abstract: The primary aim of this dissertation is to make a substantial contribution to the better understanding of the identity formations of Black Caribbean migrant women in Britain. The dissertation outlines a theory of Black female subject formation in Britain. This theory proposes that the process of subject formation in these women is an interrupted one. It further suggests that interruptions are likely to occur at four crucial points in the development of their identities. These four points are: 1) the immigrant identity; 2) the Caribbean identity; 3) “the Jamaican” identity; and 4) the Black British identity. In order to understand the racial and gendered dynamics of identity formation in these women, I hypothesized that the structure of institutional racism in Britain has taken the form of a “double wall” or a “double portcullis”, which much be scaled by these “immigrants”. My research, based on interviews with 15 Black professional women who identify with a Caribbean ancestry, confirmed very strongly the existence of this double portcullis. It further supported the hypothesis that the above points of identity transition were also points of possible interruption. My research also revealed that through a variety of social movements, cultural and political mobilizations, it has been possible to get over the negative stereotypes of the immigrant identity, the Caribbean identity, “the Jamaican” identity and to succeed getting over the first or the Black British wall of the double portcullis. For me, the most interesting findings of my research, are the continuing difficulties that the women I interviewed have faced in attempting to climb over the second portcullis to achieve the Black English identity. The dissertation concludes with some suggestions about the future of this “unfinished” Black British identity and its prospects for easier access to the Black English identity, and thus to “life success”. / Dissertation/Thesis / Doctoral Dissertation Justice Studies 2019

This study provides a foundational framework for Afrocentric translation. Afrocentric translation in which Afrikan languages and their Pan-Afrikan cultural context, transgenerationally and transcontinentally, are central in the interpretation of Afrikan texts (written or oral) and, thus, ensuring that Afrikan people are the subjects in the episteme of the translation process. The two languages of focus in this study are Medew Netcher, the Kemetic language, and the Jamaican language. The basic grammatical features of Medew Netcher will be explained from an Afrocentric perspective through Jamaican translations. More specifically, the analysis shows that the equational juxtaposition system reflects the Afrikan notion of ontological unity, the verbal paradigm is reflective of the Afrikan notion of time, and it also shows how Afrikan existential concepts of existence and knowledge manifest in the grammar of Medew Netcher and Jamaican. In addition, this study includes the first translation of a Kemetic text in an Ebonics language as an exemplar for large-scale Afrocentric translation of a text. Overall, this study provides a foundational framework for the Africological study of Afrikan language. / African American Studies

This dissertation critically examines both the discursive and empirical significances of recent newcomers in the Haitian religious field, namely Korean and Korean American Protestant women missionaries. This confluence of Korean and Haitian Protestantism, which first emerged in the early 1990s, is a compelling case of the diversification of contemporary transnational and even global Christianity. Protestant Christianity was implanted in Haiti and Korea at around the very same time, in the nineteenth century, by North American missionaries who were inspired to work in new national religious fields by the Second Great Awakening (1790-1840) and its evangelical fervor. In the eyes of North American missionaries, both countries were religious wildernesses waiting to truly receive and understand the Good Word. Since then, in both Korea and Haiti, westernization, Western hegemony, and Western neo-colonialization have featured strong undercurrents of North-American-derived Protestantism. However, the respective lots and religious fields of each country have been dramatically different overall largely because of national and global economic and political forces. South Korea enjoyed formidable growth both in its economy and its evangelical Christian population after the Korean War (1950-1953), resulting in Korean Christianity’s zealous participation in evangelical Protestant mission overseas, following the models of North American mission enterprises, especially toward the end of the century. Meanwhile, Haiti continued to suffer from natural disasters, political turmoil, and widespread abject poverty. Thus, overseas Haitian Protestant mission work is altogether non-existent, though internally evangelical prosetalization efforts are legion and often aggressive. Vodou and Catholicism, meanwhile, continue to captivate the majority of the Haitian masses, but Protestantism is clearly on the rise across the nation. In is into this socio-religious context that Korean Protestant missions expanded in the Caribbean nation, an expansion that has amplified especially since the tragic 2010 earthquake. Toward understanding these developments, this project investigates the influx of Korean and Korean American Protestant missionaries in contemporary Haiti and the reverberations of North American evangelicalism as channeled through and adapted by Korean missionaries. With all of these historical and contemporary contexts in mind, this dissertation more sharply focuses on a specific group of actors in the Haitian religious field, namely contemporary Korean American Protestant women missionaries. I argue that their activity suggests a new type of examples for current scholarly discourses about the relationship between gender and evangelical missions. By way of historical analyses of both Korean and Haitian Protestant Christianity and oral histories based on interviews with Korean missionaries in Haiti, this study argues that Korean evangelicalism has developed a distinctive gendered praxis that claims both continuity with and divergence from North American evangelicalism. It also shows that in both South Korea and Haiti, twentieth-century U.S. hegemony and military occupation were significant factors in propelling Protestant Christianity. / Religion

In the Cayman Islands, one is raised to be the managers of someone else’s financial empire; the empire of the United Kingdom to be precise. Historically, whenever there are whispers about political independence among the population, they are abruptly quieted by a chorus of familiar rhetoric that attributes the success of business and tourism industries on island to its administrative financial connection to the United Kingdom. In a colony where most people rarely think of themselves as colonized, to the majority of Caymanians there is nothing improper about this relationship, it is simply the way things have been. On the few occasions where there is sustained conversation on the topic of political independence, like clockwork, the dialogue often takes a decidedly anti-Jamaican and anti-black tone that positions the so-called socioeconomic “struggles” of Jamaica as a cautionary tale on the perils of political independence. Perils that are then juxtaposed with the so-called socioeconomic success of Cayman which are framed as the prosperity of political dependency. It is this enduring conversation that warrants further interrogation; how and why African descended persons are actively choosing to not be self-determining. Much of the current literature interrogates the colonial presence in the Caribbean in a historical context. However, my interest is in how modern-day manifestations of colonialism (economic, cultural) impacted understandings of agency and freedom? Moreover, Caribbean scholarly discourses on colonialism tend to situate it in the past, instead a present, ongoing reality in the region today. This project centers Caymanians and their understanding of their own humanity outside of what they provide to others. My work seeks to disrupt the concept of ‘Paradise’ in the Caribbean; a concept evoked in order to provide leisure for tourists (mostly originating from North America and Western Europe) and make the financial management of the wealth of the ruling elite from the same places as those tourists desirable. This research interrogates a humanity that is agentic, self-conscious, and decolonial. / African American Studies

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This dissertation examines one of the most significant theological shifts in the Rastafari movement: the transformation of the Rastafari deity, His Imperial Majesty Emperor Haile Selassie I, from Jah in the flesh to the spirit that dwells within the body of each Rasta. Although the belief that Rastas are participants in the divinity of Jah emerged early in Rastafari, it was not until Selassie’s death in 1975 that the theological assertion of Jah dwelling within their bodies as the spirit emerged. Despite the initial claim made by some of the early Rastas that their bodies are the dwelling place of Jah, the notion of Jah as indwelling the spirit remains undertheorized, thus leading to an inadequate view that Rastafari is tenuously an African-derived religion. The aim of this dissertation, therefore, is to make visible the notion of Jah as spirit by focusing on how Rastas conceptualize and ritualize the process of Jah becoming a part of their bodies. The dissertation proposes divine envesselment as a central theoretical and conceptual framework to understand the Rastafari belief that their deity Jah becomes a permanent part of their bodies, thereby imbuing them with divine power, authority, and identity to resist the oppressive state Babylon. By formulating a theory of divine envesselment to account for the indwelling of Jah within the body, this study highlights the social, cultural, and theological factors that enabled Rastas to deify Selassie, continue to proclaim him as God after his death, and distinguish themselves from the oppressive neocolonial state through their ritualization of Jah spirit and power. The study uses an African-centered epistemological approach to argue that the Rastafari belief that Jah dwells within them is not only an embrace of the spirit but an ethos rooted in the history of contestation and creative friction within the Afro-Caribbean religious field. Furthermore, an African-centered epistemology locates the process of divine envesselment (Jah becoming the spirit that dwells in flesh) within the social, material, intellectual, and symbolic world of African people on the continent and in the diaspora. The study asserts that the logic, structure, and nature of Rastafari as an African-derived religion with a conception of spirit become evident when examined through an African-centered epistemological lens. / Religion

What is the meaning of Fanonian liberation? That is the question that animates this work, which is (negatively) inspired by the reality of misanthropy, practical and theoretical, and neocolonialism, external and internal. To answer this question, I first situate Frantz Fanon within the larger discourse of liberation, emphasizing the relationship between his liberatory work and the work of Gustavo Gutiérrez, Paulo Freire, and Enrique Dussel. From there, I argue that there is today an unfortunate privileging of ethics, and that this privileging is used to discredit the political as an intersubjective domain. To establish (what I call) the primacy of politics, I carefully analyze Fanon's first book, Black Skin, White Masks, and his sociogenetic conclusions. I then turn to The Wretched of the Earth and to the phenomenon of petrification, which is, I contend, one of the most important features of colonialism and neocolonialism. To fully explain this phenomenon, I consider both its mythopoetic significance and its relationship to Jean-Paul Sartre's conception of seriousness. Finally, I argue that the solution to the problem of petrification can be found in Fanon's second book, A Dying Colonialism, in which there are rich descriptions of political playfulness and (what I call) philosophical archaeology, which can be defined as the descriptive and evaluative analysis of meanings as contingent human artifacts. / Philosophy

This ethnographic study examines the relationships between cultural commodities and identity formation in a Jamaican rural locale. This study represents 24 months of participant observation, participant interviews and artifact analysis in St. Thomas, Jamaica. This study provides analytic descriptions of how identity development is experienced by youth in St. Thomas during the era of Gaza vs. Gully. Chapter one outlines the statement of the problem and the research questions. Chapter two frames the literature and theoretical frameworks utilized in the study. The methodology of the study and the case for the utilization of ethnography is explained in Chapter three. The social, cultural, and political context of St. Thomas as well as the Gaza vs. Gully era is discussed in Chapter four along with the introduction of the four main participants of the study. Chapter five utilizes examples and experiences from the lives of the four main participants to analyze the features of identity development in this specific “time and space”. Conclusions about and implications of the data from the participant observation presented will continue to be addressed in Chapter six. The study’s findings should interest anthropologists focused on popular culture, globalization, and development as well as educational researchers who seek to understand the role cultural commodities play in identity formation and the conceptualization of youth cultures. / Urban Education