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Many Black scholars have researched and written about their experiences as Black students at a Predominantly White Institution (PWI). Most of their successes were built on the support they received from their families and friends. More importantly, their personal commitment to being numbered as successful Black students was the impetus for which they were willing to challenge the paradigm that Blacks can indeed succeed in higher education. As a Black Caribbean Diaspora student enrolled at a PWI, I have experienced what it is like to be Black through purposeful living, education, leadership and a divine plan. I have also utilized my Black identity as a vehicle to garner success amidst the challenges I faced being the only Black in academia, readjusting to college life and discovering my own Blackness. It is with this backdrop that I use the Scholarly Personal Narrative (SPN) methodology to write this dissertation and highlight my experience as a Black Caribbean student at a PWI. The research and stories explored during this dissertation were examined through several questions: What is the experience of a Black Caribbean Diaspora student who carries multiple identities at a PWI? What differs, separates, divides, as well as unites, the Black Diaspora students from a racial perspective? How can PWIs communicate confidence in the ability of Black students and engage them in the campus and its academic life regardless of their racial identity? How can Black Diaspora students be retained to successfully achieve a college degree? Additionally, this dissertation focuses on a myriad of experiences and stories from other Black Diaspora students who are from different ethnic backgrounds. This helps to support and answer some of the posed research questions. This SPN methodology includes a literature review on topics of Black Identity Development (Cross, 1978, 1972, 1971), Colorism (Harris, 2009; Reid-Salmon, 2008), and Critical Race Theory (Cole, 2009; Collins, 2007; Roithmayr 1999; West, 1993). Several themes emerged that aligned with my personal narrative and that of my Black Diaspora peers. These included parental involvement, integrative model of parenting (Darling and Steinberg‟s 1993), leadership supported by the African proverb, “it takes a village to raise a child,” and purposeful living where faith for a Black Diaspora student is central to their survival. A number of recommendations for how faculty and staff at PWIs can support Black Diaspora students in their educational attainment emerged: recognizing and acknowledging the differences among Black students; supporting, imparting, accepting and encouraging Black students in their education; and reorienting faculty and administrators in matters of race so as to understand Black Diaspora students. My personal narrative further elucidates and universalizes the notion that Black students can be successful in higher education despite the odds that are sometimes against them.

This dissertation examines the production of culture among Indo-Caribbean communities in New York City and Trinidad. It seeks to understand how cultural producers use performance as a way to mediate their experiences of racialization in local, national, and transnational spheres. Based on a multisited ethnographic study, I analyze the Indo-Caribbean diaspora as a result of nineteenth and twentieth century indentured labor migration and as a focus of post-1965 transnational migration. To do so, I introduce the idea of "transnational performances," which I employ to examine how expressions of Indo-Caribbean identity are performed in Trinidad and New York City as a way of mediating global processes. Specifically, this dissertation begins with a geographic and historical overview of Indo-Caribbean transnational populations, then provides an ethnographic study of contemporary Hindu religious festivals in Trinidad, an Islamic festival held in both New York City and Trinidad, Indo-Caribbean media in New York, and a cultural and arts center in New York. In all these sites Indo-Caribbean cultural producers engage the politics of public representation of Indo-Caribbean identity. I argue that while Indo-Caribbean religious, festival, media, and cultural producers engage with diasporic formations of identity and develop diasporic narratives that address Indian origins, they simultaneously develop new, creative, and flexible Indo- Caribbean transnational performances in the public sphere often coproducing their identities in relation to other diasporic communities. Concerns about authenticity exist alongside the desire to create new cultural practices that employ hybridity as a strategy to assert belonging. These transnational performances are spaces from which Indo-Caribbean communities develop a public voice that responds to perceived exclusions and erasures. The geographies of belonging that are central in the transnational performances of Indo-Caribbean cultural producers suggest that we must attend to the cultural practices developed within and across boundaries while taking a historical perspective on global processes that are reconfigured in the contemporary period. / text

This qualitative study examines the social, spiritual and political role the Black Oneness Churches play in Black communities. It also provides an anti-colonial examination of the Afro-Caribbean Oneness churches to understand how it functioned in the formation and defense of the emerging Black communities for the period 1960-1980. This project is based on qualitative interviews and focus groups conducted with Black Clergy and Black women in the Oneness church of the Greater Toronto area. This study is based on the following four objectives: 1. Understanding the central importance of the Black Oneness Pentecostal Church post 1960 to Black communities. 2. Providing a voice for those of the Black Church that are currently underrepresented in academic scholarship. 3. Examining how the Black Church responds to allegations of its own complicities in colonial practices. 4. Engage spirituality as a legitimate location and space from which to know and resist colonization. The study also introduces an emerging framework entitled: Whiteness as Theology. This framework is a critique of the theological discourse of Whiteness and the enduring relevance of the Black Church in a pluralistic Afro-Christian culture. The data collected reveal that while the Black Church operated as a social welfare institution that assisted thousands of new black immigrants, the inception of the church was political and in protest to racism. Hence, the Black Church is a product of white racism, migration and colonization. The paradox of the Black Church lies in its complicity in colonization while also creating religious forms of resistance. For example, the inception of the Afro-Caribbean Oneness Church was an anti-colonial response to the racism in the White Church. But 40 years later, the insidious nature of colonization has weaved through the church and “prosperity theology” as an impetus of colonialism has reshaped the social justice role of Black Churches.

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This qualitative study examines the social, spiritual and political role the Black Oneness Churches play in Black communities. It also provides an anti-colonial examination of the Afro-Caribbean Oneness churches to understand how it functioned in the formation and defense of the emerging Black communities for the period 1960-1980. This project is based on qualitative interviews and focus groups conducted with Black Clergy and Black women in the Oneness church of the Greater Toronto area. This study is based on the following four objectives: 1. Understanding the central importance of the Black Oneness Pentecostal Church post 1960 to Black communities. 2. Providing a voice for those of the Black Church that are currently underrepresented in academic scholarship. 3. Examining how the Black Church responds to allegations of its own complicities in colonial practices. 4. Engage spirituality as a legitimate location and space from which to know and resist colonization. The study also introduces an emerging framework entitled: Whiteness as Theology. This framework is a critique of the theological discourse of Whiteness and the enduring relevance of the Black Church in a pluralistic Afro-Christian culture. The data collected reveal that while the Black Church operated as a social welfare institution that assisted thousands of new black immigrants, the inception of the church was political and in protest to racism. Hence, the Black Church is a product of white racism, migration and colonization. The paradox of the Black Church lies in its complicity in colonization while also creating religious forms of resistance. For example, the inception of the Afro-Caribbean Oneness Church was an anti-colonial response to the racism in the White Church. But 40 years later, the insidious nature of colonization has weaved through the church and “prosperity theology” as an impetus of colonialism has reshaped the social justice role of Black Churches.

Cette thèse porte sur l’évolution des représentations de la diaspora antillaise en Grande-Bretagne depuis la deuxième moitié du vingtième siècle. La recherche se fonde sur l’hypothèse que le processus d’intégration est lié aux représentations. L’intégration ne peut se faire pleinement que lorsque les représentations négatives datant de l’époque coloniale sont complètement démantelées. Impuissante dans les années 1950 et 1960 face à l’hostilité de la population autochtone à son égard, la première génération de la diaspora antillaise en Grande-Bretagne ne pouvait que subir la discrimination raciale et les inégalités sociales dont elle fut victime. Cependant, dès la fin des années 1960, libérée du joug colonial britannique et se reconnaissant dans un discours de fierté noire venu des États-Unis, la diaspora antillaise se mobilisa, créant des associations de quartier et se donna de nouvelles représentations postcoloniales. Cette étude examine différentes stratégies déployées par une panoplie d’acteurs sociaux, politiques et culturels issus de la diaspora antillaise. L’évolution des représentations est certes bien amorcée, mais les résultats sont encore ambivalents. De nombreux travaux témoignent de la persistance d’un racisme institutionnel qui touche tout particulièrement les jeunes générations. L’éducation et les relations avec la police sont des domaines où des progrès sont encore à faire. Aux premières années du vingt-et-unième siècle, plus de soixante ans après son installation en Grande-Bretagne, la diaspora antillaise n’est toujours pas complètement intégrée à la société britannique. / This doctoral thesis focuses on the evolution of the social, political and cultural representations of the Caribbean diaspora in Great Britain since the second half of the twentieth century. It puts forward the hypothesis that integration is linked to representations and will only be successful when the negative representation of the colonial era is completely deconstructed. In the 1950s and 1960s, the members of the Caribbean diaspora were the passive victims of racial discrimination and social inequality. At the end of the 1960s, thanks to a growing political awareness and the emergence of Black self-help and protest groups encouraged by the U.S. Black Power movement, the diaspora began to weave its own new post-colonial social, political and cultural representations. Examples of the various strategies deployed to cast off detrimental colonial representations are analyzed. Representations have undoubtedly changed, but the results are mixed. Numerous reports indicate that institutional racism has not been eradicated from the British education system or from the police and that the younger generations are particularly vulnerable. At the beginning of the twenty-first century and after over sixty years of presence in the country, the Caribbean diaspora in Great Britain has still not achieved full integration.

Made available in DSpace on 2016-04-27T19:30:19Z (GMT). No. of bitstreams: 1 Nirlene Nepomuceno.pdf: 7141675 bytes, checksum: 3327ede728e6cb5db4b3a10c13893ce4 (MD5) Previous issue date: 2011-06-10 / Coordenação de Aperfeiçoamento de Pessoal de Nível Superior / This paper outlines the emergence of black festivities around Christmas holidays, in Brazil and the Caribbean during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Its main objective is to identify its dynamic processes of transformation, as well as strategies used by slaved Africans to both adapt to the "new world ", and to perpetuate the ties that bound them to Africa, a necessary step to resist colonial power embodied into oppression and violence. In addition to the seasonality of the period between Christmas and January 6, these black festivities share fragments of performative literacies , which inspite of their similarities and differences are revealing the contribution of African civilization in the Americas. We propose to "read" these festivities through, mainly, cultural practices, customs and the African body which in its displacement uploaded experiences and knowledge / Este trabalho acompanha a emergência de festas de protagonismo negro, de ocorrência no ciclo natalino, em regiões do Brasil e do Caribe, durante os séculos XVIII e XIX. O objetivo é identificar seus dinâmicos processos de transformação, bem como estratégias de adaptação ao novo mundo a que africanos escravizados, burlando a repressão e a violência do poder colonial, lançaram mão para perpetuarem os vínculos que os ligavam à África. Para além da sazonalidade do período, compreendido entre Natal e 6 de janeiro, essas festas negras partilham fragmentos de textos performativos , que em suas similaridades e diferenças são reveladores do aporte civilizacional africano nas Américas. Propomos ler essas festas privilegiando costumes, práticas e, principalmente, o corpo africano, que em seu deslocamento carregou experiências e saberes

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