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.

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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

This dissertation explores bullerengue music as an oral and aural practice, tradition, and social space through which cantadoras—elderly women singers—construct and preserve knowledge, memory, and affect in the Caribbean region of Montes de Maria in northern Colombia. This study delves into bullerengue as a struggle of forms and cultural practices that cantadoras articulate through musical performance to resist marginalization and embody constructive ways of being in the world. The cantadoras realize a force and artistry directly related to their Maroon history, ontologies based on respect for life and nature, and the affective dimensions of bullerengue performance. My research goal is to assess, question, and impactfully revert the long history of discrimination and oppression in capitalist modernity—by gender, race, and age—while revealing how the hegemonic notions of music, poetry, and politics in Colombia have ostensibly excluded women, Afro-descendants, and therefore, Afro-descendant women. The importance of this dissertation lies in amplifying the cantadoras’ voices in academia through bullerengue as a vehicle for musical, social, and political possibilities to recognize the cantadoras’ ontologies that uphold life and nature over the capitalist extractivist ideology that has brought the global crises of wars. The research methodology includes music-recording production, participant observation, interviews, and archival research, reflecting on 15 years of collaboration with cantadoras. Chapter One discusses how folkloric constructions of bullerengue have been based on the silencing of cantadoras, given that researchers, as outsiders, could not grasp the influence of Afro-descendant elderly women. To revert the epistemological framework of white men producing ignorance about a tradition led by Afro-descendant women, the archival exploration unsilences women through the sound archive and oral memories of their heiresses. Chapter Two explores bullerengue song as a “technology of sound inscription”(Ochoa Gautier 2014), a women’s archive that shapes culture (Brooks 2021), and a political and epistemic expression within counter-hegemonic sites (Collins 1999; Davis 1999). I argue that song functions as a (re)sounding historical vehicle for the ancestresses and their heirs to communicate cross-generationally, overcoming the silencing of hegemonic politics and death. Chapter Three ethnographically investigates the lifelong processes of building the bullerengue-voice, drawing from cantadoral testimonies, concepts, and theories in dialogue with academic sources. Chapter Four chronicles the production of the album Ancestras, focusing it as a lens through which to study Petrona Martinez’s bullerengue-voice as an entity that united Afro-diasporic women while blurring symbolic, material, and geopolitical boundaries through song and sound reproduction technologies despite her tragic loss of material voice. I argue that her bullerengue-voice crossed such boundaries thanks to its epistemic aurality—a mutual construction relating voice and worlding—and poetics of collaboration. I also reflect on the album’s cross-cultural collaborations and how I—Petrona’s producer and friend— sought to help her amplify her voice, thought, and oral memory.

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.