This is a novel that takes place primarily in 1947 – 1948—the immediate postwar period—in a fictional British Caribbean island named St. Francis. St. Francis, while a distinct fictional space, is strongly based off the island I grew up in, the Commonwealth of Dominica, in the days after the War when many British Caribbean islands still had American bases and were embroiled in battles to end their rule by the British. The novel follows four primary characters: a teenage trans girl named Imogen, who doesn't even know the word "transgender" might exist and who most of the world knows as "Derek"; her grandmother, Isabel Catarina da Gama, who for many years has lived alone with Imogen in the da Gama family mansion; Beija-flor, a Brazilian teenage girl from Sao Paulo who has come with her father to St. Francis, as her father is involved in a mysterious job in the island, and who has been promised to be married to a man back in Brazil she does not love; and Monsignor Bakkus, a highly influential religious figure in the island who has a secret history with Isabel Catarina that torments him. In the beginning of the novel, the da Gamas' house burns down when Imogen steps outside to investigate two things she isn't accustomed to: the sound of someone singing and the smell of guavas. When she returns, the house is on fire, and her grandmother, furious, tells her Imogen must pay her back for what she has done, as well as to rebuild the house. In order to generate money, the grandmother forces Imogen to put on a disturbing, dangerous show that attracts people from across the island, including American soldiers from the nearby WWII base and the local pastor, who condemns the show and calls the monsignor to the village to investigate. Imogen meets Beija-flor through the show, and the two form a fast friendship. But when Imogen begins to stray beyond her grandmother's control to spend more time with Beija-flor and to try to figure out her own identity, they begin to learn things about themselves and the world that they can never unlearn. When the monsignor arrives in the village with an agenda to not only stop the show and deal with the American soldiers' brothel but to confront his past with Isabel Catarina, chaos ensues, and everyone learns that they must make decisions that will terrify them—and change them forever. This is a novel about love, loss, gender, religion, imperialism, and much more. / A Dissertation submitted to the Department of English in partial fulfillment of the Doctor of Philosophy. / Spring Semester 2017. / April 12, 2017. / Caribbean, Dominica, LGBT, LGBTQ, Queer, Transnational / Includes bibliographical references. / Mark Winegardner, Professor Directing Dissertation; Martin Munro, University Representative; Diane Roberts, Committee Member; Elizabeth Stuckey-French, Committee Member; Candace Ward, Committee Member.

The prevalence of diabetes is increasing among persons of Caribbean ancestry in the United States, yet there is little research on the differences in the health and nutrition patterns of diabetics from this population. This study created a culturally-sensitive diabetes education program for the staff of an internal medicine practice that treated patients from the English-speaking Caribbean. The project was guided by the health belief model, as well as Leininger's theory of transcultural nursing. Methodology of project had a quality improvement focus. The comprehensive curriculum included diabetes medications, physical activity, culturally-tailored medical nutrition therapy, complications, self-care behavior, problem solving, and goals. Tools incorporated into the program included DVD, self-learning power point modules, and staff and patient education materials. The diabetes education program was introduced to 16 members of the internal medicine staff, chosen by the physician. A question and answer session was included, during which medical personnel articulated satisfaction with the program. Also verbalized was their increased understanding of diabetes education, and medical nutrition therapy tailored towards English-speaking Caribbean diabetics. The implication for social change indicates that in order for patients of the target population to receive quality, culturally-specific diabetes education, medical personnel must receive structured culturally-tailored diabetes education. Education translated into evidence-based patient education and practices. Program evaluation can be undertaken by monitoring staff and patient satisfaction, and improved patients' hemoglobin A1C.

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Using semi-structured interviews, this research brings to light the lived experiences of thirteen men informally employed as sex workers in Jamaica and concentrates on both determining the motivations of Jamaican men involved in the informal sex trade and understanding the men's perceptions and understandings of the tourist women with whom they become involved with. Female sex tourism is found to be used in part as a mechanism for escaping poverty, allowing men to provide for their families, an important area for male identity in Jamaica. The sex tourism of Western women also allows Jamaican men an arena to both secure sexual access to women as well as associated social status. The link between sex tourism and racism, and the racial stereotypes that precede black men are very familiar to the male sex workers who regard racial motivations, ranging from the desire to experience 'something new' to wanting to engage in sexual relations with 'real black men' to be the primary motivating factor for women who travel to Jamaica to engage in sexual relations with local men. Using the conceptualizations of the Rude Boy and Rasta performances of masculinity, it is found that local men have cultivated the ability to deploy their masculinity and sexuality in ways that maximized their desirability to tourists, allowing them to perform the stereotyped roles of Jamaican masculinity in ways that accord to tourist women’s expectations. / Thesis / Master of Arts (MA)

In the context of American imperialism, what role does the interracial/interethnic literary romance play? Do these romances offer the possibility of integrating politically disparate elements, or do these literary unions reveal the conflicts of nation-building at a time of territorial expansion? Drawing upon Doris Sommer's work on heterosexual romances and Robert McKee Irwin's work on homosocial bonds and both authors studies on nation-formation in Latin America, I explore interethnic/interracial unions in works by American and Latino writers and analyze the role these fictional romances and unions serve in representing the inclusion of new peoples and the formation of American national identity at the time of territorial expansion. The texts examined include Helen Hunt Jackson's Ramona, María Amparo Ruiz de Burton's The Squatter and the Don, Elizabeth Van Deusen's collection short story readers, Stories of Porto Rico and Tropical Tales (Porto Rico) and Manuel Zeno Gandía's Redentores. Through their use of the interracial/interethnic romance and unions, I argue that these writers reveal the complications of the larger geopolitical unions being constructed by the United States in the second half of the nineteenth century and early part of the twentieth century. These texts show the potentially subversive power that love, the romance trope, and related themes and homosocial bonds may have in a genre that traditionally emphasizes unions; in addition these works demonstrate that in unions—whether romantic or political—tensions will always persist. Lastly, these texts also demonstrate the frailty of using the nation-as-lovers as the emblematic trope of a nation that will hold within it multiple unions. Issues discussed include how romance is constructed, including the allusions, metaphors, plot devices, and motifs incorporated to tell the story of that romance; representation of these unions in light of United States' anti-miscegenation laws; the construction of consent; education and the lessons of domesticity.

An examination of postcolonial writings from the Caribbean disrupts the notion that postcolonial discourse is locked in a mode of constant reply to the colonizer and keeps the colonial powers at the center. Many Caribbean writers focus their discourse primarily on the ways their own communities internalize received ideas, and use them as the basis of social organization and interpersonal relationships. This study examines the use of Caribbean orature as the narrative strategy in selected Anglophone Caribbean fiction. I use a performance studies-centered approach to read prose fiction by Merle Collins, Earl Lovelace and Olive Senior that exemplifies the "inward turn" of Caribbean postcolonial criticism. I argue that these writers use specific oral forms to critique and challenge their communities, while affirming their local resources. In The Colour of Forgetting Merle Collins interrogates her community's rejection of its indigenous stories, in favor of a Euro-centric written history that privileges the outsiders' perspectives. Colour performs and presents an inclusive history, inspired formally and substantially by Grenadian oral tradition. I enter the conversation about Earl Lovelace's well-known nationalist discourse and validation of Caribbean orature by reading the gender ideologies that his choice of narrative strategy and treatment of female characters trouble. My central argument is that this writer's works reflect the lived experience of gender relationships in the Caribbean, rather than the dominant culture's colonially-derived patriarchal structure. My reading of Olive Senior's stories explores her use of gossip and other oral forms associated primarily with women to highlight how differences in race that informed life in colonial and early postcolonial Jamaica remain a central part of life in contemporary Jamaican society. I conclude that, in writing texts that straddle European literary traditions and Caribbean orature, these writers demonstrate the inevitable merging of and tensions among cultures and knowledge systems that characterize life in colonial/modern societies. However, more importantly, reading their fictions in the ways I have read them directs attention to the "inward turn" of postcolonial criticism that is sometimes elided in postcolonial discussions.

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This dissertation addresses questions of the body that is imagined within contemporary Puerto Rican literature. Specifically, I focus on how the Afro-Puerto Rican body, as a site of artistic representation, articulates particular conceptions of history and narration in contemporary Puerto Rican culture. I have examined the texts of Luis Palés Matos, Isabelo Zenón, Edgardo Rodríguez Juliá and Beatriz Berrocal. In this study I argue that the literary embodiment of the Afro-Puerto Rican self is the crucial site where conflicting national discourses have been written and read, and as such demonstrates its ambivalent role in the struggles towards emancipation, citizenship and autonomy in the twentieth-century. Ultimately, the ways in which these texts construct relations based on the Afro-Puerto Rican experience have highlighted the inconsistencies, irregularities and upheavals that have characterized Puerto Rican literary, social and political history. Given the extent to which my approach is intertwined with other mainstream and marginal literary traditions, I have explored the historical and conceptual links of the chosen Puerto Rican texts with Caribbean, Latin American, and African-American literary traditions. By highlighting the Afro-Puerto Rican body and its cultural development, my examination reveals that one of the main intentions of this literary trend is to socially organize in the world of fiction the consciousness of the racial group. Stories of escape from bondage, redemptive suffering, and struggles of the weak against colonizing powers have led writers to particular ways of creating pseudo-autobiographical dramatizations of the Afro-Puerto Rican self. In fact, a consideration of Afro-Puerto Rican literature beyond just being about black themes can provide a reorientation for the analysis of contemporary Caribbean literary aesthetics. These are issues that my work will advance in the field of Afro-Hispanic and Latin American literatures.

The people of Ayiti have a long history of resistance, from the indigenous Arawak inhabitants of the land to the Africans who were later brought there against their will. Both groups have historically relied on the land in ways that promote resistance in a way that is not a direct response to slavery and oppression. The inherited African cultural values explored in this paper preceded European cultural domination. The relationship between Ayitians and plants is rooted within African cosmological understandings of an interwoven web that includes all beings on the earthly and spiritual plane. Using an Afrocentric theoretical framework, I examine how interspecies collaboration through Ayitian plant practices demonstrates African cultural preservation. In this paper, I draw parallels between the concepts of ubuntu and Ma’at to demonstrate ancient and contemporary African ontology and how they manifest in the Ayitian holistic medical system as illuminated by Vodou priest Max-G. Beauvoir. This paper's findings indicate that one way Ayitian people have preserved their African cultural roots is through plant practices. Through this form of cultural preservation, they have resisted European cultural domination. / Africology and African American Studies