Race, Ethnicity and Post-Colonial Studies Commons^™

Kef-Karma, Sheku, Bronx African American History Project

Oral Histories

Sheku Kef-Karma (aka Chosan) is a rapper who was born in Sierra Leone. When he was two years old, his family moved to London in search of better economic opportunities. His mother, a nurse by training, worked two jobs and frequently sent supplies and money back to her relatives in Sierra Leone while his father pursued a college education. Chosan was raised Christian, even though his father was Muslim. He was raised in a neighborhood with a large number of African families, and he was exposed to reggae, hip-hop, and the general ins and outs of African-immigrant London street culture …

Chappell, Aj And Minor, Robert, Bronx African American History Project

Oral Histories

Robert Minos and Andrew Chappell were former players on the famous Hilton White Basketball team; moreover, both grew up in the Forest Houses in the Bronx. The projects were seen as upward mobility, a community of hardworking families. Minor describes a sense of cohesion in these communities, which he contrasts to the modern perception and atmosphere of project housing.

Both men relate the story of the start of their basketball careers at the relative age of 11/12. Mr. Alley and Haley White were two mentors and coaches of the Hilton basketball program. Robert says this about the program, “I came …

Martinez, Danny Interview 1, Bronx African American History Project

Oral Histories

Danny Martinez, aka BeatMann, is one of the original Bronx DJs. He is of Puerto Rican and Italian descent. He was born in 1965 and raised in the South Bronx alongside his brother (Freddie, born 1967) and sister. As young boys and pre-teens, the Martinez brothers began tagging throughout the Bronx, using spray paint to leave their names and artwork on trains, walls, buildings, etc. They stole the paint from various stores throughout the New York/New Jersey area. The neighborhood the boys grew up in was very diverse—Puerto Ricans, blacks, Italians, and Irish all lived together in that section of …

Meka Ou Le Lent Retour À Soi, Alexandre Lizotte

Présence Francophone: Revue internationale de langue et de littérature

Inspired by Ferdinand Oyono’s novel Le vieux nègre et la médaille and relying on the works of Albert Memmi and a number of critics of the negro-african novel, what we are proposing here is a reflection on the relation between the colonizer and the colonized. At the very core of our analysis is the character of Meka, Oyono’s main character, who symbolizes the people’s strive for freedom and self-rediscovery and reconquest. Step by step, we follow him through his long and difficult “walk” or journey towards himself, towards his own truth. In our understanding of that whole liberation process, we …

The Disabling Nature Of The Hiv / Aids Discourse Among Hbcu Students: How Postcolonial Racial Identities And Gender Expectations Influence Hiv Prevention Attitudes And Sexual Risk-Taking, Bruce H. Wade

Wagadu: A Journal of Transnational Women's & Gender Studies

This analysis reveals how some African American college students respond to the discourse on HIV / AIDS as a social disability. The methodology includes surveys (n = 217), focus groups and interviews with convenience samples of students attending a consortium of historically black colleges and universities (HBCUs) in the U.S. The findings show that the perceived risk of HIV is high in this community, that nearly half of students use condoms inconsistently even though they are well aware of the risks of unprotected sex and their levels of HIV / AIDS knowledge are high. Social stigma, gender role expectations, an …

The Technology Of Immortality, The Soul, And Human Identity, Richard A. Jones

Wagadu: A Journal of Transnational Women's & Gender Studies

In this paper, I argue that human beings will soon achieve immortality, but that that immortality will be neither the theistic promise of resurrection of the body nor the soul. Rather, I suggest that technological immortality—the ability through pure techné to reproduce any human life ever lived—is not only possible, but inevitable. Moreover, more than a cursory survey of the biological sciences, computer technology, and fictive literature, this essay also examines the normative dimensions of this near-future reality; ought we or ought we not?

Editorial, Pushpa Parekh

Wagadu: A Journal of Transnational Women's & Gender Studies

No abstract provided.

The Rise Of Asian-Owned Businesses In Massachusetts: Data From The 2002 Economic Census Survey Of Business Owners, Michael Liu, Paul Watanabe

Institute for Asian American Studies Publications

Asian-owned businesses are following a very rapid growth trajectory in Massachusetts. In fact, Asian-owned firms increased by 44 percent in Massachusetts from 1997 to 2002. This growth is nearly double the national gain of 24 percent for all Asian-owned firms in the United States. Moreover, during the same time period, the number of all firms in the state expanded by only five percent. Similar comparisons can be made when looking at sales and receipts and number of paid employees. From 1997-2002, Asian-owned businesses in Massachusetts experienced an increase in sales and receipts of 20 percent. This was over three times …

Disability As Embodied Memory? A Question Of Identity For The Amputees Of Sierra Leone, Maria Berghs

Wagadu: A Journal of Transnational Women's & Gender Studies

This paper examines the problematic construction of amputee identity in Sierra Leone society after the decade long civil war through discourses and imagery of amputees presented in the media. Empowerment by NGO’s and other charities lead to a reaffirmation of amputee identity in which notions of class, ethnicity, and age may not play a big role, but gender certainly remains a relevant cultural marker.

Isolation And Companionship: Disability In Australian (Post) Colonial Cinema, Kathleen Ellis

Wagadu: A Journal of Transnational Women's & Gender Studies

Despite reflecting a postcolonial rethinking of identity throughout the 1990s, disability was positioned as ‘Other’ in Australian national cinema. The intersection between culture, gender, nationality, and disability is evident in films located in traditional colonial spaces (The Well, The Piano). This article concentrates on the fascination 1990s Australian filmmakers had with disabled women; otherwise strong characters who redundantly fulfill cultural expectations of femininity. A disability perspective illustrates the link between disability and sexism in Australian Cinema.

I Don’T Ask God To Move The Mountain, Just Give Me The Strength To Climb It”: Disability Stories Of Southern Rural African American Women, Aline Gubrium

Wagadu: A Journal of Transnational Women's & Gender Studies

In this article, I focus on the life stories of African-American women living in a rural community in the South, particularly on their career trajectory stories. Life in this small community leaves little to offer in terms of work, with most women working either in a clothing factory in town, in the state prison located on the outskirts of town, or working in nearby University Town as nursing assistants or custodial workers—all jobs which rely on the participants’ strenuous labor and which often result in disabilities (often related to back or hip injuries) and the participants’ consequent inability to work …

Monsters In The Closet: Biopolitics And Intersexuality, Nadia Guidotto

Wagadu: A Journal of Transnational Women's & Gender Studies

In this paper, I focus predominantly on the hermaphrodite (intersex, in modern discourse) and its relationship to other abject bodies in history to show how biopolitics creates and regulates populations of monsters in order to establish and sustain a particular structure in society. This particular structure is based on what Judith Butler has called the heterosexual matrix, which I will extend to include racial and liberal elements.

Review Of Kounandi (Film From Burkina Faso) By Apolline Traoré, Barbara Hoffman

Wagadu: A Journal of Transnational Women's & Gender Studies

No abstract provided.

Entremundos/ Among Worlds: New Perspectives On Gloria Anzaldúa Edited By Analouise Keating, Colleen Kattau

Wagadu: A Journal of Transnational Women's & Gender Studies

No abstract provided.

Cultural Rehabilitation: Hansen’S Disease, Gender And Disability In Korea, Eunjung Kim

Wagadu: A Journal of Transnational Women's & Gender Studies

This essay explores how leprosy was used to enforce cultural inferiority, which resulted in the oppression of affected people in Korea. The literature shows that images of lepers as cannibals infiltrated family lives in the communities and made institutionalization inevitable. Contemporary cultural representations depict marriage between disabled men and nondisabled women as a symbolic bridge between the segregated space of "lepers" and the "healthy." Such efforts reinforce the normative power of heterosexual marriage.

Colonial Discourses Of Disability And Normalization In Contemporary Francophone Immigrant Narratives: Bessora’S 53 Cm And Fatou Diome’S Le Ventre De ’Atlantique, Julie Nack Ngue

Wagadu: A Journal of Transnational Women's & Gender Studies

In this paper, I examine recent Francophone immigrant narratives in a disability studies framework to reveal the ways in which colonial discourses of illness and disability on the Black female body haunt contemporary discussions of immigration and integration. While these novels portray female immigrant bodies as subject to constant surveillance and examination within multiple institutions of ‘normalization,’ they also expose oppressive discourses of illness and disability in order to challenge the paradigms of normality and homogeneity which undergird French treatment of immigrants.

Vitalism: Subjectivity Exceeding Racism,Sexism And (Psychiatric) Ableism, James Overboe

Wagadu: A Journal of Transnational Women's & Gender Studies

Liberal discourse has argued against the pathology of differences that stem from being gendered or racialized. Yet, liberal discourse continues to pathologize the differences that derive from disabilities whether physical, mental, and/or developmental. This paper considers the position of a woman who is the site of the coming together of being gendered, being aboriginal, and being psychiatrized, and argues that her vitalism that has been psychiatrized benefits her subjectivity.

Gender, Disability And The Postcolonial Nexus, Pushpa Parekh

Wagadu: A Journal of Transnational Women's & Gender Studies

This study will focus on intersecting gender, disability and Postcoloniality nexus and will foreground the contributions to and interventions from gendered disability perspectives within selected postcolonial cultural works in India and the Indian diaspora, including literary works, films, performances and activism. The articulation of intersecting identity perspectives, inclusive of disability, is a significant though ignored area within Gender, Disability or Postcolonial studies. Bringing these areas together within the current modes of interdisciplinary inquiry involves crossing the boundaries of identity categories and cultural locations.

(Post)Colonising Disability, Mark Sherry

Wagadu: A Journal of Transnational Women's & Gender Studies

Disability and postcolonialism are two important, and inter-related, discourses in the social construction of the nation and those bodies deemed worthy of citizenship rights. This paper acknowledges the material dimensions of disability, impairment -and postcolonialism and its associated inequalities – but it also highlights the rhetorical connections which are commonly made between elements of postcolonialism (exile, diaspora, apartheid, slavery, and so on) and experiences of disability (deafness, psychiatric illness, blindness, etc.) The paper suggests that researchers need to be far more careful in their language around experiences of both disability and postcolonialism. Neither disability nor postcolonialism should be understood as …

"Whether Beast Or Human": The Cultural Legacies Of Dread, Locks, And Dystopia., Kevin Frank

Publications and Research

Analyzing the ongoing problem of Caribbean racial exploitation, particularly fear signified through one of the most potent Caribbean symbols, dreadlocks, Kevin Frank offers a paradigm shift in arguing that Medusa's alterity is altered by Rastafarians' snake-like hair, but the transformative power of Rasta dreadlocks is contested through certain cinematic depictions of dread.

Selected Bibliography Of Work On Canadian Ethnic Minority Writing, Steven Tötösy De Zepetnek, Asma Sayed, Domenic A. Beneventi

CLCWeb Library

No abstract provided.

Making The “Unfit, Fit”: The Rhetoric Of Mainstreaming In The World Bank’S Commitment To Gender Equality And Disability Rights, Rebecca Dingo

Wagadu: A Journal of Transnational Women's & Gender Studies

In the 1990s The World Bank president James Wolfensohn urged Bank policy- makers to consider gender in their development policies; in 2004 the Bank made a similar commitment to include people with disabilities in their programmatic plans. Examining materials from Bank archives and from “The World Bank: Disability and Development” conference in 2004, this essay demonstrates the contradictory arguments put forth by the World Bank’s gender, disability, and development programs.

Attah-Mensah, Nana, Bronx African American History Project

Oral Histories

Interviewee: Nana Atta-Mensah

Interviewer: Dr. Jane Edwards

Date of Interview: May 16, 2007

Summarized by Alice Stryker

Nana Atta-Mensah migrated to the Bronx in 1979. He was from Ghana originally, then moved to Germany for 10 years, then moved back to Ghana and from there immigrated to the United States. When he initially moved to the Bronx he was working as a gas station attendant. In 2005, however, he went back to school at Lehman College and got degrees in Accounting and African American Studies. With these degrees, he now operates a small business on Gun Hill Road.

He also …

Fearon, Shirley, Bronx African American History Project

Oral Histories

Shirley Fearon was born on July 8, 1945 in Harlem. However, she spent her early years in the South Bronx on Brook Avenue. Her parents met in Harlem and then moved to the Bronx. Shortly after she was born, her parents split up and she and her mother moved to Williamsbridge with her grandparents. This neighborhood was mostly Italians, but all the children got along well. Her grandparents lived in a private home. She and her family attended New Bedford, which is part of St. Luke’s. This church was predominately black, with both people from the Caribbean and African-Americans.

She …

Brothers Under Skin: African And African-American Relation In The Bronx, Jean-Yves Mutanda

African & African American Studies Senior Theses

This project is inspired by my experience as a child of two African immigrant parent from Kinshasa, Congo. I was raised in a household where Congolese values were held to a very high standard, and I was told that these types of values should be incorporated into my daily life as a child, a young adult and later an adult. Despite living in the United States and living in n English speaking society, I never had conversations with my parents in English and was greatly encouraged to talk to my parents in their native language of Swahili or Lingala (Congolese …

Rodriguez, Angel, Bronx African American History Project

Oral Histories

Angel Rodriguez (b. 1954) is a Puerto Rican musician, educator, historian, and grassroots cultural organizer. Born in Puerto Rico, he came to the Bronx twice: first at the age of 5, and then for good when he was 10 years old, along with his father, a Pentecostal minister, his mother, a day laborer, homemaker, and accomplished dancer, and several siblings. Angel always had a love for music, and he was especially inspired by the sound of traditional drums, which he first heard as a young boy. Initially Angel wanted to be a preacher like his father, but his father’s strict …

Williams, Veralyn, Bronx African American History Project

Oral Histories

Dr. Jane Edward interviewed Veralyn Williams on May 5, 2007. Veralyn was born in Sierra Leonie in 1985 right before war broke out in the country. Her parents thus immigrated to the United States, Harlem. After about a year of living in the Harlem, they moved to the Bronx and have lived there ever since.

Veralyn recalls a happy childhood. She lived in a multiethnic community. Though Veralyn was born in Sierra Leone, she says she is mostly connected to her American roots. Apart from the food her mother cooks and other indications of culture she experienced in her house, …

A Study Of How Four Black Newspapers Covered The U.S. Masters Tournament 1994 Through 2001., Mark James Sharman

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

The intent of this thesis is to discuss the manner in which four black newspapers covered the U.S. Masters Tournament, hosted annually at the Augusta National Golf Club, Georgia, from 1994 through 2001. The four black newspapers include two from the North, the New Pittsburgh Courier and the Chicago Defender, and two from the South, the Atlanta Voice and the Birmingham Times. It is my contention that U.S. Masters coverage in the aforementioned black papers is dependent upon the presence of Tiger Woods. Without Woods' participation at the Masters, coverage of the event would be diminished in the …

Ua12/2/1 College Heights Herald, Vol. 82, No. 51, Wku Student Affairs

WKU Administration Documents

WKU campus newspaper reporting campus, athletic and Bowling Green, Kentucky news.

Ua12/2/1 Freedom - Graduation 2007, Wku Student Affairs

WKU Administration Documents

Special commencement edition of the College Heights Herald.