Arts and Humanities Commons^™

A Dance Of Resistance: The Puerto Rican Bomba As A Means To Challenge Intersections Of Discrimination On The Island, Daniel Loving

LSU Master's Theses

This thesis examines the Puerto Rican Bomba as a multifaceted cultural and political phenomenon, focusing on its pivotal role in challenging and subverting the enduring issues of racial and gender discrimination on the Island. Drawing from an interdisciplinary framework that encompasses cultural studies, anthropology, history, performance and film studies, this research elucidates the complex interplay between Bomba's rhythmic and choreographic elements, its historical evolution, and its contemporary significance in the context of Puerto Rico's sociopolitical landscape. By analyzing Bomba's historical roots in African and indigenous traditions, its adaptation during colonial and post-colonial eras, and its ongoing relevance in the struggle …

The Greatest Show On Earth: Is Trinidad’S Carnival Perpetuating A Society Of Elitism And Class Struggle?, Charisse A. Lewis

Student Theses and Dissertations

Trinidad's Carnival, often hailed as "The Greatest Show on Earth," embodies a vibrant celebration of culture, identity, and liberation. Over the last two decades Trinidad’s Carnival has become a popularized, global phenomenon. A highly anticipated event that remains a top-notch experience year in year out. The Carnival that was once known for its traditional characters, calypso, J’ouvert and “pretty mas” has now become a globalized event that not only represents the country’s attempt to increase its foreign revenue through tourism but also appears to perpetuate the class struggle that has existed throughout the history of Trinidad. Beneath its colorful surface …

The Ripple Effect: Gender And Race In Brazilian Culture And Literature, Maria José Somerlate Barbosa

Purdue Studies in Romance Literatures

In The Ripple Effect: Gender and Race in Brazilian Culture and Literature, Barbosa adopts a comparative, multilayered, and interdisciplinary line of research to examine social values and cultural mores from the first decades of the twentieth century to the present. By analyzing the historical, cultural, religious, and interactive space of Brazil’s national identity, The Ripple Effect surveys expressive cultures and literary manifestations. It uses the martial art-dance-ritual capoeira as a lynchpin to disclose historical ambiguities and the negotiation of cultural and literary boundaries within the context of the ideological construct of a mestizo nation. The book also examines laws …

Defining Black Masculinities: Intersectional Analyses Of Gender, Race And Sexuality In Caribbean And Latin American Literature, 1955 To Present, Jerry Eugene Scruggs Jr.

Doctoral Dissertations

The objective of my dissertation is to define and construct parameters for analyzing the Afro-descendant male experience in four specific texts: Mi compadre el General Sol [General Sun, My Brother] (1955), Adire y el tiempo roto [Adire and Broken Time] (1967), Sortilégio II: mistério negro de Zumbi redivivo [Sorcery 2: Black Mystery of Resurrected Zumbí] (1979), and Negro: Este color que me queda bonito [Black: This Color Looks Good on Me] (2013). Black masculinities are distinct and this study sets five parameters: 1) Sexual Prowess, 2) Contentious relationship with the White woman, 3) Violence and Toxic Masculinity, 4) Emotive Numbness, …

The African Experience And Heritage In The Caribbean And Brazil Project, Willie Mack

Open Educational Resources

This project will be a culmination of work that the student will do over the course of the semester. The first step is for the student to identify a country that they wish to examine. By the end of the semester, the student will be able describe, in a 5 – 8 page paper, the experience/heritage of Africans and African identity in that country. Alternatives to a paper submission are also accepted with consultation and approval from the instructor.

Boundary As Borderland: Mexico City’S Central Plaza And The Politics Of Presence, Re'al Christian

Theses and Dissertations

In the postcolonial era, the land surrounding national borders—the borderland—has inherited a specific identity and relationship with those who navigate it. While national borderlands are oft discussed amid conversations on globalization, land disputes, and war, the Spanish colonization of the Americas in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries saw the new establishment of borderlands from within in the form of segregative boundaries that purported to separate Indigenous and European peoples. This thesis concerns the manifestation of the borderland as not only an external entity, but an internal one as well. Using Mexico City, the center of the Spanish colonial empire, as …

Painting Outside Of The Lines: How Race Assignment Can Be Rethought Through Art, Giovanni Mella-Velazquez

Gettysburg Social Sciences Review

For centuries art has been used to make us think about our own human experiences. Unfortunately, works usually reflect the era which they were painted in; this has led to various artists showing, maintaining, and therefore reinforcing racist thoughts in our cultures. Art can be used to create a new narrative for our race assignments and their meanings. The idea of loving one's roots has been prevalent in many cultures, but in art form a disconnect between history and the everyday experience can arise which could miss the mark in helping us redefine our own race. Therefore, artwork which empowers …

Popular Feminism(S) Reconsidered: Popular, Racialized, And Decolonial Subjectivities In Contention, Janet M. Conway, Nathalie Lebon

Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies Faculty Publications

This issue is concerned with the salience of “popular feminism” as an analytic category for naming the myriad contemporary forms of gendered awareness and agency appearing among Latin America’s poor, working-class and racialized communities. Although we have an analytic agenda, our underlying concern here is with the politics of feminism—the construction of intersectional feminist praxes of gender, race, and economic justice and their relation to other projects for social justice. Our focus on popular feminism addresses the relationship between the subaltern subjectivities of marginalized women, their relation to feminist political agency, and the relation of both to mixed-gender efforts for …

Doing Latinidad While Black: Afro-Latino Identity And Belonging, Vianny Jasmin Nolasco

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

This study centers on the experiences of Afro-Latinos and how the racialization of Latino as a distinctly ‘brown’ identity—thereby excluding Blackness—shapes their identity and sense of belonging within Latino communities and spaces. Through in-depth interviews with eight Afro-Latinos, and using West and Fenstermaker’s (1995) work, ‘Doing Difference’, I find that the invisibility of Blackness, being categorized as Black, and therefore not Latino, and the negative meanings attached to Blackness may make it difficult for Afro-Latinos to come into their racial and ethnic identity and feel like they belong in Latino spaces. However, these experiences are also an important step to …

Miedo, Celebración Y Otredad Racial En El Cambio De Siglo: Hacia La Construcción Del Negro En El Discurso Artístico-Literario Cubano (1880-1933), Alberto Sosa Cabanas

FIU Electronic Theses and Dissertations

The disrupting visual and literary languages of the turn of the 19^th century to the 1930’s constitute an area of research as a moment of crystallization of the Cuban national consciousness or identity. Writers and artists in Hispanic Caribbean region had to face the challenge of finding ways to include highly racialized elements (such as religion and popular culture) within the rhetorical space of the elites, in other words, what Angel Rama has labeled the "Republic of letters". The result of these efforts not only opened a new kind of negotiation of the idea of nation, but also meant …

Yucatán's Pirate Novels And The Discursive Mayan Rebel In The Nineteenth-Century Criollo Imaginary, Sarah West

Sarah West

The Racial Equation: Pan-Atlantic Eugenics, Race, And Colonialism In The Early Twentieth Century British Caribbean, Christopher Anderson Davis

FIU Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This dissertation explores the intellectual discourse on race in the early twentieth century, particularly from 1919 to 1958, examining how British and American eugenicists and Caribbean nationalists debated the limits of colonial politics in the British Caribbean using academic and scientific language. These discussions emerged in the aftermath of World War I, the economic crises that led to the Great Depression, the political and labor unrest in the British Caribbean, and consequences of the Second World War. The dissertation’s goal is to examine how residents of the British Caribbean understood, appropriated, and challenged some of the principles of eugenics, particularly …

Cuarto Oscuro: Recuerdos En Blanco Y Negro, Lila Quintero Weaver, Karina Elizabeth Vázquez

Bookshelf

A visually stunning graphic memoir of an Argentinian immigrant’s experience during the civil rights movement. Cuarto oscuro: Recuerdos en blanco y negro is the long-awaited Spanish-language translation of Lila Quintero Weaver’s critically acclaimed Darkroom: A Memoir in Black and White. An arresting and moving memoir about childhood, race, ethnicity, and identity in the American South, Cuarto oscuro is animated by Weaver’s stunning illustrations. Her drawings are visually understated but striking and dramatically embolden her heartfelt storytelling. In 1961, when the author was five, she emigrated with her family from Buenos Aires, Argentina, to Marion, Alabama, located in the …

Blackish: Afrolatinidad And Dominican Identity In Nyc, Salim Elias Chagui-Sanchez

Senior Projects Spring 2018

Senior Project submitted to The Division of Social Studies of Bard College.

Jenyffer Nascimento’S Epic Poetry Of Black Female Empowerment Jenyffer Nascimento: A Poesia Épica De Empoderamento Da Mulher Negra, Sarah S. Ohmer

Publications and Research

This article presents results of auto-ethnography, literary analysis, and fieldwork research to answer an underlying, perhaps unresolved, concern, relevant to this dossier: how can we produce an ethical dialogue as transnational Black Feminists, among Black Brazilian women, and North American Black women, in an ethical manner, while realizing that one may (not ever) be a part of the “carnival without you in it.” Fertile Earth/ Terra Fertil tells a long overdue epic story to an audience within the poetry: Black women, family members, other times a Black man, Brazil, white women, or “you,” undefined. Joy to pain to chaos, sensuality, …

Creating A Multiracial Lesson Plan, Clayton Davis

Capstone Projects and Master's Theses

The purpose of this project is to teach students about multiracial identity issues. Multiracial populations in the U.S. continue to grow and it’s important for educators to address the needs of these students. A 5-E multiracial literature lesson plan was created for second grade that incorporates KWL and Text-to-World teaching strategies. A second grade class were read two children’s picture books, each featuring a biracial protagonist, and were asked to discuss and evaluate the content and commonalities of these stories. Students recorded what they learned in this lesson in their KWL’s. The results reveal that some students understood the problems …

The Sound Of Silence: Ideology Of National Identity And Racial Inequality In Contemporary Curaçao, Angela E. Roe

FIU Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This dissertation addresses racism in contemporary Curaçao—a former Dutch colony in the Caribbean that remains a component of the Kingdom of The Netherlands. The dissertation theorizes racism as a partially hidden constituent of the island’s ideology of national identity, which throughout its history has emulated hybridity before being influenced, more recently, by multiculturalism. The research’s main objective is to uncover the ways race and racism have been entangled with Curaçao’s hegemonic ideology of national identity, a reality too often omitted and always under-theorized in Dutch and Dutch Caribbean scholarship.

Using historical, ethnographic, statistic, and discourse analysis data, the dissertation reveals …

Collective Amnesia, Boca Floja

South

A wide gap exists between the phenomenon of cultural appropriation and historical claim. How do you justify when you are 12 and at that age you have been programmed by an information structure and culture that has defined every identifying feature?

The migration phenomenon, the informal market, and the constant flow between the idealization of the First World in the northern corner and the underworld in the backyard, made it possible for me one day, while walking with my grandmother in a street market in Mexico, to stumble across a cassette tape with Ice Cube’s face on it that said …

Performing Blackness In A Mulatto Society: Negotiating Racial Identity Through Music In The Dominican Republic, Angelina Maria Tallaj-García

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

My dissertation analyzes Dominican racial and ethnic identity through an examination of music and music cultures. Previous studies of Dominican identity have focused primarily on the racialized invention of the Dominican nation as white, or non-black, often centering on the building of Dominican identity in (sometimes violent) opposition to the Haitian nation and to Haitian racial identity. I argue that although Dominicans have not developed an explicit verbal discourse of black affirmation, blackness (albeit a contextually contingent articulation) is embedded in popular conceptions of dominicanidad ("Dominicanness") and is enacted through music. My dissertation explores ways in which popular notions of …

Joshua Lund. The Mestizo State: Reading Race In Modern Mexico. Minneapolis: U Of Minnesota P, 2012. Xx + 217 Pp., Miguel Ángel González-Abellás

Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature

Joshua Lund. The Mestizo State: Reading Race in Modern Mexico. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 2012. xx + 217 pp.

The Argentine Tango As A Discursive Instrument And Agent Of Social Empowerment: Buenos Aires, 1880-1955, Lorena Elizabeth Tabares

Open Access Theses & Dissertations

As an indisputable central element of Argentine popular culture, the tango constitutes much more than an artistic expression or a recreational activity. It is the manifestation of a collective ideology and idiosyncrasy. The development of the tango as a song of the people and social history between the 1880's and the first half of the 20th century, was not merely the result of a matter of identification but more importantly, the fact that it, in its `tridimensionality' comprised of music, dance and lyrics, offered the milieu to the existence of the people that identified with it. In other words, the …

Unspoken Prejudice: Racial Politics, Gendered Norms, And The Transformation Of Puerto Rican Identity In The Twentieth Century, Cristóbal A. Borges

Open Access Theses & Dissertations

The Dissertation uses border theory to craft a comparative study that explores the promotion of the white jí­baro in Puerto Rico throughout the twentieth century and the challenges to that racialized identity that emerged simultaneously. Through a biographical approach that examines the lives of José Julio Henna (1848-1924), Arturo Alfonso Schomburg (1874-1938), Muna Lee (1895-1965), Juano Hernández (1896-1970), Ruby Black (1896-1957), Luis Muñoz Marí­n (1898-1980), Pura Belpré (1899-1982), Inés Mendoza (1908-1990), and Roberto Clemente (1934-1972) as symbols of Puerto Ricanness and contributors to its definition, the Dissertation analyzes the racial and gendered inequalities that persisted during twentieth century Puerto Rico. …

La Máscara Afro-Puertorriqueña: Una Auto-Re-Presentación A Través De La Búsqueda De La Identidad Racial, Étnica Y Nacional En Down These Mean Streets, Forrest Blackbourn

The Coastal Review: An Online Peer-reviewed Journal

This article analyzes the textual elements of Piri Thomas’s Down These Mean Streets that demonstrate, in addition to the continual problematization of closed racial categories, the problems that are associated with static categorizations of ethnicity and nationality. This article calls into question traditional definitions of race, yet it also challenges definitions of Puerto Rican and Nuyorican identities. Race, nationality, and ethnicity are all vital elements to the human experience, and we will discover who is/are responsible for the protagonist Piri’s lack of racial recognition in the United States.

[Introduction To] The Latino Body: Crisis Identities In American Literary And Cultural Memory, LáZaro Lima

Bookshelf

The Latino Body tells the story of the United States Latino body politic and its relation to the state: how the state configures Latino subjects and how Latino subjects have in turn altered the state. Lázaro Lima charts the interrelated groups that define themselves as Latinos and examines how these groups have responded to calls for unity and nationally shared conceptions of American cultural identity. He contends that their responses, in times of cultural or political crisis, have given rise to profound cultural transformations, enabling the so-called “Latino subject“ to emerge.

Analyzing a variety of cultural, literary, artistic, and popular …