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No description available.

No description available.

No description available.

This study, based on novels written originally in English by writers from English-speaking West Indian nations during the period 1949 to 1980, explores the authors' vision of the motives, nature and processes by which liberation from colonialism is sought and achieved. Extended discussion is given to the following: V.S. Reid's New Day (1949, George Lamming's In the Castle of My Skin (1953), John Hearne’s Land of the Living (1961), Andrew Salkey's A Quality of Violence (1959), Paule Marshall's The Chosen Place, The Timeless People (1969), V. S. Naipaul's Guerrillas (1975), and Michael Thelwell's The Harder They Come (1980). Whereas New Day asserts the reality of a West Indian identity, In the Castle of My Skin stresses the need for a collective awareness of racial identity and its socio-political implications. A Quality of Violence and Land of the Living attest to the importance of establishing (in West Indian societies) spiritual values which are not Western and which are connected to the people's cultural history. Similarly, The Chosen Place, the Timeless People illustrates that a sense of history can greatly influence the struggle to achieve social change. Even though Guerrillas uses a chaotic situation on a specific West Indian island to suggest socio-political and cultural confusion in the West Indies generally, this novel nevertheless reveals the need for fundamental socio-political change. Unlike Guerrillas, The Harder They Come stresses the creative potential of the West Indian people as an agent for such change. Thus in conclusion it is argued that these novels confirm the West Indian nations' need to change their societies in ways which are more egalitarian and less colonial. But to bring about that change, the writers generally agree that psycho-cultural resistance requires a consciousness that no longer accepts the dictates of an oppressive culture but attempts to rediscover its own validity. This attempt at rediscovery of individual, communal, and racial identities indicates an increasing vitality in the struggle for change in these societies, whose past has been stolen, whose present is being directed, and whose future has been planned by external agencies.

This research assesses the extent to which written and illustrated imagery, created for a general audience, informed perceptions of colonial Korea, in England, between 1910 and 1939. Through the utilisation of primary sources and material evidence, I show how these perceptions were mainly constructed through a Japanese lens, even when consideration was being offered by Western people. Pre-existing views of Japan and of the Orient, held by the English public at the time, also informed these views. Evidenced here is the manner in which Japan played a role in the creation of a Korean image in England. My findings show that some aspects of modernisation, which Korea received via Japan, were perceived as beneficial, particularly in the facilitation of travel for foreigners to colonial Korea.

In 1902, Virginia's revised constitution was proclaimed by the all-male, all-white delegates who had met in Richmond, the state capitol, for over a year. While they reviewed and revised the entire document, their main goal was to disfranchise black males. For the next seven decades, most black men, and, after 1920, black women found it difficult, if not impossible, to participate in the electoral process.;This dissertation looks at the effect of this event on blacks living in Hanover County, Virginia. Black Hanoverians steadily chipped away at the walls that enclosed them and limited their opportunities for success. First, they worked to determine their paths to freedom, and in doing so, set patterns of survival for their descendants. When their rights were being eroded, black Hanoverians, along with their compatriots in Richmond, deemphasized political involvement as the path to full citizenship and instead focused on self-help. Third, they responded to Jim Crow by fostering lives that ran parallel to those of whites. Fourth, in spite of the hardships of living in a racist system, black Hanoverians moved to play their part in overcoming the pressures placed on the country by the Depression and war. Finally, African Americans in Hanover drew on various traditions established by their ancestors to regain their civil rights.;In the end, black Hanoverians resisted the strictures of their "place" as defined by white people. Following Emancipation, the amendments to the federal Constitution, and the Reconstruction Acts, they had reason to believe that they would finally be accepted as citizens in the United States, a country that they and their ancestors had helped to build. They soon found that this would not be the case. Instead, they would have to seek citizenship via avenues of their own making. In the end, they have taught their descendants that citizenship asserts itself from within, and that it has proved to be something that no one can take away.

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No description available.

This dissertation seeks to explain why more than 110 African American individuals proposed to enslave themselves (and, in some cases, their children as well) in Virginia from 1854 to 1864. I examine the act of the Virginia legislature in 1856 "providing for the voluntary enslavement of the free negroes of the commonwealth" and suggest that this law provided some free Afro-Virginian individuals with an alternative to removal from the state and separation from their families (as called for by the sporadically enforced 1806 expulsion law, passed in part to discourage manumissions). I argue that if receiving legal freedom threatened a free black Virginian with removal, then a legal enslavement that allowed for domestic freedoms---a meaningful family life and a connection to a homeland or community---could come to seem preferable.;Many scholars have suggested that, by passing the 1856 self-enslavement law, legislators intended to facilitate the wholesale enslavement of Virginia's free black population. They have assumed that the passage of Virginia's so-called voluntary enslavement law marked the nadir of free black life in the state and the height of antebellum repression of a class that Virginia politicians at times unequivocally deemed to be "an evil." But such an interpretation of the law in Virginia is a misreading both of the intentions of white lawmakers and of the law's use by free blacks. to enslave oneself in the state during the politically tense 1850s was generally not an easy task. Safeguards incorporated into the law itself ensured that neither the state nor individual slaveholders could coerce free blacks into servitude. In fact, if the state played any part in self-enslavement, it was in an attempt to prevent it.;Through data gathered in county will books, court minutes, ended papers in chancery and law causes, personal property tax lists, and various other county sources, as well as state and federal records, I attempt to illuminate the lives of those individuals who chose to become legally enslaved---all in an effort to draw larger conclusions about the multiple meanings of manumission, freedom, and slavery to African Americans in nineteenth-century Virginia.