Breast cancer is the 2nd leading cause of death among women. While a significant amount of research has been done to understand the different disparities related to this disease, there is still more to learn about the relationship between a person's nationality and the staging of breast cancer. Using the Surveillance, Epidemiology, and End Results Program as the data source, this retrospective cohort study was aimed at assessing late-stage breast cancer among Caribbean immigrants, specifically comparing Haitian women with Americans and other immigrant populations in the United States. The research questions addressed the link between nationality and the likelihood of late-stage breast cancer diagnosis as well as the risk factors associated with an advanced stage of breast cancer. Findings from logistic regression analyses indicated no statistically significant difference in Stage IV diagnosis between women born in Haiti and U.S.-born women, while the converse was true for women born in other foreign countries. The results also suggested that race, Hispanic ethnicity, marital status, insurance coverage, being unemployed, and language isolation were significant predictors of late-stage breast cancer diagnosis (p < 0.05). When stratifying the analyses by nationality, marital status and poverty were the common predictors of advanced breast cancer diagnosis among Haitian, foreign-born, and U.S.-born women. The observed disparities confirm the need for additional efforts that seek to improve screening rates among underserved groups and ultimately reduce the burden of late-stage breast cancer.

In the Dominican Republic, the memory of the Haitian conquest and annexation of the nation from 1822 until independence on February 27, 1844, along with the solidification of the anti-Haitian nationalist rhetoric of the 1920s and 30s, have fueled deep-seated animosity toward Haitians. Many Dominicans continue to hold strong anti-Haitian attitudes, and negative views of blackness pervade much of Dominican popular discourse, as well as ideas of beauty and social propriety. Lamentably, these negative attitudes toward Haitianness, which has become synonymous with blackness and vice versa, have spread far beyond informal conversations in private households, permeating the political realm as well. Anti-Haitian attitudes have long guided government action and unofficial policy in the spheres of immigration, citizenship, and labor. Though the Dominican Constitution, prior to a 2010 reform, explicitly granted citizenship to all persons born on Dominican soil, persons of Haitian descent were routinely denied the right to citizenship, as well as the right to any forms of government-issued identification. As a result, even those born in the Dominican Republic endure the looming threat of being deported to a nation that, in some cases, they have never known. Though the common occurrence of such grave injustice is well-known within the nation, most Dominicans are apathetic. The minority of Dominicans who oppose such immoral treatment are overpowered by the vociferous anti-Haitian majority who argue that those who fail to sympathize with their views are not only un-Dominican but anti-Dominican as well. With the majority of Dominicans holding such strong, vehemently-defended views on Haitian immigration, the minority opposition is often overlooked. In this study, I will analyze information obtained from field observation and interviews with Haitian sugar cane cutters and Dominican intellectuals, as well as citizenship and immigration legislation, to provide readers with a more comprehensive view of the political, economic, and socio-cultural impact of racism and anti-Haitianism. As part of my analysis, I will examine the motivations behind and causes of contradictory citizenship and immigration policy and discriminatory interpretations of the law as it applies to Haitian-descended persons. Through this thesis, I aim to construct a new, more complex analysis of anti-Haitianism and racism to generate a more thorough understanding of contradictory Dominican immigration and citizenship policy and its impact within the Haitian-Dominican community.

This dissertation examines the ways that slaves and free blacks participated in and shaped the Bourbon Reforms in New Spain (Mexico and Central America) during the period of 1750-1808. By framing the Bourbon Reforms in this part of the Americas through an Atlantic World perspective, centered on the importance of slavery to European empire-building efforts in the eighteenth century, this dissertation argues that the politics of difference was vital to these imperial ambitions even in places where the slave population was relatively small. In the context of the slave and free black populations, the Spanish Empire determined its politics of difference on prejudices against blacks informed by skin color. Slaves and free blacks, nonetheless, actively participated in Bourbon imperial projects through litigation, forcing negotiations by escaping slavery, giving service in the militias defending the frontiers, borderlands, and imperial cities, and forging important kinship ties that shaped their identities and social networks that they used to negotiate their position in the imperial order. I argue that a pivotal moment when racism exacerbated the relationships of slaves and free blacks with the Crown was the Haitian Revolution. Although racist attitudes were already present against blacks, the Haitian Revolution demonstrated that slaves could eradicate slavery and the colonial order associated. The impact of this revolution was profound and even affected regions of the Americas that had small slave populations.

Thesis (M.A.)--Columbia Graduate School of Bible and Missions, 1986. / Includes bibliographical references (leaves 89-100).

Thesis (D. Min.)--Bethel Theological Seminary, 1995. / Includes bibliographical references (leaves 253-259).

Sometimes when a person who has been diagnosed with cancer finds out that his or her cancer returned and continuously has to go for surgeries, treatments, regular follow-ups, and continued overtime to deal with the same life-threatening illness, he or she can actually feel frozen due to feeling depressed and anxious in not knowing how to move forward with life. Dance is a metaphor used in this study to move forward. Psychotherapy can offer major benefits to help cancer patients cope with the depression, anxiety, stress, and other emotional reactions that often accompany a cancer diagnosis (Stuyck, 2008). Many studies have explored the benefit of psychotherapy for cancer patients, but little is known about the personal narratives of cancer patients who sought individual therapy to talk about their experience with cancer. The purpose of this study is to explore, through autoethnographic inquiry, what role dance plays in the process of seeking individual therapy. It also explores the impact of facing cultural biases that exist in the Haitian culture about mental health. Finally, this study explores what role psychotherapy played in my reflective therapeutic journal that I wrote while in therapy. This autoethnography was written from a first-person perspective, thus giving readers the chance to enter into the researcher’s world. This study brings a social constructionist and systemic understanding to the experience of being a Haitian Marriage and Family Therapist cancer patient who sought individual therapy and became transformed by accepting my therapist’s invitation to dance with cancer. Additionally, this study examines my unique position as a Marriage and Family Therapist to receive therapy.

This thesis examines two crises that occurred in Philadelphia in the middle of the 1790s: the arrival of refugees from the revolution in the French West Indian colony of Saint-Domingue and the outbreak of yellow fever the followed their arrival. These crises are studied together in order to understand the challenges that they posed to the post-Revolutionary culture of sensibility and to the sympathetic construction of social order that drew upon this culture. Philadelphians’ post-Revolutionary sentimental project – the reorganization of society along lines of fellow-feeling, benevolence, and emotional parity – was strained by the arrival of refugees from Saint-Domingue and by the outbreak of epidemic disease. Both of these events were opportunities to actuate sympathetic ideologies, and in both cases, action fell short of rhetoric. This thesis examines why this was the case. Central to Philadelphians’ ambivalence in creating sympathetic social bonds was the presence of people of color – American and foreign – in the city. When asked to extend fellow-feeling to black Philadelphians and black Saint-Domingan refugees, white Philadelphians equivocated. The reorganization of society in the post-Revolutionary period had presumed emotional equality among Americans, but the issue of race repeatedly demonstrated weaknesses in the application of this ideology. The crises examined within this work demonstrate the enduring appeal of sensibility in 1790s Philadelphia. They also demonstrate its weaknesses. As more and more groups use the language of sympathy and benevolence to voice their demands, sensibility faltered. This thesis builds upon a growing scholarship that examines the effect of the Haitian Revolution on the United States to argue that the arrival of refugees from that revolution to Philadelphia highlighted fundamental ambivalences and fault lines in the United States’ post-Revolutionary sentimental project.

French literature has undoubtedly exerted a marked influence over Haitian letters. Since the Middle Ages, notable elements of the fantastic, such as loups-garous and talking animals in lais and fables, all the way to the unheimlich narratives of the nineteenth century, are also present in Haitian works with strong overtones of the oral traditions of slave narratives. However, Haitian literature, given its syncretic nature, offers not just an array of talking animals and “magic realist” episodes, but a unique “fantastic being,” the zombie. In turn, these figures have made their way not just into the Haitian folkloric tradition, but infused with political undertones, have become pivotal metaphors for contemporary Haitian writers on the island, as well as for those who write in the diaspora, to explore the nation’s oppressive governments. This dissertation traces the origins of such figures and their creative reincarnations today. / Includes bibliography. / Dissertation (Ph.D.)--Florida Atlantic University, 2020. / FAU Electronic Theses and Dissertations Collection

Thesis (Ph.D.)--Boston University / PLEASE NOTE: Boston University Libraries did not receive an Authorization To Manage form for this thesis or dissertation. It is therefore not openly accessible, though it may be available by request. If you are the author or principal advisor of this work and would like to request open access for it, please contact us at open-help@bu.edu. Thank you. / This study examines the evolution of the kin-based organization of Haitian migration to the U.S. and Canada during the Duvalier era. Using a model applicable to all migration, the study looks at two ways in which a hierarchy of interactive macrosystems shaped Haitian migration by generating constraints on choice. First, over a period of 290 years, the emerging world system, the European and U.S. empires, the Haitian national political-economy, and local political-economies have shaped Haiti's domestic systems. In doing this, they shaped the behavior patterns and ideology of kin units which make life decisions, thereby affecting migration choices. Second, at particular times, certain macrosystems, especially at the empire level, have strongly structured particular migration patterns, determining not only their direction but also, largely, their social organization. Structural conditions shaping migration to the U.S. and Canada between 1957 and 1986 encouraged kin-based organization. The specific Haitian forms of family and network processes, discovered through fifteen years of network observation and two years of intensive field work, stem from the traditions of the lakou, the extended family residential compound, which developed during the nineteenth century and disappeared during the mid-twentieth, due to land pressures from partible inheritance, ecological degradation, and U.S. penetration of the Haitian economy. Lakou traditions of joint action and solidarity among consanguineally-linked households inform current patterns of intense cooperation in migration among the nuclear family, the household, and a subset of the extended family, including adult siblings, their parents, and children. Migration structured through this form of social organization has numerous feedback effects on local and national political-economic and social systems in Haiti, the U.S., and Canada. The study concludes that migration evolves over time from the interaction of a hierarchy of political-economic macrosystems with domestic systems. The social and cultural processes as well as the political-economic processes generate and shape migration patterns. \ / 2031-01-01

Haitians as an ethnic group face many problems while trying to acculturate in Boston. This pilot study was conducted in an attempt to identify the major source of their problems in achieving cultural integration. The data was analyzed via descriptive statistics: frequency distributions and cross-tabulations. The central problem identified was the lack of a transitional vehicle which would make easier the adaption from a monocultural to a bicultural society. Proposal for such a transitional vehicle was made, in addition to a set of guidelines. These were developed to facilitate the task of mental health caregivers dealing with Haitian clients.