This dissertation explores the representation of black masculinities in Claude McKay's novels, Home to Harlem (1928), Banjo (1929) and Banana Bottom (1933). I use the trope of marronage to theorize McKay's representations of black male subjectivities across a range of African diasporan spaces in the Caribbean, the USA and Europe, arguing that McKay's male characters negotiate these diasporan spaces with the complex consciousness and proclivities of maroons. I then examine the ways in which careful attention to the migration and settlement in various diasporan spaces of McKay's black male characters exposes some critical manifestations that profoundly alter how we think about the formation of black male subjectivities. McKay's representations predate by more than sixty years the present currency of difference, hybridity and multiplicity in postmodernist and postcolonial discourse, yet almost throughout the entire 20th century his work was not recognized in this context either in the USA or the Caribbean, both places where he has some degree of iconic stature. In fact, the maroon consciousness of McKay's men produces new insights on the issues of cosmopolitanism, race, nation, and migration in terms of how these affect black male subjectivity but more so how black male subjectivities work upon these concepts to expand their definitions and produce particular kinds of diasporan masculinity. Through the trope of marronage, the project will demonstrate how McKay's male characters use their maroon conditions to map, explore and define a black diasporan experience --- one, moreover, that is shaped by "creolizations"--- the various pushes and pulls of multiple forms of psychological and cultural crossover.;The Introduction places marronage in its historical and cultural contexts and defines who the Maroons were and what particular characteristics managed their existence. The trope of marronage, as an organizing frame for McKay's texts, is intricately tied to the understanding of how "creolization," a term that is integrally associated with the Caribbean experience of hybridity, as both an experience and a concept, structures McKay's sensibility and representations. Marronage and creolization are integral in understanding the range of black male subjectivities that performed under the umbrella of class, race, nation and gender, even as those same performances were producing, underground as it were, "other" narratives about black identity and migration during the 1920s-30s, the period in which McKay wrote. Furthermore, the term "subjectivities" rather than "identity" or the singular form, "subjectivity" merges so as to give texture and form to the ambiguities that abound in McKay's representation of the individual and collective experience of the characters in his novels.;Chapter One offers an interpretation of Home to Harlem as a narrative in which black masculinity is as much a subjectivity driven by the search for home as it is itinerancy. Chapter Two seeks to analyze McKay's Banjo or a Story without a Plot, through an examination of the protagonist Banjo, to see how his migrant or vagabond characters live as cosmopolites in Marseilles' metissage inclined port city. Finally, Chapter Three proposes to examine how Banana Bottom's Bita Plant represents a "masked" McKay, or McKay in drag, looking critically at a colonial Jamaica that restricted her/him with certain conservative ideas but which still appeals to McKay artistically because of its rich pastoral sensibilities.

The purpose of this narrative inquiry was to explore the lived experiences of college educated, immigrant women from the Caribbean in their quest for professional advancement in educational leadership roles in the United States. There were six participants for this study who were selected based on convenience, purposeful, and criterion sampling. Each participant’s lived experience was explored through a triangulation of information provided from two in-depth face-to-face interviews, document analyses, and observation/field notes. The findings indicate that Caribbean immigrant women studied navigated hills and valleys that included acculturative stress. Furthermore, the participants are characterized with a militant motivation in their approach to achieving their goals; thus having an attitude of “by any means necessary” was essential to their success. To accomplish their goals and successfully navigate the hills and valleys, the participants shared the support of strong matriarchs in their family and with the added help of the village; they also engaged in adult learning practices in their efforts to excel. Additionally, a Caribbean identity was utilized as a source of resistance and high self-esteem bordering on ethnocentrism against prejudices to facilitate the journey to success. / Includes bibliography. / Dissertation (Ph.D.)--Florida Atlantic University, 2019. / FAU Electronic Theses and Dissertations Collection

<p><italic>Imagined Islands: A Caribbean Tidalectics</italic> confronts islands -at once as a problem, a concept, and a historical and mythical fact and product- by generating a tidalectical encounter between some of the ways in which islands have been imagined and used from without, primarily in the interest of the advancement of western capitalist coloniality, and from within, as can be gathered from Caribbean literatures. The perspective from without, predominantly based on negation, is explored in Section 1 using examples of islands in the Mediterranean, the Pacific, and the Atlantic, as well as a few canonical texts in various academic discourses. Section 2 discusses the perspective from within, an affirmative and creative counter-imagination on/of islands. Emerging from literary work by Derek Walcott, Edgardo Rodríguez Juliá, Édouard Glissant, and Alejo Carpentier, the chapters in Section 2 are organized around three key concepts associated with insularity -tropical light, the coast, and the sea/ocean- and the ways in which they force a rearrangement of enduring philosophical concepts: respectively, vision and sense perception, time and space, and history.<br><p> <italic>Imagined Islands'</italic> Introduction establishes, (1) the stakes of a project undertaken from an immanent perspective set in the Caribbean; (2) the method, inspired chiefly by Kamau Brathwaite's concept of <italic>tidalectics</italic>; (3) the epistemological problems posed by islands; (4) an argument for a different understanding of history, imagination, and myth inspired by Caribbean texts; and, (5) an overview of the academic debates in which <italic>Imagined Islands</italic> might make a significant contribution. The first section, "Islands from Without," comprising Chapter 1, provides an account of a few uses and imaginations of islands by capitalist coloniality as they manifest themselves both in the historical and the mythical imaginary realms. I focus on five uses and imaginations of islands (entrepôt island, sugar island, strategic island, paradise island, and laboratory island), with specific examples from the Mediterranean, the Pacific, and the Atlantic, and from five canonical texts ascribed to different disciplinary discourses: Plato's "Atlantis," Thomas More's <italic>Utopia</italic>, Daniel Defoe's <italic>Robinson Crusoe</italic>, Charles Darwin's <italic>The Origin of the Species</italic>, and Margaret Mead's <italic>Coming of Age in Samoa</italic>. I argue, on the one hand, that a dominant idea of the island based on negation (lack, dependency, boundedness, isolation, smallness, remoteness, among other characteristics) has coalesced in the expansionist and exploitative interests of capitalist coloniality, despite the fundamental promiscuity of the concept of "island." On the other hand, I find in the analyzed examples, especially in those of the mythical imaginary, residues in flight that remain open for creative reappropriation.<br><p> <italic>Imagined Islands'</italic> second section, "Islands from Within," encompassing Chapters 2 through 5, relocates the discussion within the Caribbean in order to argue that some of the region's literatures have produced a counter-imagination concerning insularity. This counter-imagination, resulting from an immanent and affirmative engagement with Caribbean islands, amounts to a way of thinking about and living the region and its possibilities in terms other than those of the dominant idea of the island. Each chapter opens with a historical and conceptual discussion of the ways in which light (Chapter 2), the coast (Chapters 3 and 4), and the sea/ocean (Chapter 5) have been imagined and deployed by capitalist coloniality, before turning to Caribbean literary texts as instances of a re-conceptualization of the aforementioned insular features and their concomitant rearrangement of apparently familiar philosophical concepts. Chapter 2 focuses on tropical light, vision, sense perception, Walcott's book-length poem <italic>Tiepolo's Hound</italic>, and Rodríguez Juliá's novel <italic>El espíritu de la luz</italic>. Chapter 3 turns to the insular coast, time, space, and the novels <italic>El siglo de las luces</italic> by Carpentier and <italic>The Fourth Century</italic> by Glissant. Chapter 5 goes out to sea and history with the help of Rodríguez Juliá's chronicles "El cruce de la Bahía de Guánica y otras ternuras de la Medianía" and "Para llegar a Isla Verde," as well as of sections from Glissant's <italic>Poetics of Relation</italic> and some of his poems from <italic>The Restless Earth</italic>. Finally, <italic>Imagined Islands'</italic> Coda points to some of the ripples this project produces for future study, and defends the urgent need to "live differently" the Caribbean archipelagoes.</p> / Dissertation

Thesis (M.A.)--University of Florida, 2003. / Title from title page of source document. Includes vita. Includes bibliographical references.

As the Caribbean Community (CARICOM) deepens its economic and political integration, the development of the CARICOM identity is seen as both a natural outgrowth, and as paramount to its success. This is because a regional identity can promote social cohesion and shape political objects, including social policies. Regional identities are also shaped by politics, social relations and personal attributes. Using data from a cross-national survey and semi-structured interviews, this thesis examines the nuances of identity formation in CARICOM. It specifically asks three questions: a) how do intra-regional CARICOM migrants negotiate their identities and self-identify? b) How do intra-regional CARICOM migrants construct their lived-experiences in other CARICOM countries? And c) how do intra-regional migrants rationalize the impact of CARICOM regionalism on their identities? These data are analyzed statistically, and through the interpretations of migrants’ discourses and experiences. The study identifies six factors that determine attachments to CARICOM: education level, citizenship region, the meaningfulness of CARICOM, benefits of CARICOM, belonging in member countries, and the nature of migratory experiences. All these variables moderately impact attachment to CARICOM except perceived benefits, which is strongly associated with identification with CARICOM. Perceptions of benefits also impact how migrants rationalized regionalism and their experiences. Overall, support for regional integration and a regional identity are strong, but the CARICOM identity is weak and non-salient primarily because expectations of benefits do not match lived realities. The deepening of the CARICOM identity are therefore contingent on: people experiencing CARICOM’s expected benefits; the development of policies that address perceived failures; CARICOM rebranding itself and being more engaged with its constituents; and on collaborative actions being taken to embed the regional identity into national ones.

The formation and evolution of sedimentary basins are best understood within the context of prevailing tectonic conditions. This dissertation presents an integrated geologic and geophysical study of the southeast Caribbean–northeast South American margin which is characterized by a 300-km-long curved transition from subduction to strike-slip plate boundary interaction. Tomography models are generated to image the geometry and orientation of the subducting slab and associated upper mantle structures, and integrated with observations made from gravity, magnetic and seismicity data. The plate boundary interaction changes laterally from: (1) direct subduction where oceanic South American lithosphere dips towards the west at up to 65° beneath the Caribbean plate; to (2) collision where South American transitional-continental type lithosphere dips 44°–24° beneath the Caribbean plate; to (3) east-west oriented strike-slip interaction where the slab is detached from the South American continent. A tectonostratigraphic framework based on the interpretation of ~10,000 km of 2-D seismic and abundant well data is used to study the evolution of the structures and basin fill of the margin. The basins are characterized by composite and superimposed structural styles which differ from basins formed in pure strike-slip or convergent margins. A NW–SE oriented tear fault aligned with the South American continent-ocean-boundary defines the boundary between different contractional styles in the sedimentary succession of the subduction and collision provinces. An examination of bathymetric conditions and the upper Pleistocene succession of the continental shelf suggest a bimodal sediment transport process, linked to shoreline changes. Current-driven, strike-parallel sediment distribution systems dominate during highstand, generating unique shelf-bound channels and fills. Lowstand across the area is characterized by dip-directed, sediment distribution systems with SW–NE oriented channels that direct sediments to the shelf edge and deep basin environments. The results of this study illustrate that plate boundary conditions and associated lithospheric arrangement at depth, play a significant role in influencing the form of shallow structures, basins and surface geomorphology. Crustal-scale structures; influenced by deeper lithospheric-scale configuration, act over longer time-scales to create and deform depocenters; while sea-level stand exerts significant control on the timing and location of sedimentation over shorter time periods. / text

La literatura cubanoamericana a pesar de ser un fenomeno aparentemente muy reciente es uno de los mejores testimonios de este inmigrante en Norteamerica. Sin embargo, no ha sido posible hasta los anos noventa encontrar algunos de los exponentes literarios que mejor han sabido representar esa experiencia en la narrativa. Tomando en consideracion la hibridez contemporanea de "teoria cultural" y su manifestacion sociohistorica asi como los estudios de varios sociologos e historiadores de la experiencia sociocultural cubana, el proposito de este trabajo es examinar como la hipotesis cultural de Michael Ryan se manifiesta en la produccion de varios narradores cubanoamericanos que han intentado exponer la realidad cultural de este inmigrante en la literatura. Los escritores que consideraremos en este estudio son los novelistas Oscar Hijuelos, Cristina Garcia y Elias Miguel Munoz quienes mejor constancia han dejado de sus experiencias y han sabido reflejar el dilema de temas como la transculturacion del inmigrante cubano, la busqueda de la identidad de sus descendientes y la realidad del exilio y la revolucion que ha marcado la condicion ideologica de muchos cubanos en Norteamerica.

The possible impacts of the level of formal education on different aspects of disaster management, prevention, alarm, emergency, or postdisaster activities, were studied in a comparative perspective for three countries with a comparable exposure to hurricane hazards but different capacities for preventing harm. The study focused on the role of formal education in reducing vulnerability operating through a long-term learning process and put particular emphasis on the education of women. The comparative statistical analysis of the three countries was complemented through qualitative studies in Cuba and the Dominican Republic collected in 2010-2011. We also analyzed to what degree targeted efforts to reduce vulnerability were interconnected with other policy domains, including education and science, health, national defense, regional development, and cultural factors. We found that better education in the population had clear short-term effects on reducing vulnerability through awareness about crucial information, faster and more efficient responses to alerts, and better postdisaster recuperation. However, there were also important longer term effects of educational efforts to reduce social vulnerability through the empowerment of women, its effect on the quality of institutions and social networks for mutual assistance creating a general culture of safety and preparedness. Not surprisingly, on all three accounts Cuba clearly did the best; whereas Haiti was worst, and the Dominican Republic took an intermediate position. (authors' abstract)

Claude McKay (1890-1948) is best known as a major figure of the Harlem Renaissance and a pioneer of Caribbean literature. He is less well known as a political thinker and activist. This thesis undertakes three tasks. First, it provides a detailed presentation of Claude McKay's political ideas and practices over time. Second, it critically engages with these. And finally, in the process, debunks and challenges a number of pervasive misconceptions of McKayfs politics. Although the analysis covers the period 1890 to 1920, it nevertheless is based upon the entire corpus of McKay's work - published and unpublished - from his early writings in Jamaica to those up to his death in 1948. His preoccupations and thought are placed within their historical context. The thesis thus draws upon his non-fiction texts, poetry, novels, short stories, journalism, unfinished manuscripts and correspondence. In the process, it demonstrates that McKay was a major political thinker, that his ideas have remarkable resonance today, especially in the United States, and that they are still relevant to contemporary black politics, particularly to those of the African diaspora. All in all, the thesis is a contribution to a better understanding of a remarkable man and outstanding figure of the African diaspora.

The purpose of this thesis is to analyze the role of the Haitian Revolution in helping to shape Jose Marti's writings on the social, political and economic conditions in Cuba during its wars of independence. The first chapter examines some of the similarities and differences between these two events (the Haitian Revolution and Cuba's independence wars) and the impact of the Haitian Revolution on Cuba during its wars of independence. The second chapter analyzes some of Marti's political essays and shows how Marti, throughout his works, mentions Haiti as an example not to be emulated. He stresses his desire for Cuba not to become another Haiti and proposes ways for Cuba to avoid the fate of Haiti. The final chapter studies Cuba's political, economic and social environment in the years following Marti's death and establishes whether or not Cuba did indeed accomplish Marti's wish of Cuban independence.