The Millon Clinical Multiaxial Inventory-Third Edition (MCMI-III) currently ranks among the most commonly utilized personality tools. A review of the literature revealed that ethnic minorities tend to score higher on certain scales of the MMPI and MCMI compared to their White counterparts. The literature also indicated that acculturation level can serve as a moderator variable on overall performance on these measures. Most of the studies that examined racial/ethnic differences on the MCMI were conducted using the MCMI-I and MCMI-II. While many MCMI studies have explored racial differences, few studies have examined the impact of cultural factors on MCMI-III performance. To date, there is no empirical data on the impact of culture on the MCMI-III scores of Blacks from different cultural backgrounds. Given the significant increase in the number of Black immigrants to the United States especially from the Caribbean and Africa, Black Americans are becoming an even more diverse group, representing different cultures and nationalities. In the current study, the performance of African Americans (n = 52) and Caribbean Blacks (n = 77) were compared on the Antisocial, Narcissistic, Paranoid, and Delusional Disorder scales of the MCMI-III. Attempts were also made to compare Blacks in the current sample to the MCMI-III's development sample. Additionally, the impact of cultural variables was examined using the African American Acculturation Scaled-Revised (AAAS-R). Multivariate Analysis of Variance procedure revealed no significant difference in performance between the two groups on the select scales of the MCMI-III (p =.883). Additional analyses revealed significant difference between the two groups on the Compulsive scale: Caribbean Blacks obtained a higher mean (Cohen's d =.-50. F= 6.663, p = .011). Analyses comparing the Blacks in the current sample to the MCMI-III's development sample indicated the following: a) a significant difference between the two groups on the Antisocial, Narcissistic, and Delusional Disorder Scales and b) no significant difference between the two groups on the Paranoid scale (p = .559). Supplemental analysis revealed moderate association between the Paranoid and Delusional Disorder Scales of the MCMI-III and certain scales of the AAAS-R, implying both a degree of item overlap and similar item content.

This research looks at the ethnographies Mules and Men (1935) and Tell My Horse: Voodoo and Life in Haiti and Jamaica (1938) by Zora Neale Hurston focusing on representations of Time and the anthropologist’s body. Hurston was an African-American anthropologist, folklorist, and novelist who conducted research particularly between the end of the 1920s and the mid-1930s. At first, her fieldwork and writings dealt with African-American communities in Florida and Hoodoo practice in Louisiana, but she consequently expanded her field of anthropological interests to Jamaica and Haiti, which she visited between 1936 and 1937. The temporal and bodily factors in Hurston’s works are taken into consideration as coordinates of differentiation between the ethnographer and the objects of her research. In her ethnographies, the representation of the anthropologist’s body is analysed as an attempt at reducing temporal distance in ethnographical writings paralleled by the performative experience of fieldwork exemplified by Hurston’s storytelling: body, voice, and the dialogic representation of fieldwork relationships do not guarantee a portrayal of the anthropological subject on more egalitarian terms, but cast light on the influence of the anthropologist both in the practice and writing of ethnography. These elements are analysed in reference to the visualistic tradition of American anthropology as ways of organising difference and ascribing the anthropological ‘Others’ to a temporal frame characterised by bodily and cultural features perceived as ‘primitive’ and, therefore, distant from modernity. Representations and definitions of ‘primitiveness’ and ‘modernity’ not only shaped both twentieth-century American anthropology and the modernist arts (Harlem Renaissance), but also were pivotal for the creation of a modern African-American identity in its relation to African history and other black people involved in the African diaspora. In the same years in which Hurston visited Jamaica and Haiti, another African-American woman anthropologist and dancer, Katherine Dunham, conducted fieldwork in the Caribbean and started to look at it as a source of inspiration for the emerging African-American dance as recorded in her ethnographical and autobiographical account Island Possessed (1969). Therefore, Hurston’s and Dunham’s representations of Haiti are examined as points of intersection for the different discourses which both widened and complicated their understanding of what being ‘African’ and ‘American’ could mean.

<p> Tobagonian fathers are leaving their homes whether due to separation, infidelity, or divorce. As a result of fathers absent from the homes, young men on the island of Tobago are increasing in defiant behavior patterns and displaying more violence in the schools. Research indicates that the child&rsquo;s ability to thrive and excel is affected by the presence or absence of the father. Therefore, this qualitative case study included interviews and a focus group conducted with 10 Tobagonian fathers to gain their perspectives on being absent from the home and the effect of this absence on their sons specifically. Two of the most important findings were that Tobagonian fathers were well aware of their sons being affected due to their father absence and they actually wanted to make a significant difference in their sons&rsquo; lives. Recommendations for future study include initiating support groups for fathers by fathers, in which they can discuss struggles, problems, and issues as well as conducting case studies with mothers and grandmothers focusing on their perceptions as to absent fathers from the home and its effect on young Tobagonian males.</p>

Consortium for International Earth Science Information Network (CIESIN) initiated a series of nine human dimensions of global change pilot projects in 1991, to better understand how physical, biological, and social scientists must interact in order to address problems of importance to decision -makers. There is also a need to develop methodologies for merging data sets which differ on spatial and temporal scales, and indeed, to ascertain whether or not data are generally available to address specific, highly complex earth and social science. Because there has been virtually no research on the use of remotely sensed data in the social sciences of global change, this is a component of each pilot project. Pilot projects need to show how the results would be transferred to decision makers. All these elements of the pilots are to be used to inform the design of the CIESIN Data and Research Center. One of the CIESIN human dimensions of global change pilot projects is situated on the north coast of the Dominican Republic in Buen Hombre.

This thesis explores hybridity and ethnicity in Nickerie, Western Suriname. It undertakes this exploration from the perspective of doglas, Surinamese people with mixed African and Asian parentage. In Suriname’s postcolonial process of nation-building, ethnicity has been essentialized, with doglas representing a category of anomaly, but also of uncertainty. What I have termed ‘dogla discourse’ refers to the opinions, experiences and negotiations among and about doglas in Nickerie that both shored up and destabilized Suriname’s ethnic essentialism. Dogla discourse fuses and confuses ethnic categories and boundaries in its insistent hybridity. The thesis shows that being dogla does not simply align with common tropes of ‘mixed-race’. I argue that in embracing conflicting paradigms of ethnicity, doglas in Nickerie both emphasized and undermined ethnic essentialism. This was expressed in idioms of kinship and sexual relations, in notions of the pure/impure dogla body, and in the relevance and irrelevance of ‘cultural spirituality’. Furthermore, dogla discourse problematized the role of ethnicity in the enduring struggles of how to define ‘the national’ in postcolonial states. Thus, the thesis presents an ethnographic contribution to studies of ‘mixed-race’ in contexts of postcolonial nation-building, and theoretically expands conceptualizations of ‘the hybrid’.

The objective of the thesis is to analyse mutual relations between the European Union and the Caribbean region, especially to study and subsequently evaluate the various levels in which these relations take place. The first chapter deals with the mutual relations of the EU and the Caribbean as a part of the ACP group of states, which represented the beginnings of their collaboration. In addition to the characteristics of the group as a whole and their common features, it addresses also specific features of different regions while trying to distinguish the Caribbean from the other two. Its main part is a legal institutional form of their relations as well as its practical form. The second chapter is the level at which the EU cooperates with the various groupings of the Caribbean. It discusses the legal institutional framework ensuring their relations, trade and development cooperation. The last, third chapter is devoted to the national level and explains how the ongoing humanitarian assistance and implementation of development programmes works thanks to participation of both, the local authorities of the Caribbean countries and the European Union.

The advent of Area Studies and Comparative Literature in US academia developed in response to (or, more aptly, as a result of) the Cold War in the 1960s, with locations such as the Middle East relegated to Area Studies due to the strategic importance that knowledge of its histories, cultures, and languages had for global (read: US) geopolitics. On the other hand, the discipline of Comparative Literature constituted the expansion of US literary studies due to the influx of European intellectual refugees, with scholars and practitioners formulating the field around texts in, primarily, German and Romance languages in conversation with Anglophone texts. Over the past two decades, this Eurocentric model of Comparative Literature has been challenged, and, to some extent, subverted. Yet more often than not, modern Persian Literature is consigned to the realm of Area Studies in general and a Middle Eastern discourse in particular. My dissertation, “Disorderly Political Imaginations: Comparative Readings of Iranian and Caribbean Fiction and Poetry, 1960s-1980s,” addresses this gap by placing Iran and Persian literature front and center of a comparative project that includes canonical writers from the anglophone and francophone Caribbean. Additionally, “Disorderly Political Imaginations” considers intellectual figures and their literary productions that contributed to the liberation of individual and social consciousness. These figures created unique forms and languages of revolt that deviated from the prevailing definitions of committed, political, or national literature. In The Darker Nations: A People’s History of the Third World, Vijay Prashad sets a precedent for comparing Iran and the Caribbean in his chapter titled “Tehran,” by connecting Gharbzadegi (Westoxification or Occidentosis)—the cultural and socio-political manifesto of Jalal Al-e Ahmad—and Aimé Césaire’s négritude. On a broader, geopolitical level, he concomitantly connects imperial schemes in the “nominally independent” Iran and Caribbean region, along with the forms of resistance to them. Yet, for a chapter titled “Tehran,” the focus is mostly the contribution of other Third World projects to that of Iran’s. Conversely, “Disorderly Political Imaginations” centers Iran as a comparable case meriting comprehensive analysis in Third World cultural and political projects. Furthermore, rather than study the works of Al-e Ahmad and Césaire as exemplary cultural projects of resistance, I choose to investigate alternative modes of political thought and writing that move beyond the framework of “resistance”—modes that are not always considered as contributing to the political landscape. The “disorderly” politics and the “disorderly” creations of the writers under study thus take to task the idea of political literature during the decades of global decolonization, motivated by Jean Paul Sartre’s littérature engagée (engaged literature). In three chapters, I study Iranian literature of the mid to late 1960s in comparison to African diasporic literature from the Caribbean of the late 1970s to mid 1980s. The oft-overlooked issue of gender in national liberation projects of the time is addressed in my first chapter, “Scarecrows and Whores: Women in Savashoun and Hérémakhonon,” as I compare the two novels by Simin Daneshvar and Maryse Condé. The multilingual female protagonists in the novels of Condé and Daneshvar act as both literal and cultural interpreters and intermediaries in the narratives. I then extend my analysis of these protagonists’ precarious positions to the equally precarious intellectual positions of their creators in political discourses. By using Condé’s delineation of disorder in “Order, Disorder, Freedom and the West Indian Writer” as a necessary marker for freedom in both thought and creativity, central arguments of my dissertation about disorderly political imaginations are also presented. In “Disrupted and Disruptive Genealogies in the Novels of Hushang Golshiri and Édouard Glissant,” I compare Golshiri’s Shazdeh Ehtejab (Prince Ehtejab) and Éduoard Glissant’s La case du commandeur (The Overseer’s Cabin). Building upon Michél Foucault’s concept of “subjugated knowledges,” I demonstrate how their protagonists’ insistence on finding answers to the political questions of the present in the historical past (of empire and slavery respectively) leads to their insanity, and how, concomitantly, the formal characteristics of these narratives (such as their in-betweenness in terms of genre, language, and mode of address) offer “noncoercive knowledge” (to use Edward Said’s phrasing from The World, the Text, and the Critic) in lieu of answers. While taking into consideration the world literary traditions these novelists are engaging with, my analysis moves beyond a poststructuralist critique; instead, I privilege these writers’ own historical, socio-political, and cultural contexts in literary analysis, both distinctively and in comparison with one another. In “Poet-Travelers: The Poetic Geographies of Sohrab Sepehri and Derek Walcott,” I analyze how they both create a poetic language of revolt and liberation that, while affirming multiple literary and linguistic traditions, cannot be dismissed as derivative or unoriginal. In this comparative reading, I study their particular use of enjambments and anaphora, the combination of an autobiographical, monologic poetic voice with that of dramatic dialogues, a plethora of travel imagery and vocabulary that reflect the poets’ own multitudinous travels, the disparate religious, mythic, and folkloric traditions they draw from, and ultimately, the unique languages they create. In comparing these texts, I consider the different and particular historical moments they were written in, which is a revolutionary moment for Iran, and for the Caribbean texts is a postcolonial moment. The political nuances of these different contexts thus effect the timbre of the texts, and these divergences in articulation are analyzed as well. “Disorderly Political Imaginations” thus does not create a homogenizing, globalized study of literary texts. In that same vein, my research demonstrates the valence that incorporating neglected subjects (in this case, Persian language and literary studies) into Comparative Literature can have in understanding the hegemonic structures of power at play in knowledge production, both locally and globally.

The first two chapters of this dissertation present the evolution of the feminist movement and the evolution of the Puerto Rican female short story, from the later part of the XIX century to the decade of the eighties. During those years, short stories written by women received little recognition in and out of the Island. In regards to the female characters, they were introduced performing traditional roles that subordinated and subjugated them to the male figures. / Starting during the decade of the seventies, and as a result of the neo-feminist movement, a group of female writers took over themes that had been the exclusive domain of men. These female writers restated the social, political, economical, and cultural realities of Puerto Rico and the Caribbean. These writers are: Rosario Ferre, Magali Garcia Ramis, Mayra Montero, Olga Nolla, Carmen Lugo Filippi and Ana Lydia Vega. / Starting with the third chapter Ellen Morgan's critical study "Humanbecoming: Form and Focus in the Neo-Feminist Novel," (185-205) was used in the analysis of Carmen Lugo Filippi and Ana Lydia Vega's short stories compiled in the following books: Virgenes y martires, Encancaranublado y otros cuentos de naufragio, Pasion de historia y otras historias de pasion, Falsas cronicas del sur, Apalabramiento: diez cuentistas puertorriquenos de hoy and the journal Cariban. / This neo-feminist study reveals that Carmen Lugo Filippi and Ana Lydia Vega as well as their female characters rebel to the Puerto Rican male dominated culture. Furthermore, they managed to defeat the stereotypes and taboos that for decades had subordinated and subjugated Puerto Rican women. These two writers created a new self-directed woman, one who knows what she wants, how to make decisions, and has control of her own life. / Source: Dissertation Abstracts International, Volume: 55-08, Section: A, page: 2413. / Major Professor: Ardis L. Nelson. / Thesis (Ph.D.)--The Florida State University, 1994.

Understanding and defining nation and identity in diaspora has long characterized the cultural production of Caribbean authors. Notwithstanding, Hispanic Caribbean authors that have emigrated to the United States face this question doubly as they form part of what is labeled the Latino community. While much of the Latino Studies groundwork began in Mexican American or Chicano literary circles, whose cultural background is vastly different from that of the Hispanic Caribbean, authors of Cuban, Dominican, and Puerto Rican descent have brought new perspectives to constructions of race, class, gender, and sexual orientation to the broadly named “Latino/a” experience. While much of the early theoretical and literary work was written by men, women writers began to produce prolifically in the late twentieth century. The first voices to be published in mass were primarily those of a privileged existence, coming from families of higher social classes within the Latino community, despite being marginalized within the context of the United States. During the late 1970s to early 1990s, literary production established that being Cuban American, Dominican American, and Puerto Rican in the mainland U.S. meant being light-skinned, heterosexual, and of middle to upper-class economic status. However, during the mid-to-late 1990s and early twenty-first century, new voices came to the forefront to challenge these hegemonic constructions of Caribbean Latina identity that dominated the cultural imaginary and, instead, presented intersectional protagonists who consistently face discrimination based on their gender, sexual orientation, race, and economic class both in and outside of the Latino community. By utilizing diverse strategies of resistance, such as humor, these authors, including Achy Obejas, Jennine Capó-Crucet, Loida Maritza Pérez, Angie Cruz, Giannina Braschi, and Erika López, highlight and satirize the normative aspects of the Hispanic Caribbean diasporic cultural imaginary that marginalizes and/or excludes the voices and experiences of their characters as being representative of Caribbean Latina identity. In this sense, these authors not only represent a marginalized perspective of identity within the Latino community, but they also re-present, as in presenting anew, a more diverse image of Latina identity in the twenty-first century that departs from the homogenous, normative image of Caribbean Latinas played out in earlier narratives of identity from the early-1990s Latina literary boom. / A Dissertation submitted to the Department of Modern Languages and Linguistics in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy. / Spring Semester 2018. / February 22, 2018. / Diaspora, Hispanic Caribbean, Latina Women, Race, Sexuality, U.S. Latinx Literature / Includes bibliographical references. / Delia Poey, Professor Directing Dissertation; Virgil Suárez, University Representative; José Gomariz, Committee Member; Jeannine Murray-Román, Committee Member; Peggy Sharpe, Committee Member.

Critics have praised Roberto Fernandez's Raining Backwards since its publication in 1988. This investigation will use Mikhail Bakhtin's theories to show how the work challenges stereotypes and subverts authority by undermining cultural icons that Cubans and Americans revere. / Chapter I will focus on heteroglossia, the diverse language strata within one language. Chapter II studies polyglossia, and diglossia, more commonly known as bilingualism. Disglossia--the inability to speak in a language is also explored. Moreover, this chapter deals with chronotope and the subversion of authority. Chapter III focuses on structure, theme, motif, and dialogue. Chapter IV focuses on the different forms of parody and how the author uses parody to interilluminate other texts, or forms of authority. Chapter V, based on the background information provided in the previous chapters, focuses on the role of the speaker (author) of text and the idea of the traduttori traditorri as well as stylization. Chapter VI investigates menippea and skaz. Chapter VII explores choteo and carnival as well as post-modernism to conclude the study. / Source: Dissertation Abstracts International, Volume: 56-01, Section: A, page: 0209. / Major Professor: Ernest Rehder. / Thesis (Ph.D.)--The Florida State University, 1994.