This study examines Anglophone Caribbean national identities to interrogate multiple and varied economies that manage citizens in the interest of economic and social production and/or the policing of national identities. It is particularly concerned with the gendered character of these economies. The formation and preservation of these national identities rely heavily on gender and sexual difference as Anglophone Caribbean national identities are inextricably linked to expressions of Afro-Caribbean masculinity. Thus I analyze novels and cultural representations of Afro-Caribbean masculinity in cricket, calypso and chutney-soca music in Trinidad's carnival. I also examine Afro-Caribbean religions, Revivalism and Rastafarianism, as well as Afro-Caribbean practices of masking. I examine these practices in order to interrogate the reproduction of colonial practices of marginalization and exclusion. These colonial practices, I argue, are inherent in the cultural politics that inform these cultural performances while denying modes of national belonging that refuse dictated performances of national identities. The literary and cultural performances in this project span three epochs in Caribbean history: post emancipation, independence, and post independence to assess the shifting cultural landscapes that shape postcolonial subjectivities. In Sylvia Wynter's The Hills of Hebron and Orlando Patterson's The Children of Sisyphus, I examine sexual economies in which power is negotiated and contested in a struggle to chart the gendered borders of citizenship and production. I then turn to Lakshmi Persaud's For the Love of My Name to analyze violence exacted against ethnically marked national collectives as an instrument of political and economic aggression that disproportionately affects women. My critique of Earl Lovelace's The Dragon Can't Dance and contemporary performances in calypso and chutney-soca carnival competitions, considers how operative traditions seek to govern post-independent cultural politics. By drawing parallels between the formation of Afro and Indo-Trinidadian nationalisms, I argue that these identity formations establish cultural difference while also dictating cultural performances to advance and police national identities. Lastly, I engage Lovelace's Salt, Garfield Ellis' Such as I Have and contemporary discourses concerning cricket performance, remuneration, and women's limited access to cricket. I argue that cricket becomes a cultural commodity in the perpetuation of a regional national identity that is dependent on gender constructs. Thus this study demonstrates how representations of culture can be mobilized to challenge ideologies and political practices of exclusion, marginalize women in the formation and performance of national identities and govern cultural politics.

Stratigraphic analyses of lacustrine sediments provide powerful tools for reconstructing past environments. The records that result from these analyses are key to understanding present-day climate mechanisms and how the natural environment may respond to anthropogenic climate change in the future. This doctoral dissertation research investigates climate and environmental history at Laguna Saladilla (19° [degrees] 39' N, 71° [degrees] 42' W; ca. 2 masl), a large (220 ha) lake along the north coast of Hispaniola. I reconstructed changes in vegetation and environmental conditions over the mid to late Holocene based on pollen, microscopic charcoal, and diatoms in an 8.51 m sediment core recovered from the lake in 2001. Fieldwork in December 2009 included the use of ground penetrating radar to identify subaqueous deltas that indicate past positions of the Masacre river, which flows into the lake from the Cordillera Central. Laguna Saladilla was deeper and more saline from the base of the sediment profile approximately 8030 cal yr BP to about 3500 cal yr BP. Mangrove (Rhizophora) pollen percentages were highest around 7650 cal yr BP, when mollusk shells in the core suggest marine conditions. The lake became progressively brackish ca. 3500 cal yr BP, followed by a transition ca. 2500 cal yr BP to its current freshwater state. This shift in water chemistry was likely due in part to a change in the position of the Masacre river. Diatoms show that lake levels decreased as evaporation/precipitation ratios increased. Amaranthaceae and other herbs dominated the pollen record under the drier conditions of the last 2500 cal yr BP; pollen of fire-adapted taxa, particularly Pinus, increased in the last 800 years. Patterns of microscopic charcoal influx at Laguna Saladilla over the Holocene are similar to patterns at Lake Miragoane, Haiti and Laguna Tortuguero, Puerto Rico. The changes in fire frequency or extent indicated by these Caribbean charcoal records may be driven by increased winter insolation at ca. 5000 cal yr BP that led to earlier winter drying. Comparing the charcoal record to archeological data and other paleoenvironmental records facilitated the disentangling of changes in climate from anthropogenic impacts.

Florida’s Spanish borderland was the result of over two hundred and fifty years of cooperation and contention among Indians, Spain, Britain, the United States and Africans who lived with them all. The borderland was shaped by the differing cultural definitions of color and how color affected laws about manumission, miscegenation, legitimacy, citizenship or degrees of rights for free people of color and to some extent for slaves themselves. The borderland did not vanish after the United States acquired Florida. It persisted in three ways. First, in advocacy for the former Spanish system by some white patriarchs who fathered mixed race families. Free blacks and people of color also had an interest in maintaining their property and liberties. Second, Indians in Florida and escaped slaves who allied with them well knew how whites treated non-whites, and they fiercely resisted white authority. Third, the United States reacted to both of these in the context of fear that further slave revolutions in the Caribbean, colluding with the Indian-African alliance in Florida, might destabilize slavery in the United States. In the new Florida Territory, Spanish era practices based on a less severe construction of race were soon quashed, but not without the articulate objections of a cadre of whites. Led by Zephaniah Kingsley, their arguments challenged the strict biracial system of the United States. This was a component of the persistent borderland, but their arguments were, in the end, also in the service of slavery and white patriarchy. The persistent border included this ongoing resistance to strict biracialism, but it was even more distinct because of the Indian-African resistance to the United States that was not in the service of slavery. To defend slavery and whiteness, the United States sent thousands of its military, millions of its treasure, and spent years to subdue the Indian-African alliance and to make Florida and its long shorelines a barrier to protect whiteness and patriarchy in the Deep South.

The extensive educational reforms currently being implemented in Jamaica, in addition to my personal curiosity as a teacher educator, provide the rationale for this research. A better awareness and understanding of who enrols to learn to teach may be critical to the viability and success of the current reforms taking place in the Jamaican education system, and teacher education in particular. This study explores why Jamaican student teachers, who were not aspiring to learn to be teachers or teach, entered and completed a three-year teacher education programme. The study was guided by two essential research questions: (i) What accounts for Jamaican students, who indicate that teacher education and teaching are not their educational or occupational aspirations, entering and completing teacher education? (ii) What do these Jamaican students experience within the teacher education program that contributes to their belief that such a program is of benefit to their educational and occupational aspirations? Postcolonial theory (Ashcroft, Griffith & Tiffen, 1989) and theory of occupational choice (Ginzberg, 1963, 1972) serve as analytical frameworks to assist in better understanding the Jamaican student teacher experience. Qualitative methodology provided the means to including the essential “voices” of eight Jamaican student teachers; and, grounded theory the means to collecting and analysing what they had to say about entering and completing teacher education. The findings raise the notion of “youthfulness”, and how this may influence aspirations and decisions in an economic and academic environment of limited options and opportunities. They suggest that teacher education may serve as a “stepping-stone” to more desirable educational or occupational goals. The findings also reveal what these student teachers believed were significant aspects of the teacher education experience, and how this experience may contribute to their future educational or occupational plans and aspirations. Finally, this study supports the movement to reform teacher education in Jamaica; however, not at the expense of reducing the opportunities for higher education within the wider Jamaican populace. Suggestions are presented regarding possible reforms to secondary and post-secondary education in general; therefore, reforms which may support or enhance existing teacher education programmes.

The identity of the Caribbean as a territory is a veritable bricolage of cultural forms. Since Columbus’ mistaken arrival in the West Indies, these islands have become home to Spanish, French, Dutch, British, African, Indian and Chinese immigrants, alongside its Aboriginal inhabitants. Despite the massive diversity that can be seen in these islands, there exists one common cultural expression that has persisted for the past 200 years throughout the Caribbean and Latin America. This celebration is Carnival. Trinidad is the southernmost island in the archipelago that composes the Caribbean. Carnival is celebrated in many of Trinidad’s towns, the biggest celebration being held in its capital city, Port-of-Spain. This research thesis looks at Carnival in Port-of-Spain as a complex urban entity that ritualistically re-energises and reclaims the city’s streets. Through ecstatic celebration, the festival engenders a strong sense of communitas and collective identity, annually reinventing itself and occupying a liminal space between the Ordinary city of day-to-day living and the Extraordinary city of mythological complexity. As the festival moves through the city along its annual Parade Route, it creates an urban narrative which exists invisibly during the year in the city’s collective memory. Through a combination of descriptive text, scholarly research and experiential mapping, A City with Two Faces outlines the transformative qualities of Carnival in the streets of Port-of-Spain from its largest temporary urban forms to its smallest manifestations in syncretic masquerade archetypes.

Florida’s Spanish borderland was the result of over two hundred and fifty years of cooperation and contention among Indians, Spain, Britain, the United States and Africans who lived with them all. The borderland was shaped by the differing cultural definitions of color and how color affected laws about manumission, miscegenation, legitimacy, citizenship or degrees of rights for free people of color and to some extent for slaves themselves. The borderland did not vanish after the United States acquired Florida. It persisted in three ways. First, in advocacy for the former Spanish system by some white patriarchs who fathered mixed race families. Free blacks and people of color also had an interest in maintaining their property and liberties. Second, Indians in Florida and escaped slaves who allied with them well knew how whites treated non-whites, and they fiercely resisted white authority. Third, the United States reacted to both of these in the context of fear that further slave revolutions in the Caribbean, colluding with the Indian-African alliance in Florida, might destabilize slavery in the United States. In the new Florida Territory, Spanish era practices based on a less severe construction of race were soon quashed, but not without the articulate objections of a cadre of whites. Led by Zephaniah Kingsley, their arguments challenged the strict biracial system of the United States. This was a component of the persistent borderland, but their arguments were, in the end, also in the service of slavery and white patriarchy. The persistent border included this ongoing resistance to strict biracialism, but it was even more distinct because of the Indian-African resistance to the United States that was not in the service of slavery. To defend slavery and whiteness, the United States sent thousands of its military, millions of its treasure, and spent years to subdue the Indian-African alliance and to make Florida and its long shorelines a barrier to protect whiteness and patriarchy in the Deep South.

Project (M.A.) - Simon Fraser University, 2006. / Theses (Liberal Studies Program) / Simon Fraser University. Also issued in digital format and available on the World Wide Web.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Texas at Austin, 2001. / Vita. Includes bibliographical references. Available also from UMI/Dissertation Abstracts International.

Issued also as thesis, Groningen. / Summary in English and Spanish. Bibliography: p. 291-318.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--Ohio State University, 2009. / Title from first page of PDF file. Includes bibliographical references (p. 347-356).