Caribbean Languages and Societies Commons^™

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 …

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 …

Los Fantasmas De La Imaginación En El Deseo Más Canalla De Arístides Vargas, Rojo Robles Mejias

Publications and Research

Como motivo del evento crítico teatral Un espacio seguro producido por Caborca y Teatro Público en el Teatro de la UPR en Octubre 2022, este ensayo revisita la obra de Arístides Vargas, El deseo más canalla (2001). El artículo argumenta que la obra divisa la posibilidad de transformar espacios y proyectar seres creativos por medio de la imaginación. La imaginación en la dramaturgia de Vargas es un mecanismo recurrente para establecer una relación entre la realidad interior y la exterior, entre una posible construcción del yo y la otredad. Esa metamorfosis del yo se alcanza por medio del juego literario …

Self-Reclamation Through Death: Attaining Creoleness In Jamaica Kincaid’S The Autobiography Of My Mother And In Praise Of Creoleness By Jean Bernabé, Patrick Chamoiseau And Raphaël Confiant, Phillip J. Jordan

Dissertations and Theses

This thesis makes the claim that Xuela, the protagonist of the novel The Autobiography of My Mother mirrors the principles of the essay In Praise of Creoleness by Jean Bernabé, Patrick Chamoiseau, and Raphael Confiant. These works, published nearly a decade apart address a process of identity formation in which specifically Caribbean identity features blend together in a fluid and complex way, the process of creolization. The essay, In Praise of Creoleness, can be seen as the manifesto of creolization, while Kincaid’s Xuela in The Autobiography of My Mother is the manifestation. Kincaid’s work presents an account of an individual’s …

Family Relationships And Academic Performance Via Belongingness Among Cuban Medical Students: Examining Family Legacy And Sex As Moderators, Maria J. Cisneros-Elias

Theses and Dissertations

Medical diplomacy is a foundational part of Cuban domestic and foreign policy (Feinsilver, 2010). Cuba has an abundance of doctors, encouraged by the country’s free medical education program (Hand et al., 2020), and has made a significant impact with its well-established healthcare system, provision of healthcare for all of its citizens, and healthcare support internationally. The current study aims to focus on processes underlying Cuban medical students’ academic performance, as they are a critical component of this successful system, and a population that has received limited empirical attention. Thus, the current study used path analyses to examine the relations between …

La Voz Fall 2021, El Instituto: Institute Of Latina/O, Caribbean, And Latin American Studies

La Voz

In this issue:

• Two New Colleagues Join El Instituto’s Core Faculty; Marysol Asencio Retires
• WFSB Profiles El Instituto during National Hispanic Heritage Month
• UConn and UPR Debut Online Event Series
• Learn About La Comunidad Intelectual
• Eyzaguirre Lecture Series Returns
• El Instituto Welcomes Activist-in-Residence MaryJoan Picone
• Meet El Instituto's New Graduate Students for AY 21-22

Praxis Of Jose Marti: Politico Literary Discourse And Agency For Independence Movement, Yishan Lea

All Faculty Scholarship for the College of Education and Professional Studies

This article explores Jose Marti’s political mobilization in general and extrapolates Marti’s praxis specifically. A multifold analysis is conducted as follows: first, the analysis explores the narrative of Jose Marti regarding the development of his consciousness and his role in changing the historical trajectory of Cuba; second, the analysis examines Marti’s political praxis in engaging with the geopolitical semiotic field and mobilizing Cuban cultural communities for the Cuban War of Independence.

Disrupting Paradise: A Pan-Caribbean Film Series, Dessane L. Cassell

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

As one of the regions most economically dependent on tourism in the world, the Caribbean is a place where the impacts of colonial myth-making remain viscerally felt. Long framed as a tropical “paradise,” the Caribbean has been marked by campaigns to package and promote the region as idyllic, picturesque, and available for (primarily Western) consumption. Building upon the writings of Krista Thompson, Ian Gregory Strachan, and Angelique V. Nixon, Disrupting Paradise connects the myth of “paradise” and the modern tourism industry to the long, extractive history of colonialism in the region. Taking shape as a film series, this project examines …

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 …

The Preacher And Missionary War: The Political Role Of Race And Christianity In The 1831 Baptist War, Emilee Dale

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Abolitionists from the Eighteenth Century to the mid-Nineteenth Century tended to be remembered by William Wilberforce, Joseph Soul, Thomas Clarkson, Samuel Bowly, and William Lloyd Garrison. All of these men have been extremely well represented throughout scholarship and the archives. The voices that are often left out of the archives are the men and women who fought on the frontlines for their freedom. Enslaved men and women fought to the death for their freedom and are often overshadowed by White missionaries and abolitionists in the archives. Black leaders often have less representation throughout history and scholarship due to the lack …

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 …

Comparing African Cultural Retention And Its Effect On Racial Attitudes In The Music And National Identities Of Cuba And The United States, Lucie Turkel

Honors Scholar Theses

This project investigates to what extent the African roots of popular music in Cuba and the United States are acknowledged and examines if this level of cultural acknowledgement has any influence on the postcolonial social, cultural, and economic treatment of African Americans and Afro-Cubans. Does a greater and/or more widespread acceptance of African cultural retention and overall African heritage in a country’s national identity help alleviate racism in that country? Using primary sources from Cuban and American music and cultural periodicals, economic statistics, and political and cultural histories, I have determined that Cuba has a higher level of African cultural …

Cuban Art After The Revolution: 1960s-1970s, Elvis Fuentes

Open Educational Resources

This presentation features Cuban art after the Communist Revolution of 1959. It includes the rise of documentary photography and poster design as state-sponsored propaganda art, as well as changes in the visual arts from abstraction to figuration. It includes a brief chronology of Cuban art in the 20th century.

La Voz Spring 2021, El Instituto: Institute Of Latina/O, Caribbean, And Latin American Studies

La Voz

In this issue:

• Conference Brings Cuba Scholars to UConn
• Performance Art in the Crossfire
• An Evening with Karla Cornejo Villavicencio
• Jesús Ramos-Kittrell Wins AAUP Teaching Innovation Award
• Alumni Contribute to State Latinx History Curriculum Initiative
• New Study: School Employees Help Farmworker Families Access Health Care

Las 101: Latin American And Caribbean Cultures, Cuny School Of Professional Studies

Open Educational Resources

Introduces texts and media from Latin American and Caribbean cultures, including film, music, and performance. Analyzes the distinguishing features of Latin American and Caribbean Cultures through the study of cultural artifacts and issues related to history, politics, customs, and art. Requires research on selected topics.

A Widened Angle Of View: Teaching Theology And Racial Embodiment, Mara Brecht

Journal of Global Catholicism

Today’s undergraduate students are digital natives, shaped by constant access to information and countless experiences of encountering the world through the convenience of a screen. The ostensible comfort students have with difference gives way to a paradox, and one that’s made especially apparent in the theology classroom: Students are comfortable with seeing difference and particularity at a distance, but not adept at locating difference and particularity “at home.” I contend that Catholics & Cultures can help students from the dominant culture—namely, white students who comprise the vast majority of Catholic college students—destabilize their notion of the Catholic tradition as tightly …

Traveling Tropes: Race, Reconstruction, And "Southern" Redemption In The Story Of Evangelina Cisneros, Thomas Genova

Spanish Publications

This essay considers the entanglement of race, gender, and imperialism in U.S. discourse on Evangelina Cisneros, a white Cuban woman imprisoned in a Havana jail during her country’s final War for Independence from Spain (1895–1898). I argue that, an event historically tied to the colony’s abolition of slavery, Cuban Independence in writings about Cisneros becomes discursively imbricated with the reconsolidation of white supremacy in the U.S. South following the Civil War. The study establishes a dialogue between U.S. discourse on the events published in the late 1890s – the articles on the affair that appeared in The New York Journal …

Auto®Ficción Latinx De Nueva York (1999–2020), Jacqueline Herranz Brooks

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This research on the intersection of Literary Criticism, Latino Studies, Persona Studies, and Performance Studies has led me to question the accepted definitions of autoficción (Doubrovsky, Gasparini, Alberca, Casas, Schlikers) and expand that definition into a more multifaceted and operational term. Hence, I created auto®ficción, a new term describing the hybrid creations of a group of underrepresented contemporary Latinx authors living/producing/circulating their work in New York City, during the first two decades of the 21^st Century. For these authors, their life experiences and quotidian uses of this city’s spaces are the subjects of their work. Auto®ficción draws attention …

Epílogo, In Manus Tuas, Domine: Cartas De Los Pobres A La Virgen De Altagracia, Aida L. Heredia

Hispanic Studies Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

No Diré Que Fue Milagro, Pero ... Corriente Positivista, Aida L. Heredia

Hispanic Studies Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

Disrupted Identities And Forced Nomads: A Post-Disaster Legacy Of Neocolonialism In The Island Of Barbuda, Lesser Antilles, Sophia Perdikaris, Rebecca Boger, Edith Gonzalez, Emira Ibrahimpašić, Jennifer D. Adams

School of Global Integrative Studies: Faculty Publications

In the aftermath of the forced evacuation of the island of Barbuda due to Hurricane Irma, the Barbudan people have experienced an exile and return to a ‘new’ geographical, political, and economic context, albeit on the same island. With the specter of climate change and the potential impacts on island communities and nations, we use Barbuda, sister island of Antigua in the Lesser Antilles, to examine the trajectory of nomadic identities as they navigate changes that threaten contemporary land relationships and culture. Since its first permanent settlement in the 17th Century, the island geography of Barbuda has been fundamental to …

La Voz Winter 2021, El Instituto: Institute Of Latina/O, Caribbean, And Latin American Studies

La Voz

In this issue you will find:

• MA Student Researches Takeover in Providence Schools
• Indigenous Language Survival in Colombian Amazon
• "Rise of the Latinx Vote"
• La Colectiva Virtual Conversation
• Mark Healey Wins SCHARP Award

Llegó La Futura: La Cuirificación Del Género Urbano, Isabel Streiffer, Isabel S. Streiffer

Scripps Senior Theses

Hoy en día, artistas cuir de reggaeton y trap están desestabilizando el género urbano, tal como las estructuras y suposiciones sociales que se manifiestan dentro del género. Prestando atención al proceso de desidentificación, a través de mi tesis analizo (1) cómo artistas cuir trabajan dentro del reggaeton para romper el binario entre la respetabilidad y la autonomía erótica; (2) cómo desafían el binario del género, la heteronormatividad, y la manifestación de ambos en el género urbano; y (3) cómo abordan los problemas políticos y sociales mediante su música. Además, al comparar lo que están haciendo les artistas cuir y los …

Mas Yo Resto: Entrevista Con Nancy Morejón, Vanessa Pérez-Rosario

Publications and Research

Como afirma este dossier, Morejón ha sido reconocida como una de las escritoras e intelectuales más célebres y veneradas del período revolucionario cubano, y una de las escritoras caribeñas más importantes del siglo XX y XXI. Ha publicado más de quince colecciones de poesía y numerosos ensayos. Lectora y traductora cuidadosa de los escritores e intelectuales del Caribe francófono del siglo XX, Morejón ha traducido del francés al español las obras de Aimé Césaire, Jacques Roumain y Édouard Glissant, entre otros. De 1986 a 1993 y nuevamente de 2000 a 2006, se desempeñó como directora del Centro de Estudios del …

Disaster And Hope In The Comic Universe Of 'Gardening In The Tropics', Molly Mosher

Dissertations and Theses

In this paper, I explore ideas of dominion and how Western canon has helped propagate ideas of human domination of the natural world. Using Joseph W. Meeker’s The Comedy of Survival, I trace a line from the advent of the literary tragedy to the climate crisis. To contrast, I use his idea of comedy as the antidote to domination — a way of thinking that might inspire collaboration with the natural world. I will explore the comic with, predominately, Olive Senior’s Gardening in the Tropics, alongside Jamaica Kincaid’s gardening studies and Mona Lisa Saloy’s essay on environmental destruction. To …

Latin America & Caribbean Collection, Zach S. Henderson Library Special Collections

Finding Aids

This collection, assembled by Dr. Corinna Zeltsman of Georgia Southern University, consists of items from Latin America and the Caribbean dating from 1692 to 1985. Materials include political pamphlets, newsletters, ephemera, sheet music, published books, and other materials. The subject matter includes U.S.-Latin American relations, popular culture, and revolutions.

Find this collection in the University Libraries' catalog.

Pirate Radio Proves Invaluable To Immigrant Communities During The Pandemic — But The Fcc Isn’T Having It, May Olvera

Capstones

In January 2020, congress passed the PIRATE Act into law, expanding the legal consequences for operating pirate radio tenfold. Although the FCC claims that the reason they are cracking down on pirate stations — that is, stations broadcasting on regulated airwaves without an FCC license — is that they could interfere with emergency messaging, the pandemic has proven otherwise; there is no evidence of pirates interfering with official safety warnings. In fact, most pirate stations are run by immigrants speaking in their native tongue and they have been able to provide vulnerable and underserved communities with the information they need …

Junto Diaz’S The Brief Wondrous Life Of Oscar Wao: A Narrative Of Identity And Diaspora, Samirah Almutairi

English Faculty Publications

Junto Diaz’s novel The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao raises the question of the identity formation for the Caribbean in diaspora. Diasporic Caribbean people struggle with understanding their difference and recognizing the important of assimilating to other people’s lives and cultures when they leave their home country. The struggle of the main character, Oscar Wao, in the novel is established perfectly well through apparent identity crisis that is manifested in his cultural displacements, childhood memories, real-life situations, and unsuccessful relationship with the other sex. It is a problem that Oscar creates his passage towards constructing a national identity, which …

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 …