Caribbean Languages and Societies Commons^™

Negotiating Plurality: Korean Catholic Funerals As Lived Religion, Jieun Han

Journal of Global Catholicism

This article examines Korean Catholic funeral rites through the lenses of ritual

guidebooks and lived religion, arguing that Catholic funerary practice in Korea

has emerged through sustained engagement with Confucian and Buddhist tradi-

tions as well as modern nationalism. Focusing on Catholic manuals such as the

Sangjang yesik [Rites for Mourning and Funerals] and related texts, it traces how

officially sanctioned liturgical forms coexist with, accommodate, and reinterpret

indigenous ritual logics surrounding mourning, burial, ancestor veneration, and

care for the dead. Rather than viewing Korean Catholic funerals as a simple

localization of Roman rites, the article conceptualizes them as a …

Editor's Introduction, Brent H. Otto S.J.

Journal of Global Catholicism

No abstract provided.

Hindu Poetry And The Project Of An Inter-Spiritual Catholic Theology, Francis X. Clooney

Journal of Global Catholicism

This article engages the work of the Indian south Indian Tamil-language Vaiṣṇava poet saints known as the Alvārs. The article specifically focuses the First HundredHoly Linked verses of Poykai Ālvār to argue for inter-spiritual learning between Catholics and Hindus. The article concludes with personal reflections on this encounter within the context of the global Catholic Church

A Home In Both Places: Gender, Afro-Caribbean Migration, And Transnational Home-Making In Central Brooklyn, 1920–1980, Ruth Edwards

ELIN Graduate Theses

No abstract provided.

Genderless And Sexualized: Caribbean Enslaved Women In The 18th Century, Amy Van Arsdell

Campus Research Month

This study focuses on the uniquely-gendered experiences of enslaved women in the Caribbean in the 18^th century. First, I examine the racialized views of femininity and how enslaved women were denied the privileges of white femininity and forced to do the same work as men, yet were still valued less than their male counterparts because of their gender. The study goes on to highlight the sexual oppression enslaved women experienced, and its adverse effects on their health. The study concludes that despite the intersectional racism and sexism they faced, enslaved women were able to use their gender to resist …

Colectivo Moriviví: Reconfiguring The Puerto Rican Nation Through Feminist Art Activism, Tania Carrasquillo Hernandez

Faculty Publications

This article analyzes national identity construction in Puerto Rico in terms of gender dynamics and how contemporary artistic production has questioned patriarchal constructions within the nation. I argue that by voicing the narratives of Puerto Rican communities in the public sphere, Colectivo Moriviví validates the active participation and contribution of women, Afro-descendant minorities, and LGTBQ+ groups within the national body, forcing the national discourse to re-envision its purpose, values, and mission

Narrar El Final De Los Tiempos: Misantropía Y Liberación En Dos “Cuentos Atómicos” Del Salvadoreño Álvaro Menen Desleal (1960s), David Díaz Arias

Alambique. Revista académica de ciencia ficción y fantasía / Jornal acadêmico de ficção científica e fantasía

El presente artículo analiza una parte de la obra de ciencia ficción del salvadoreño Álvaro Menen Desleal. Para eso, se concentra en uno de los temas que, aunque no dominante, sí es abordado de forma crítica y sagaz por parte de ese autor: el exterminio de la humanidad a partir de una hecatombe nuclear. Así, se estudian dos cuentos publicados por Menen Desleal en 1969 y que forman parte de su premiado texto Una cuerda de nylon y oro y otros cuentos maravillosos. Los cuentos son el que le da nombre a esa antología de relatos y “Hacer el …

Chronotropics: Caribbean Women Writing Spacetime, Odile Ferly, Tegan Zimmerman

Language, Literature, and Culture

This book deconstructs androcentric approaches to spacetime inherited from western modernity through its theoretical frame of the chronotropics. It sheds light on the literary acts of archival disruption, radical remapping, and epistemic marronnage by twenty-first-century Caribbean women writers to restore a connection to spacetime, expanding it within and beyond the region. Arguing that the chronotropics points to a vocation for social justice and collective healing, this pan-Caribbean volume returns to auhthonous ontologies and epistemologies to propose a poetics and politics of the chronotropics that is anticolonial, gender inclusive, pluralistic, and non-anthropocentric.

Table of Contents:

1 Introduction: Chronotropics, co-authored by Odile …

Ephemeral Elsewheres: Locating Narratives Of Resignation, Resistance, And Refusal In The Poetry Of Black Cuban And Black Brazilian Women, Aidan Keys

Comparative Literature M.A. Essays

This essay dissects the language of Latin American revolution and nationalism to locate the body of the black woman and the appropriation of her image. In two seemingly incommensurable radical movements—the Cuban Revolution (1952-1959) and the Brazilian Unified Black Movement (1978-)—the contributions of Black women are unevenly recognized. Reading the poetry of cubanas Nancy Morejón and Georgina Herrera and brasileiras Sônia Fátima and Esmeralda Ribeiro, this essay claims that in both contexts, the Black woman is marginalized to a geographic “elsewhere.” Expanding on this term, coined by scholar Carol Boyce Davies, this essay further identifies temporal and ephemeral “elsewheres.” The …

An Exploration Of Self-Identity Experiences Within The Lives Of Afro-Caribbean Women Undergraduate College Students: A Feminist Phenomenological Study, Shana J. Gelin

Dissertations - ALL

The purpose of this feminist phenomenological dissertation was to explore the self-identity experiences of Afro-Caribbean women undergraduate college students. In doing so, self-identity experiences, ethnic marginalization, and counseling experiences were explored for six participants. Data was collected and analyzed using Simone De Beauvoir's feminist framework of self-discovery/ rediscovery where two semi-structured interviews were conducted for each participant. This study resulted in six individual profiles illuminating the voices of each participant as well as collective themes. Findings from this study show that Afro-Caribbean women undergraduate college students filter their self-identity experiences through their ethnicity; meaning that participants understand other pieces of …

I Still Love You, Despite Everything, Amy Bravo

Theses and Dissertations

My practice seeks to reconcile the family—be it a found, queer family, or blood relatives. Addressing ancestral conflict, the complications of US/Cuba relations and my physical and cultural distance from the island I hail from, my work offers another world for communing with those you cannot physically reach.

A Quest For Dignity: Colored Women’S Anti-Slavery Resistance In The Eighteenth Century British Jamaica And The Reconceptualization Of Human Rights, Yuwei (Ada) Liu

Of Life and History

The public conception of the Human Rights struggle was a European originated post-WWII campaign, advocated by the white organization through the top-down executing system on the non-European country. Nonetheless, by historicized Human Rights struggle, I found that the concept of rights and the ways to reclaiming them evolved under the effects of time, culture, gender, class, and race. In the eighteenth and the nineteenth century, enslaved and fugitive black women of Jamaica continually asserted their humanities in the face of institutional exploitation through the day to day resistance, black communal and family solidarity, and organized revolts. This argument builds upon …

The Rise Of An Eco-Spiritual Imaginary: Ecology And Spirituality As Decolonial Protest In Contemporary Multi-Ethnic American Literature, Andrew Michael Spencer

English Theses and Dissertations

The Rise of an Eco-Spiritual Imaginary reveals a shared ecological aesthetic among contemporary U.S. ethnic writers whose novels communicate a decolonial spiritual reverence for the earth. This shared narrative focus challenges white settler colonial mythologies of manifest destiny and American exceptionalism to instantiate new ways of imagining community across socially constructed boundaries of time, space, nation, race, and species. The eco-spiritual imaginary—by which I mean a shared reverence for the ecological interconnection between all living beings—articulates a common biological origin and sacredness of all life that transcends racial difference while remaining grounded in local ethnicities and bioregions. The novelists representing …

1% Left Of 100: Taino History And Puerto Rican Identity, Alanis Gonzalez Torres

Undergraduate Research Symposium

1% left of 100 is a documentary poetics research project exploring the confluence of identity, family, and language. Crafted in a hybrid format that mixes Spanish and English according to my personal idiolect, which is itself a product of my heritage as a Puerto Rican, Africa, native Taino American, this poem engages with exciting new approaches to thinking about race which liberate us from talking about physical features and takes us instead toward race as a social fact, a product of culture, history, and family. I seek to intervene in a narrative of American history that, though it teaches about …

2022 Iggad Conference Program, Charles Joyner Institute For Gullah And African Diaspora Studies

IGGAD Conference Programs

Program of the 2022 IGGAD Conference: Who Owns This? Communities, Heritage, and Preservation.

Transgressing Boundaries Of Identity, Geography And Time In Transmutadxos And La Mucama De Omicunlé, Lucinda Smith

Tête à Tête: Journal of Francophone Studies

The literary works of Rita Indiana (1977) and Yolanda Arroyo Pizarro (1970) are recognised for exposing and challenging hegemonic ideas of identity, sexuality and power. The transgression of boundaries appears time and again in the fiction of both writers, whether these be boundaries of sexual or gender identity, desire, geography, time or even life and death. Using Rita Indiana’s novel La mucama de Omicunlé (2015) and Arroyo’s collection of short stories Transmutadxs (2016), the authors’ representations of such transgressions are the focus of this essay.

Further to addressing similar themes in their texts, both Rita Indiana and Arroyo Pizarro were …

Pensar El Límite: El Símbolo Indígena En Los Proyectos Políticos Cubanos De Principios Del Siglo Xix, Jorge L. Camacho

The Coastal Review

This article investigates the way in which Cuban literature reflected on indigenous people during the early half of the nineteenth century and uses the symbol of the Amerindians to demonstrate a moral disjuncture between them and the colonizer. In this article, I call attention to the way Cuban independentists and Spanish nationalists used this figure to support their views and thus created a split in the Cuban creole imagination. I start by pointing out that these appropriations started at the end of the 18th century when historian José Martín Félix de Arrate, and poets such as Miguel González and Manuel …

Carnivalizing The Nation: Reassessing The Trinidad And Tobago Carnival As An Inclusive Platform For Local And Diaspora Cultural Identity, Shari Bissoondatt

CGU Theses & Dissertations

Trinidad and Tobago's 2020 National Cultural policy ostensibly seeks to build the twin islands’ cultural confidence through the development of a unifying and empowering national cultural identity. However, this research asserts that the current policy undermines these national goals by approaching its community through problematic colonial, nationalist frameworks and through centralizing the annual carnival festival. This positioning poses several key problems. First, it reinscribes the colonial cultural identity of the island. Second, this nationalist, Christian colonial approach reinforces a binary of belonging and non-belonging that excludes minoritized, diasporic, and non-conforming gender communities. Third, by centralizing carnival in cultural policy, the …

The Ill-Treatment Of Their Countrywoman: Liberated African Women, Violence, And Power In Tortola, 1807–1834, Arianna Browne

Master's Theses

In 1807, Parliament passed an Act to abolish the slave trade, leading to the Royal Navy’s campaign of policing international waters and seizing ships suspected of illegal trading. As the Royal Navy captured slave ships as prizes of war and condemned enslaved Africans to Vice-Admiralty courts, formerly enslaved Africans became “captured negroes” or “liberated Africans,” making the subjects in the British colonies. This work, which takes a microhistorical approach to investigate the everyday experiences of liberated Africans in Tortola during the early nineteenth century, focuses on the violent conditions of liberated African women, demonstrating that abolition consisted of violent contradictions …

María Teresa Ramírez Nieva: La Griot De Los Ancestros Y Las Ancestras, Catalina Rojas

Vernacular: New Connections in Language, Literature, & Culture

María Teresa Ramírez Nieva: La Griot de los Ancestros y las Ancestras

La poesía de María Teresa Ramírez es una poesía de resistencia y cimarronaje, de reafirmación de la vida y la libertad, de “recuperación y defensa de los territorios ancestrales” que han sido históricamente amenazados y usurpados en un Pacífico colombiano de abandono, guerra territorial, desplazamiento y muerte. Es a través de sus obras La noche de mi piel (1988), Flor de Palenque (2008), Abalenga (2008), Mabungú Triunfo (2013), Mabungú Triunfo: Cosmogonía Africana Tomo II (2016), como se eleva la voz poética de la ancestralidad Pacífica alrededor de la …

Místicas Y Disidentes: Feminismo Teresiano En La Literatura Latinoamericana Del Siglo Xx, Almudena Vidorreta

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation addresses for the first time a gender-based approach to the understanding of Spanish mystic Saint Teresa’s role as a symbol of feminism, language identity and creative writing theorization in 20^th-century Latin American literature. Saint Teresa (1515-1582) was not only a model in her role as an intellectual for authors such as Delmira Agustini (1886-1914), Gabriela Mistral (1889-1957), Victoria Ocampo (1890-1979), Alfonsina Storni (1892-1938), Juana de Ibarborou (1892-1979), Teresa Wilms Montt (1893-1921), Dulce María Loynaz (1902-1997), Silvina Ocampo (1903-1993), Mercedes García Tudurí (1904-1997) y Alejandra Pizarnik (1936-1972), among others, but also a literary referent for those who …

Anger, Genre Bending, And Space In Kincaid, Ferré, And Vilar, Suzanne M. Uzzilia

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation examines how women’s anger sparks the bending of genre, which ultimately leads to the development of space in the work of three Caribbean-American authors: Jamaica Kincaid, Rosario Ferré, and Irene Vilar. Women often occupy subject positions that restrict them, and women writers harness the anger provoked by such limitations to test the traditional borders of genre and create new forms that better reflect their realities.

These three writers represent Anglophone and Hispanophone Caribbean literary traditions and are united by their interest in addressing feminist issues in their work. Accordingly, my research is guided by the feminist theoretical frameworks …

Queer Baroque: Sarduy, Perlongher, Lemebel, Huber David Jaramillo Gil

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation analyzes the ways in which queer and trans people have been understood through verbal and visual baroque forms of representation in the social and cultural imaginary of Latin America, despite the various structural forces that have attempted to make them invisible and exclude them from the national narrative. My dissertation analyzes the differences between Severo Sarduy’s Neobaroque, Néstor Perlongher’s Neobarroso, and Pedro Lemebel’s Neobarrocho, while exploring their individual limitations and potentialities for voicing the joys and pains of being queer and trans in an exclusionary society. As I analyze the literary works of each artist, …

Women In Socialist Cuba: Political And Economic Equality, Julia E. Rogers

Senior Honors Projects, 2020-current

Gender equality is recognized as a fundamental human right and goal by the United Nations. The 1959 Cuban Revolution advocated for widespread social changes including equality for women. Cuba is a critical case because it both confirms and refutes assumptions about gender equality. The central research question explored in this thesis is: How do domestic and global factors combine to affect the rhetoric and experiences of gendered and racial groups with respect to economic and political opportunities in socialist Cuba? I examine whether the divergences between expectations and experiences conform to the general literature. I find that women did achieve …

2020 Iggad Conference Program, Charles Joyner Institute For Gullah And African Diaspora Studies

IGGAD Conference Programs

Program of the 2020 IGGAD Conference: Without Borders: Tracing the Cultural, Archival, and Political African Diaspora.

Rethinking The Monstrous: Gender, Otherness, And Space In The Cinematic Storytelling Of Arrival And The Shape Of Water, Edward Chamberlain

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

Through comparing the Hollywood films Arrival and The Shape of Water, this article explicates the films’ similar portrayals of gender, social collaboration, and monstrosity. Although the mainstream media in the United States has linked the idea of the monstrous to larger global forces, the two films suggest that “the monster” exists much closer to home. Hence, this article makes the case that monstrosity occurs in a variety of formulations such as the actions of national authorities like governmental officials that oppress and endanger a myriad of American citizens as well as newcomers. Further, this article makes the case that …

Cyborgs Y Frankensteins Isleños: Mirada A Dos Cuentos De Marta Aponte Alsina, Veronica E. Davila Ellis

Alambique. Revista académica de ciencia ficción y fantasía / Jornal acadêmico de ficção científica e fantasía

En el siguiente ensayo analizo dos cuentos de Marta Aponte Alsina donde se presenta una crítica sobre las narrativas femeninas ante una realidad demasiado plagada de la cibernética y productos culturales extranjeros. “Madame Bovirtual” (2005) e “Intermedio del hombre verde (20--)” (1999) muestran un cuestionamiento hacia la producción literaria durante el comienzo de la revolución tecnológica. Ambos textos utilizan como referente obras literarias canónicas canónicas, sin embargo “Intermedio…” reformula la figura del monstruo de Frankenstein para una crítica social sobre el neocolonialismo y su representación en la ficción boricua.La literatura puertorriqueña femenina a finales del Siglo 20 se encargó de …

What Does "Caliban's Woman" Sound Like? : A Study Of Indo-Guyanese Women's Emergent Voice In The Us, Caitlin Irene Janiszewski

Legacy Theses & Dissertations (2009 - 2024)

Abstract

Acoso Visual: Staring Back At The State And Gender Conformity, Juan Luna

Honors Theses

A semi-autoethnographic piece that uses a radical transfeminist lens to interrogate hegemonic systems of gender and race in the Dominican Republic through the violence that Trans and Gender Nonconforming people face. While focusing on trans violence, this thesis explicitly turns its gaze away from Trans/Gender Nonconforming people and interrogates the state, cisnormativity, and gender conformity. This thesis explores how acoso visual (visual accosting) is a historically informed process that works to border trans/gender nonconformity out of the idea of Dominicanidad. Ultimately, this text reminds Trans/Gender Nonconforming individuals that they are not the reason for the transphobia that they experience, and …

Knowledge Networks: Contested Geographies In The History Of Mary Prince, Leah M. Thomas

ABO: Interactive Journal for Women in the Arts, 1640–1830

The History of Mary Prince, a West-Indian Slave, Related by Herself (1831) is the first published woman’s slave narrative. In her History, Prince describes horrendous physical violence to which she and other enslaved peoples of African descent are subjected as well as the corresponding psychological and sexual abuse they endure. While Prince “speaks” the sexual abuse to some extent, how she knows what she knows goes unspoken. She expresses her knowledge of reading and writing and, at times, of the law, but she does not explain how she obtains this knowledge or knows what she knows. Her optimism to …