The diasporic resources and transnational flows of the Black diaspora have increasingly been of concern to scholars. However, the making of the Black diaspora in Canada has often been overlooked, and the use of sport to connect migrants to the homeland has been virtually ignored. This study uses African, Black and Caribbean diaspora lenses to examine the ways that first generation Caribbean-Canadians use cricket to maintain their association with people, places, spaces, and memories of home. In this multi-sited ethnography I examine a group I call the Mavericks Cricket and Social Club (MCSC), an assembly of first generation migrants from the Anglo-Caribbean. My objective to “follow the people” took me to parties, fundraising dances, banquets, and cricket games throughout the Greater Toronto Area on weekends from early May to late September in 2008 and 2009. I also traveled with approximately 30 MCSC members to observe and participate in tours and tournaments in Barbados, England, and St. Lucia and conducted 29 in-depth, semi-structured interviews with male players and male and female supporters. I found that the Caribbean diaspora is maintained through liming (hanging out) at cricket matches and social events. Speaking in their native Patois language, eating traditional Caribbean foods, and consuming alcohol are significant means of creating spaces in which Caribbean-Canadians can network with other members of the diaspora. Furthermore, diasporas are preserved through return visits, not only to their nations of origin, but to a more broadly defined homeland, found in other Caribbean countries, England, the United States and elsewhere in Canada. This study shows that while diasporas may form a unified communitas they also reinforce class, gender, nation and ethnicity hierarchies and exclusions in diasporic spaces. For example, women and Indo-Caribbeans are mainly absent from or marginalized at the cricket grounds, which celebrates a masculine, Afro-Caribbean culture. Corporeal practices such as sports, and their related social activities, can be deployed as diasporic resources that create a sense of deterritorialized community for first generation Caribbean migrants.

This thesis aims to read James Baldwin¡¦s Another Country to examine why and how he uses this novel to interrogate black nationalist discourses that inform the sexist and heterosexist biases in mid-century America. I would argue that Baldwin, in writing this novel, adopts an ambivalent narrative strategy both to ostensibly compromise on the heterosexual matrix politically and culturally scripted by black activists, and to critique the black hyperbolic masculinism endorsed and performed by them as itself a tragic consequence of white racism. Whereas black nationalists carry the Black Macho agenda into practice to redeem their manliness, Baldwin suspects that the heterosexist imperative of black machismo may end up infringing the rights of gender and sexual minorities. I thus argue, in Chapter One, that Baldwin writes Another Country to negotiate an oblique response to the conundrum he feels as both an artist and a black leader. To explain how his conundrum takes shape, I attempt in Chapter Two to lay bare the hegemonic masculinist ideologies embedded in anti-racist discourses. Drawing on this historical and theoretical investigation as my interpretive scaffold, I would in the following three chapters elaborate on how the novelist exemplifies his narrative technique via his male figures in Another Country. In doing so, Baldwin can, I would propose, assert that racial justice and sexual freedom must concur to effectuate blacks¡¦ autonomy. As such, I conclude my thesis by suggesting that Baldwin never intends ¡§another country¡¨ to be an idyllic landscape wherein Eric ostensibly plays out as a ¡§sexual savior¡¨ and betters other characters¡¦ self-recognition. Another Country instead illustrates a contested site where discourses on black nationalism, black male sexuality, and black masculinity come into a productive dialogism. Another Country, that is, can be best interpreted as Baldwin¡¦s investigation into the intersection of race, gender, and sexuality in the sixties, and his consistent reformulation of individual identity as fluid, labile, and multiple.

African American men’s graduation rates from institutions of higher education are among the lowest of any demographic group in the United States. I interviewed African American men who shared their narratives on how they lived out their manhood on a mid-western public regional four-year university campus. The purpose of the study was to garner insights from their stories, and to see how the lessons learned from their lived experiences could be applied to improve the first year experience for this segment of the student population. The combination of phenomenological and grounded theory research paradigms helped me to analyze the lived experiences of African American men in an institution of higher education milieu. The main themes that I identified after analyzing the collected data, using critical race theory as a key theoretical lens, were Black Masculinity, Being Seen, Brotherhood, Support Groups, and Ideations of Success. African American men’s complex and multi-dimensional masculinities called for a sense of commitment and responsibility to community, family, and brotherhood. The respondents’ goals of graduating are similar to all other student groups, and they are most likely to thrive in their first year of college if their Black masculinities are centered; they most likely will seek assistance when made to feel valued and seen by institutional and familial support systems. Keywords: Black Masculinity, Progressive masculinities, African American college men, African American men’s first year experience, critical race theory, regional campus, PWI

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Thesis (M.A.)--Miami University, Dept. of Communication, 2006. / Title from first page of PDF document. Includes bibliographical references (p. 83-86).

This study examines the African-American author Ernest Gaines's three works The Sky is Gray, In My Father's House, and A Lesson before Dying as examples of oppressed manhood, and the gradual acceptance of the characteristics of manhood in Black males. Chapter One focuses on The Sky Is Gray and follows the young hero as he makes his transition from child to a young man understanding manhood. The second chapter looks at In My Father's House, exploring the relationship between father and son. Due to his father's abandonment, the son never learns what it means to be a man. However, at the same time his son is struggling to discover his manhood, the father finally becomes a man. Finally, chapter three centers on A Lesson before Dying, showing two males can learn manhood from each other. Although both are oppressed, together they achieve the manhood that is being robbed from them.

Br(others) Only conceptualizes the wall sculptures of Rashid Johnson as free-standing “altars” that play with different and sometimes divergent brands of black masculinity and classed homosociality. Primarily, I analyze three of Johnson’s sculptures from the late 2000s: I Who Have Nothing (2008); I’m Still in Love with You (2008); and Souls of Black Folk (2010). I argue that, by invoking the history of black renaissance men, gentlemen scholars, and entertainers, Johnson’s work plays with various kinds of black masculinity and homosociality that simultaneously straddle the past and future. By doing so, his art not only enacts a racialized temporality, but it also chips away at monolithic notions of black masculinity by fabricating contradictory amalgams of race, class, and gender. For my analysis of Johnson’s artworks, I utilize Cassandra Jackson’s Violence, Visual Culture, and the Black Male Body (2010) as the chief framework for conceptualizing the waxy coats of Johnson’s sculptures as wounded bodies in an effort to “flesh out” the vulnerability of black men. Theorizing the putrescent surfaces of Johnson’s sculptures as violable bodies allows me to consider the ruptures between seemingly impenetrable black masculinity and the always-present vulnerability of the black male body to violence. / text

Fantasy sports are the latest addition to the sports industry. Fantasy sports (FS) participants compete against one another by using players from the “real” world to create a virtual team. FS simulates the structures of the real sporting world. The most popular FS is football, due to the success of the National Football League (NFL) (World Fantasy Games, 2009). Black males represent a vast majority of the athletes in the NFL and are often bought and sold by white participants who represent a critical mass of FS players. The purpose of this dissertation is to read fantasy football participation and consider the un/conscious commodification, fetishization of black masculinity, which is used for cultural transmission. Using Critical Race Theory (CRT) to analyze interdisciplinary literature enhances the discourse surrounding the intersectionalties of race, gender, sexuality, and sport. Critically reading FS, employing bricolage has made it possible to pragmatically analyze FS. I argue race is central to the acquisition, maintenance, and exposition of power that is paramount in sport, and evidenced within FS. The paradox of allowing the masses of white sport consumers to exercise virtual control over black bodies via FS is that it reveals cultural dogma of racialized masculinity with psychosocial links to fetish.

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