoio ao Desenvolvimento Cientifico e TecnolÃgico / The immigration process of Africans to Brazil and Cearà for the purpose of studying has been straightening in the last decades, especially since 2012, after the first selection processes for the Universidade da IntegraÃÃo Internacional da Lusofonia Afro-brasileira (UNILAB). These young people have suffered the daily experience of prejudice and racism, related to their condition of belonging to a social minority, being the psychosocial implication the research problem of this dissertation. The general objective, then, was to analyze the psychosocial implications of the prejudice and racism in the UNILAB Africans students; and the specific objectives are to identify the demonstrations of prejudice and racism from the reports about the experience of immigration for the purpose of studying, to analyze the psychosocial implications - such as thoughts, actions and feelings from these demonstrations and to describe strategies developed by African students at UNILAB in order to face prejudice and racism. This investigation has a qualitative approach, being fourteen the interviewed students, belonging to different African nationalities of Portuguese as official language (Angola, Cape Verde, Guinea Bissau, Mozambique, SÃo Tomà and PrÃncipe). All of them are students at UNILAB, living in Cearà as beneficiaries of social programs for student assistance. The data were run through Content Analysis with software Atlas Ti. Our main results describe different exclusion practices, as much as individual, institutional and cultural manifestations of racism, predominantly understood as cordial racism. These practices are related to processes of social categorization and stigmatization, which, by its turn, result in the assignment of social stereotypes, as well as processes of social discrimination and social suffering (shame, humiliation, fear, rejection). As a way to face this reality, we observe the importance of assertion policies for black and african identity by these young people, as much as support offered by established social networks and collective organization in search of acknowledgment and respect. We conclude that racism suffered by these young people in Brazil is enhanced by processes of distinction between Brazilian and African groups, which have a strong impact upon the psychosocial experience of migration for educational purposes. / O processo imigratÃrio ao Brasil e ao Cearà de jovens africanos para fins estudantis vem se fortalecendo nas Ãltimas dÃcadas, contexto que ganha forÃa maior a partir de 2012, apÃs os primeiros processos seletivos da Universidade da IntegraÃÃo Internacional da Lusofonia Afro-brasileira (UNILAB). Estes jovens sofrem a cotidiana experiÃncia do preconceito e do racismo, relacionados à sua condiÃÃo de pertencentes a uma minoria social, sendo nosso problema de pesquisa as suas implicaÃÃes psicossociais. Nosso objetivo geral, assim, foi analisar as implicaÃÃes psicossociais do preconceito e do racismo nos estudantes africanos da UNILAB; e nossos objetivos especÃficos: identificar as manifestaÃÃes de preconceito e racismo a partir dos relatos sobre a experiÃncia de imigraÃÃo para fins estudantis; analisar as implicaÃÃes psicossociais â pensamentos, aÃÃes e sentimentos provenientes destas manifestaÃÃes; descrever estratÃgias desenvolvidas pelos estudantes africanos da UNILAB para o enfrentamento do preconceito e do racismo. Esta investigaÃÃo possuiu carÃter qualitativo, onde foram entrevistados quatorze estudantes de diferentes nacionalidades africanas de lÃngua oficial portuguesa (Angola, Cabo-verde, GuinÃ-Bissau, MoÃambique, SÃo Tomà e PrÃncipe). Todos os participantes sÃo estudantes da UNILAB no Cearà e beneficiÃrios de programa de assistÃncia estudantil. Os dados foram trabalhados atravÃs de AnÃlise de ConteÃdo, com auxÃlio do software Atlas Ti. Nossos resultados principais descrevem diferentes prÃticas de exclusÃo, alÃm de manifestaÃÃes individuais, institucionais e culturais de racismo, predominantemente compreendidas a partir do racismo cordial. Estas prÃticas relacionam-se aos processos de categorizaÃÃo social e estigmatizaÃÃo, que, por sua vez, resultam na atribuiÃÃo de estereÃtipos sociais, em processos de discriminaÃÃo social e em sofrimentos sociais (vergonha, humilhaÃÃo, medo, rejeiÃÃo). Como forma de lidar com esta realidade, observamos a importÃncia de estratÃgias de afirmaÃÃo da identidade negra e africana por parte destes jovens, assim como o apoio prestado pelas redes sociais estabelecidas e a organizaÃÃo coletiva em busca de reconhecimento e respeito. ConcluÃmos que o racismo sofrido por estes jovens no Brasil à potencializado pelos processos de distinÃÃo entre os grupos âos/as brasileirosâ e âos/as africanosâ, impactando sobremaneira na experiÃncia psicossocial de imigraÃÃo para fins estudantis.

This project examines the ways in which several texts written in the late twentieth century by African American and Caribbean writers appropriate history and witness trauma. I read the representational practices of Toni Morrison, Ernest Gaines, Paule Marshall, and Fred D'Aguiar as they offer distinct approaches to history and the resulting effects such reconstituted, discovered, or, in some cases, imagined histories can have on the affirmation of the self as a subject. I draw my theoretical framework from the spaces of intersection between diaspora and postcolonial theories, enabling me to explore the values of the African diaspora cross-culturally as manifested in the representational practices of these writers. This study creates an opening into recent discourses of the African diaspora by comparing texts in which the effects of history rooted in diaspora are explored, both in how this history cripples with the impact of trauma and how it empowers dynamic self-actualization and the resistance of the status quo. I argue that in these novels, challenging hegemonic historical narratives and bearing witness to the past are necessary for overcoming the isolating and disempowering effects of trauma, while affirming diasporic consciousness enhances the role of communal belonging and cultural memory in the process of self-actualization.

This dissertation explores how spatial processes of race shape Afro-Nicaraguan women’s political subjectivity, activist practice, and lived experience by studying their community-based organizing in the Caribbean coastal city of Bluefields, Nicaragua. Specifically, it analyzes the political responses they are developing to address the devastating impacts of neoliberal economic reform, gendered state violence, structural racism and the politics of gender justice that have emerged from their participation in place-based struggles for racial and regional justice. My dissertation research brings together critical race theory, Latin American social movements, African Diasporic feminisms, and the critical interventions of cultural and political geography to study Creole women’s community activism. I suggest that Creole women’s participation in what Harcourt and Escobar (2005) term the “politics of place” reflects the ways in which larger processes of anti-Black racism, gender subordination, and economic inequality have historically been and continue to be articulated through the idiom of place. I demonstrate how the politics of place shapes local, regional, and national histories of race and alterity and informs Creole women’s political practice and vision in ways that differ markedly from the mainstream women’s and feminist movements in Nicaragua. Through their place-based activism and focus on regional struggles that seem to be separate from an explicit feminist politics, Creole women have brought greater attention to the particularly gendered ways in which processes of state violence, structural adjustment, and economic exclusion impact their communities. Their political participation is concentrated around several key areas: urban land conflicts; women’s work in the regional and national economy; and the struggle for racial justice and full citizenship in Nicaragua. Through their participation in these social movements, Afro-Nicaraguan women are gendering and reshaping local and national struggles for racial equality. I argue that this model of community and place-based activism suggests that scholars of Latin American and Caribbean women’s social movements might more fruitfully analyze these movements not by searching for the ideal feminist subject or narrowly defining the terms of feminist politics but rather by understanding how women’s engagement in the politics of place creates space for them to interrogate intersecting processes of racial, gender, and economic subordination. / text

Homicide deaths are a common reality in Brazil. Every year, approximately 50,000 people die from this violent crime. Between January 2009 and February 2010, 7,936 people were killed just on the state of Rio de Janeiro. Of this amount, 1,185 were committed by the police, not including the number of disappeared people in this state, came up to 6,379. This report seeks to address the political and analytical challenges of understanding and redressing the negative impacts of state policies and everyday practices, especially violence, on Black Brazilians, particularly disadvantaged Black women, through a revision of relevant scholarship. I first draw attention to three distinct approaches of violence of the state of Rio de Janeiro, and on Black people’s resistance practice. Second, I connect Rio de Janeiro’s practices of state violence with contemporary and historical experiences of racial terror in the African Diaspora through policing Black youth and Black communities, imprisonment, and violence against Black women. And finally, I theorize on the relevance of my work to Black feminism, African Diaspora, and activist theories addressing the politics of fieldwork and the impact of the research on that experience. The knowledge apprehended through this report contributes to my own and further research on state violence against Black people in Brazil and throughout the African Diaspora. / text

This dissertation describes the results of a two year anthropological investigation into the concept of mental well being among the working class Afro-Surinamese population in Paramaribo, Suriname. More specifically, the research investigated how working class Afro-Surinamese in Paramaribo, Suriname define and maintain their sense of mental well-being, given their unique ethnic identity within a multi-ethnic and multicultural society, and given that their environment is heavily compromised by negative globalizing forces Over the course of two years a total of 62 people contributed information through group and individual interviews, which was supplemented by information obtained through participant observation. Findings show a highly complex system of mental well being that consists of a number of interlocking and interdependent factors, which, when kept in a harmonious relationship with each other, are presumed to bring mental well being. There are unique Afro-Surinamese measures available for strengthening mental well being based in rich and historical cultural traditions that are currently under-utilized, but have the potential to be revived and introduced for the benefit of peoples mental well being. Suriname was selected as a Caribbean country that struggles in a marginalized political and economic position in regards to the rest of the Caribbean, and in relation to the world powers. Suriname is also a Dutch Caribbean country about which little academic information has been published. This research aimed to bring forth a story of a globally marginalized people, and particularly of a population of African descent. It aimed to bring attention to the concept of mental well being among African Diaspora people, and to use the story of a small population as a starting point to connect with and look at other populations, Diaspora based or otherwise. Theoretical viewpoints of African Diaspora, Globalization, and a combination of Black Feminist/Third World Feminist/Caribbean Feminist theories were used to guide and shape this research. Lastly, an attempt was made to introduce the concept of Spirituality as a new and complementary aspect of ethnographic methodology.

Transnational migrants challenge meanings of home, belonging, and citizenship because they exercise their right to mobility and form multiple allegiances abroad, all while negotiating different gender roles and new care deficits. In three parts, I explore the meanings of home and belonging for transnational women and seek to understand the gendered implications of their migration, especially how migrant women meet care needs and confront institutional exclusion. First, I explore how Global South women use transnational friendship networks to migrate and fill welfare-pitfalls in the US. Next, I argue that the concept of the ‘Third World Woman’ helps in understanding belonging and informal support networks both at work and in life. Finally, bringing citizenship, belonging, and care together through multiple meanings of home, I explore how multiple allegiances to multiple places form and how exclusion, inclusion, feelings of belonging, and citizenship shape transnational women’s experiences in and attachments to different places.

Transnational migrants challenge meanings of home, belonging, and citizenship because they exercise their right to mobility and form multiple allegiances abroad, all while negotiating different gender roles and new care deficits. In three parts, I explore the meanings of home and belonging for transnational women and seek to understand the gendered implications of their migration, especially how migrant women meet care needs and confront institutional exclusion. First, I explore how Global South women use transnational friendship networks to migrate and fill welfare-pitfalls in the US. Next, I argue that the concept of the ‘Third World Woman’ helps in understanding belonging and informal support networks both at work and in life. Finally, bringing citizenship, belonging, and care together through multiple meanings of home, I explore how multiple allegiances to multiple places form and how exclusion, inclusion, feelings of belonging, and citizenship shape transnational women’s experiences in and attachments to different places.