This ethnographic study investigates conditions in which groups often found to be at odds with each can instead form mutually productive and supportive relationships. As an Anglophone West Indian immigrant man myself, I am personally interested in how members of my group find success in the US and fit into the larger US African descendant sphere of Black people. As a clergyman, I am professionally interested in how different Black ethnic groups find ways to get along and even appreciate each others’ differences, as part of a larger whole. Since much of my working life is keyed to creating conditions for a positive climate in which people can be the best of themselves, I hypothesized that in the right environment groups known to be suspicious of and stereotype each other, and even engage in outright conflict, could reach a workable resolution over time. That of Afro Caribbeans and Southern African Americans presented an exemplary case. To investigate whether this positive outcome was possible in the right conditions, I selected St Albans, Queens, 1965-present, as a site to conduct research that would help me learn a) how Anglophone Afro Caribbean immigrants made successful places for themselves in the US and the neighborhood; b) from their point of view, found paths to acceptance and even mutual appreciation of African Americans of Southern migrant backgrounds; and c) test whether particular characteristics of a neighborhood environment offer support for mutual acceptance and appreciation, without either group having to give up what it culturally values. The study found that because of several factors St. Albans indeed promoted a context which fostered getting along, and even getting along well. These included sufficient employment and housing opportunities, similarities in income and middle class status, numerous churches that reinforced positive values, and the fact that the racial tensions characteristic of many parts of the US were not prevalent in the daily life of the neighborhood.

This thesis seeks to understand the South as a space through which the contested bodies of two literary characters and the men who authored them can be more fully explored: the Ex- Colored Man in James Weldon Johnson's The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man and Nicholas Worth in Walter Hines Page's The Southerner; each appearing within an early twentieth-century novel masquerading as an autobiography. These bodies serve to help us understand how the regional Other of the South has inflicted itself on individuals living in the South and caused an irreparable fracture to the characters' identities forcing them into passing roles in lives they do not see as their own. This passing allows the characters to adopt a new persona in the communities that they inhabit, but never permits them to inhabit new bodies themselves. They are always left with the perception that they do not corporeally belong and the anxiety that the "truth" about their body might be exposed at any moment. Ultimately, the thesis also challenges the notion of passing as merely racial and explores other forms of passing, especially ones dealing with geography (i.e. a Southerner passing as a Northerner) and explains that the New Southern Studies needs to find ways to examine the South that are not dependent on racial binaries.