Rhythmic Literacy: Poetry, Reading and Public Voices in Black Atlantic Poetics" analyzes the poetry of the African American Langston Hughes and the Jamaican Louise Bennett during the 1940s. Through an examination of the unique similarities of their poetic projects, namely their engagement of performance to build their audiences, their experiments with poetic personae to represent vernacular social voices, their doubleness as national and transnational figures, their circulation of poetry in radio and print journalism and their use of poetry as pedagogy to promote reading, this dissertation establishes a new perspective on the role of poetry in decolonizing language practices. While Hughes and Bennett are often celebrated for their representation of oral language and folk culture, this project reframes these critical discussions by drawing attention to how they engage performance to foster an embodied form of reading that draws on Creole knowledge systems, which I term rhythmic literacy. Growing up in the U.S and Jamaica in the early twentieth century, Hughes and Bennett were both subjected to a similar Anglophone transatlantic schoolroom poetry tradition, which they contend with as one of their only available poetic models. I argue that memorization and recitation practices play a formative role in the development of their poetic projects. As an enactment and metaphor for the dynamics of colonial control, this form of mimicry demonstrates to them the power of embodied performance to reclaim language from dominant forces. This dissertation reveals how black Atlantic poetics refashions the institutional uses of poetry in early twentieth-century U.S and British colonial education for the purposes of decolonization. / English

This research aims to connect Africans from the continent to Africans dwelling in the diaspora through ripples of retention. This thesis examines the role of water and African water divinities as markers of cultural and spiritual retention in African communities abroad and on the continent of Africa. Drawing mostly from secondary sources for the investigation, this work revisits texts already documented to uncover the role of water in the survival and lived reality of Africans. The investigation starts by the Nile in Kemet (Egypt in antiquity) and travels through time and space. By beginning at the source of African civilization, this study solidifies the role of water in the ontology and cosmology of African people that is found in antiquity, in a number of ethnic groups along the west coast of Africa, and in the diaspora. Analysis of figures like Oshun, Yemaya, and Mami Wata reveals that external factors, one’s lived reality, and one’s social and physical environment is reflected in the characteristics and attributes of the water divinity abroad. For water spirits must reflect the African people; thus, the tremendous social and geographical changes African people undergo throughout the centuries can be noted as variations in a collective African culture. While this work is conducted in three chapters, future investigation is needed to explore the emancipatory features of water to Africans that are still burdened by the effects of colonialism, assimilation, imperialism, and slavery. Yet, this research in its present state adds to the collection of works in the field of Africana Studies and Africology by reestablishing the strong link among Africans from around the globe. / African American Studies

This dissertation will demonstrate that a variety of Dominican Spanish in contact with St. Thomas English Creole (STTEC) revealed many features which are consistent with Dominican Spanish in other contact environments and some new features which are emerging as the result of uniquely STTEC influences. The most notable feature is the appearance of the vowel [ɛ] in Dominican Spanish, which in STTEC is highly indexical to St. Thomian identity. In the present sociolinguistic analysis, it was found that the variability of [ɛ] was significantly influenced by the following phonological segment, syllable stress, the language of the token, and the speakers’ social network ties and self-ascribed identity. This dissertation also includes a socio-historical background of St Thomas, U.S. Virgin Islands, a description of St Thomas English Creole, and a history of immigration patterns of people from the Dominican Republic to St Thomas, U.S.V.I. / Spanish

This work addresses the following question: How has the prominent scholarly literature on the Cayman Islands promoted a discourse that serves to undermine the acknowledgment of African contributions as well as African self-identification in the country? Utilizing an Afrocentric inquiry, the method of content analysis was employed to interrogate selected texts using location theory. It was found that the majority of literature on the Cayman Islands, as well as the dominant ideology within the Caribbean has indeed undermined the acknowledgement of African contributions as well as African self-identification in the country. More scholarship is needed that examines the experiences of African descended people living in the Caribbean from their own perspective, and critically engages dislocated texts. / African American Studies

The significance of the removal of the “White Mask” in Ayitian Vodou is to provide an Afrocentric analysis regarding the detriment of Catholicism/Protestantism has inflicted on African agency in Ayiti. The Practice of Ayitian Vodou derives from a variety of West African Spiritual Belief Systems like the Yoruba, Kongo, and Dahomean. During the imperialist era in Ayiti, Ayitians utilized biblical figures to hide their African gods in order to partake in Ayitian Vodou overtly. Due to classism, colorism, racism, and white domination, the camouflage aspect of Ayitian Vodou became a permanent component within Ayitian Vodou. This study proposes that scholars should rely on the method of Masking rather than the popular notion of Double Consciousness in examining African phenomena. W.E.B. Dubois coined Double Consciousness, which does not accurately explain or articulate how African people endured the institution of mental and physical enslavement. Double Consciousness derives from a Eurocentric ideology that operates from depriving African people of their history, culture, perspective, and personal development. / African American Studies

Since the early 1970’s, Rastafari has enjoyed public notoriety disproportionate to the movement’s size and humble origins in the slums of Kingston, Jamaica roughly forty years earlier. Yet, though numerous academics study Rastafari, a certain lacuna exists in contemporary scholarship in regards to the movement’s scriptural basis. By interrogating Rastafari’s recovery of the Hebrew Bible from colonial powers and Rastas’ adoption of an Israelite identity, this dissertation illuminates the biblical foundation of Rastafari ethics and symbolic registry. An analysis of the body of scholarship on Rastafari, as well as of the reggae canon, reveals the centrality of an Israelite identity for Rastas and its enabling of Rastafari resistance to racial oppression. Furthermore, the Hebrew Bible is, for Rastas, key to an intimate relationship with Jah, for it reveals their chosenness and their inherent divine nature. They both textually confirm this election and enact it through ritual practice. By interrogating the methods Rastas apply to the pages of the Bible in order to ascertain their appointment and decipher proper ritual practice, this dissertation expands scholarly conversations about Rastafari biblical hermeneutics. Centering on readings of Samson and Moses, it suggests that these two biblical actors function as moral exemplars and models of livity for Rastas. Despite the transgressive nature of Samson and Moses, Rastas adopt them as co-practitioners and paradigms of Rastafari election because when Samson and Moses are Rastas, all Rastas can claim their chosenness, strength, and relationship with Jah. / Religion

This dissertation examines how Dominicans of Haitian descent navigate their political situation from two perspectives: by becoming aware of their precarious legal status in Dominican Republic, and in how they obtain their legal documents or papeles with the assistance of third parties like the NGOs (Valdez 2014, Barlett et al 2011). I argue that the cyclical human rights violations, othering, and discriminatory experiences that Dominicans of Haitian descent have experienced in the past 15 years have exacerbated an eroded notion of the state and created a sense of Black Fatigue (Winters 2020) among the community. Primarily, as it pertains to the state being able to guarantee basic rights and providing an irreconcilable experience of citizenship for youth who were rendered stateless in their own country, and a defined experience of Black Fatigue that permeates their interactions both with non-governmental organizations and the state. I employ the framework of structural violence from Paul Farmer to contextualize how Black Fatigue has emerged among this community and discuss the ways in which Dominicans of Haitian descent have been disenfranchised as an extension of the abuses against Haitian immigrants in the country, and how this has extended to their understanding and experience of citizenship being born Dominicans and then rendered stateless. I examine the "sticky citizenship" process through which they were rendered foreigners in their own country by the Dominican government, and how they have thought and reevaluated their belonging through constructing narratives around their process of obtaining citizenship over the past five years. I used a mixed methods approach in which I collected data between 2015 and 2019, over 20 months (about one and a half years) total of fieldwork. During the academic year of 2018-2019 I lived in Santo Domingo, and most of the interviews and all the focus groups were conducted in that timeframe. I transcribed all the focus groups (over 25 hours of recordings, both in video and audio) and the interviews (totaling more than 30 hours over video and audio) and identified themes and threads among NGO representatives, Dominicans of Haitian descent, and the larger groups. Ultimately, my work poses that obtaining documents is far from solving the issues of this population which has come of age during a trying time, but that the issues of racism and discrimination that are at the core of the statelessness dispute could be better addressed through the work of some of the organizations and turned into sustainable development and empowerment for this community in the future. / Anthropology

<p>This dissertation examines how the crisis of World War I impacted imperial policy and popular claims-making in the British Caribbean. Between 1915 and 1918, tens of thousands of men from the British Caribbean volunteered to fight in World War I and nearly 16,000 men, hailing from every British colony in the region, served in the newly formed British West Indies Regiment (BWIR). Rousing appeals to imperial patriotism and manly duty during the wartime recruitment campaigns and postwar commemoration movement linked the British Empire, civilization, and Christianity while simultaneously promoting new roles for women vis-à-vis the colonial state. In Jamaica and Trinidad and Tobago, the two colonies that contributed over seventy-five percent of the British Caribbean troops, discussions about the meaning of the war for black, coloured, white, East Indian, and Chinese residents sparked heated debates about the relationship among race, gender, and imperial loyalty. </p><p>To explore these debates, this dissertation foregrounds the social, cultural, and political practices of BWIR soldiers, tracing their engagements with colonial authorities, military officials, and West Indian civilians throughout the war years. It begins by reassessing the origins of the BWIR, and then analyzes the regional campaign to recruit West Indian men for military service. Travelling with newly enlisted volunteers across the Atlantic, this study then chronicles soldiers' multi-sited campaign for equal status, pay, and standing in the British imperial armed forces. It closes by offering new perspectives on the dramatic postwar protests by BWIR soldiers in Italy in 1918 and British Honduras and Trinidad in 1919, and reflects on the trajectory of veterans' activism in the postwar era. </p><p>This study argues that the racism and discrimination soldiers experienced overseas fueled heightened claims-making in the postwar era. In the aftermath of the war, veterans mobilized collectively to garner financial support and social recognition from colonial officials. Rather than withdrawing their allegiance from the empire, ex-servicemen and civilians invoked notions of mutual obligation to argue that British officials owed a debt to West Indians for their wartime sacrifices. This study reveals the continued salience of imperial patriotism, even as veterans and their civilian allies invoked nested local, regional, and diasporic loyalties as well. In doing so, it contributes to the literature on the origins of patriotism in the colonial Caribbean, while providing a historical case study for contemporary debates about "hegemonic dissolution" and popular mobilization in the region. </p><p>This dissertation draws upon a wide range of written and visual sources, including archival materials, war recruitment posters, newspapers, oral histories, photographs, and memoirs. In addition to Colonial Office records and military files, it incorporates previously untapped letters and petitions from the Jamaica Archives, National Archives of Trinidad and Tobago, Barbados Department of Archives, and US National Archives.</p> / Dissertation

<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

abstract: La escritura de José Martí en sus primeros años como escritor y periodista se desenvuelve en una atmósfera política tan dinámica como el entorno cultural al que se expone a su llegada a México desde su experiencia diaspórica en España. Por ello, este estudio propone situar la etapa mexicana de Martí desde marzo de 1875 hasta diciembre de 1875 como un episodio clave en el desarrollo crítico de sus ideas centrales. Por lo tanto, esta investigación radica en el estudio de los elementos que participan en la formulación martiana en torno al concepto de cultura como síntoma de las nuevas sociedades latinoamericanas, mismo que aparece acorde y en intrínseca relación con el concepto de independencia que Martí articula particularmente en "Nuestra América" (1891). Por lo tanto, para los propósitos de esta investigación y partiendo del reconocimiento de la ausencia de un acercamiento crítico a esta etapa de Martí, es necesario observar detenidamente las relaciones entre el ámbito político y social tanto en México como en Cuba para así comprender sus aportes literario-periodísticos. Asimismo, es imprescindible un acercamiento múltiple en distintos niveles que permitan comprender el panorama intelectual y los debates que se formulan durante el siglo XIX en México y en los cuales Martí participa activamente. Dichos elementos en conjunto son fundamentales para comprender la expresión martiana como una de las vías de transmisión tanto de su estética como de sus preocupaciones e intereses modernistas. Se incluye en este análisis la escritura pública de los diarios capitalinos tales como El Partido Liberal y El Federalista, en los que Martí publica de manera prolífica durante los casi dos años de estancia en el país. Asimismo, ha sido pertinente observar su anotaciones privadas pertenecientes a los Cuadernos de Apuntes, los cuales escritos durante los mismos años en México, no fueron destinados originalmente para su publicación. Añadir las anotaciones personales de Martí a este estudio contribuye a enriquecer la perspectiva de este periodo. Como se observa, las formulaciones críticas de Martí conviven con los debates que circulaban en la capital mexicana en relación a los procesos de descolonización e independencia. Por lo tanto, la importancia de reevaluar los elementos que inmortalizan a José Martí no solo como un ícono cubano y figura emblemática transnacional permiten observar sus primigenias acepciones en torno a la identidad hispanoamericana. Asimismo, el aporte académico que añade este estudio reside en la presentación de conflictos y discursos heterogéneos que impactan las definiciones en torno a prensa y literatura de José Martí, una de las mentes más innovadoras y perspicaces del siglo XIX, cuya relevancia literaria continúa siendo pertinente. / Dissertation/Thesis / Doctoral Dissertation Spanish 2018