This dissertation examines politics and poetics of food, memory and ‘home’ among Dominican immigrants in New York City. Through a framework of ‘foodmaps’ it traces cultural histories of seven Dominican families from the gendered perspectives of the cooks in each household. Examining translocal food paths reveal the crucial role of migrant food relations in gendered production of home, place-making and community formations. ‘Migrant seasonings’ (the way immigrants season their foods and lives and the way they are ‘seasoned’ into new social relations) could be understood as contested sites of power negotiations, as strategic reclamation of ‘small measures of autonomy’, sociopolitical action, and historical visibility. Dominican foodmaps respond to culturally and historically specific ‘roots’ and ‘routes’ shared with other Afro-diasporic populations in the Americas. Food-place-memory becomes hence a continuum between geopolitical ‘seasonings’ in sending societies and new racializations in the US. Some findings of this project are: 1) food paid-unpaid labor are critical in negotiations of labor-time, places and social relations within households and in relation to the City and US state; 2) food is a key mediation for the way Dominican migrants learn to navigate and orient themselves in new environments; 3) cooking practices are inseparable from the narrative memories that give them meaning, constituting complex memory-work strategies, communicative and expressive means; 3) Food practices are crucial for the way cooks (especially women) claim value and autonomy for their life projects, produce senses of ‘home’, and re-inscribe through food-narratives their migrant history of struggles in Dominican Republic and the U.S. Basic contributions of this work are: 1) filling gaps in critical ethnographic research on food, gender and migration in Dominican and Caribbean studies; 2) development of a ‘foodmaps’ framework (a method-analytic frame to trace boundaries of ‘home’ through food relations); 3) examining food practices beyond ‘ethnic foodways’ tradition and nostalgia, but instead as critical and traumatic place-memory sites of implicit resistance, and as narrative spaces that re-inscribe working-class histories into hegemonic national narratives; 4) problematizing notions of private/public, personal/collective, memory/history in Afro-Caribbean socio-cultural formations; and 5) ‘native’ ethnography usage of interdisciplinary feminist, collaborative and media-based methodologies. / text

A comprehensive battery of commonly used neuropsychological tests, including the WMS Associate Learning and Visual Reproduction subtests, forming the focus of this study, were administered to a southern African sample (n = 33, age range 18-40). This sample composed of black South African, IsiXhosa speakers with an educational level of Grade 11 and 12, derived through DET and former DET schooling. The gender demographics were as follows; females n = 21 and males n = 12. This sample was purposefully selected based on current cross-cultural research which suggests that individuals matching these above-mentioned demographics are significantly disadvantaged when compared to available neuropsychological norms. This is due to the fact that current norms have been created in contexts with socio-cultural influences; including culture, language and quantity and quality of education distinctly dissimilar to individuals like that composed in the sample. Hence the purpose of this study was fourfold namely; 1) Describe and consider socio-cultural factors and the influence on test performance 2) Provide descriptive and preliminary normative data on this neuropsychologically underrepresented population 3) Compare test performance between age and gender through stratification of the sample and finally to 4) Evaluate the current norms of the two WMS subtests and assess their validity for black South Africans with DET and former DET schooling with comparisons to the results found in the study. Information derived from the statistical analyses indicated that a higher performance in favour of the younger group over the older age range was consistently found for both WMS subtests. With regards to gender, some higher means were evident for the male population in the sample than was produced by the female group. Lastly, due to the fact that most scores derived from the sample were considerably lower when compared to the available norms, it is felt that socio-cultural factors prevalent to this population are a significant cause of lower test performance and thus warrant the development of appropriate normative indicators.