Browsing by Subject "African Diaspora"
Now showing 1 - 6 of 6
Results Per Page
Sort Options
Item The body rockers : New Orleans "Sissy” Bounce and the politics of displacement(2013-12) Chapman, Alix Andrew; Smith, Christen A., 1977-; Costa-Vargas, Joao H.; Gordon, Edmund T.; Jones, Omi Joni L.; Gill, Lyndon; Allen, Jafari S.This dissertation in an ethnographic analysis of the ways in which black cultural performance is mobilized to produce and maintain social relationships and space in times of economic and sociocultural displacement. New Orleans Bounce music is a dynamic cultural performance of locality and blackness that prompts conflicting debates about the meaning of identity, place, and cultural heritage in “post-Katrina” New Orleans. Focusing on “Sissy” Bounce, an emergent subgenre defined by sexuality and gender, I investigate its significance as an expression of blackness marked by deviance within the socio-historical context of "post-Katrina" New Orleans. Specifically, the project frames “Sissy” Bounce as a cultural medium for the production of black space in a time of crisis, and argues that Bounce's symbolic form frames "queerness" as a tool of survival for young black people facing the politics of displacement, disorientation, and disaster. The quick rise of Bounce to national popularity has made it representational of the deviant black dancing body within the national imagination. Consequently, this dissertation also asks how these dances and representations effect meanings of blackness at home and throughout the nation? What does the resonance of “Sissy” Bounce in New Orleans and among its diaspora tell us about the political significance of queerness and displacement as nodal points of the contemporary black experience in the United States? The “Sissy” Bounce music scene’s ubiquity points to the resilience of black people living on the margins of family, community, and nation.Item Outraged mothering : black women, racial violence, and the power of emotions in Rio de Janeiro’s African Diaspora(2014-08) Rocha, Luciane de Oliveira; Gordon, Edmund TayloeThis dissertation argues that Black mothering is the re-creation of Black sociability in the African Diaspora in the face of the ways in which genocide attempts to eliminate black existence. Therefore, I argue for an approach to African Diaspora as creating, nurturing, resisting, and recuperative acts as an alternative to genocidal practices, which constitutes black mothering. Concerning genocidal practices, this dissertation focuses mainly on anti-black violence, specifically male-on-male and state-sponsored violence; although with an understanding that genocide also manifests itself through many other ways. The choice to focus on male-on-male and state violence is because I understand them as being the ultimate alternative to put forward genocidal ideologies when others fail. Thus, understanding the violent killing of the black population as the most visible expression of genocide in the African Diaspora, I want to confront them with their alternative, which is the given social, cultural, and biological significance of motherhood, i.e., to generate and nurture life. Therefore, my ethnographic project explores Black mothers’ experiences of violence in Rio de Janeiro’s poorest areas. Their struggle to survive encompasses not only their own fight against poverty, racism, patriarchy, and gender discrimination but also entails the consequences of violent acts perpetrated or facilitated by the state upon their families. Engaging with the analytical concept of Outraged Mothering, this dissertation builds bridges between African Diaspora Studies and the Anthropology of Emotions by applying a Black Feminist perspective in order to perceive Black mothers’ social-political insertion in society as well as their pedagogies of resistance. My research methods include participant observation, semi-structured interviews, oral histories, and documentary photography conducted in an extended period of seventeen months of fieldwork research between 2011 and 2012. This project embraces activism as a learning experience in the collaboration with the mothers in struggle, and employs auto-ethnography as a way to think critically through the researcher’s emotions while conducting and writing the project. This project aims to enhance developing literature on Black motherhood in Brazil and explores Black lives in the African Diaspora through an analytical framework that presents emotion as a catalytic stimulus for the rise of radical political projects.Item Research (ing/in) state genocide : toward an activist and Black diasporic feminist approach(2010-05) Rocha, Luciane de Oliveira; Gordon, Edmund Tayloe; Hale, Charles R.Homicide deaths are a common reality in Brazil. Every year, approximately 50,000 people die from this violent crime. Between January 2009 and February 2010, 7,936 people were killed just on the state of Rio de Janeiro. Of this amount, 1,185 were committed by the police, not including the number of disappeared people in this state, came up to 6,379. This report seeks to address the political and analytical challenges of understanding and redressing the negative impacts of state policies and everyday practices, especially violence, on Black Brazilians, particularly disadvantaged Black women, through a revision of relevant scholarship. I first draw attention to three distinct approaches of violence of the state of Rio de Janeiro, and on Black people’s resistance practice. Second, I connect Rio de Janeiro’s practices of state violence with contemporary and historical experiences of racial terror in the African Diaspora through policing Black youth and Black communities, imprisonment, and violence against Black women. And finally, I theorize on the relevance of my work to Black feminism, African Diaspora, and activist theories addressing the politics of fieldwork and the impact of the research on that experience. The knowledge apprehended through this report contributes to my own and further research on state violence against Black people in Brazil and throughout the African Diaspora.Item The Prancing J-Settes: Race, Gender, and Class Politics and the Movements of Black Women in the African Diaspora(2013-07-03) Wicks, AmberFor years Black women?s subjectivity in the use of their bodies and movements has been overshadowed or completely erased by dominant hegemonic systems that created its own narrative of Black women, their bodies, and their movement. This thesis works to acknowledge and analyze the dialogic relationship among the narratives of Black women, Black women?s performances of their ?theories of the flesh? through dance as well as their everyday activities, and the race, gender, and class conditions that inform said ?theories of the flesh.? During football season, everyone in the African-American community of Jackson, Mississippi is looking at and talking about the dance company, the Prancing JSettes. There are audience members who critique their movements and costumes and there are those who view the group as a vital part of the community. Either way every audience member is captivated by the J-Settes because their cultural history is depicted by the women?s performance. How does this work? How is the Prancing J-Sette image constructed and by whom, and why and how does it persist? These are the questions I ask to examine the gender, class, and racial relations that are inscribed upon the movements of Black women in the African Diaspora. For a group whose African ancestors viewed dance as very spiritual, with such activities as the ring shout, it is interesting to note the ambivalence that surrounds the public dancing body in Jackson, Mississippi. While some Jacksonians view the female body in the public sphere with a Protestant Christian lens, they also enjoy the Africana aesthetics and aggressive energy of the J-Settes? performances. Also, while the J-Settes buck their society?s hegemonic system of propriety, they also comply with some of these standards in their performance. I examine this ambivalence through the discourses of critical race theory, Black feminism, the social significance of African Diaspora dance conventions and HBCUs, and the classed, racial, and gendered power relations in the African Diaspora. I argue that the stories about the Prancing J-Settes can be expanded to present a genealogy and present state of contradictory values and issues of visibility affecting all Black women.Item To defend this sunrise : race, place, and Creole women's political subjectivity on the Caribbean coast of Nicaragua(2012-08) Morris, Courtney Desiree; Gordon, Edmund Tayloe; Hale, Charles R.; Visweswaran, Kamala; Hooker, Juliet; Siu, LokThis dissertation explores how spatial processes of race shape Afro-Nicaraguan women’s political subjectivity, activist practice, and lived experience by studying their community-based organizing in the Caribbean coastal city of Bluefields, Nicaragua. Specifically, it analyzes the political responses they are developing to address the devastating impacts of neoliberal economic reform, gendered state violence, structural racism and the politics of gender justice that have emerged from their participation in place-based struggles for racial and regional justice. My dissertation research brings together critical race theory, Latin American social movements, African Diasporic feminisms, and the critical interventions of cultural and political geography to study Creole women’s community activism. I suggest that Creole women’s participation in what Harcourt and Escobar (2005) term the “politics of place” reflects the ways in which larger processes of anti-Black racism, gender subordination, and economic inequality have historically been and continue to be articulated through the idiom of place. I demonstrate how the politics of place shapes local, regional, and national histories of race and alterity and informs Creole women’s political practice and vision in ways that differ markedly from the mainstream women’s and feminist movements in Nicaragua. Through their place-based activism and focus on regional struggles that seem to be separate from an explicit feminist politics, Creole women have brought greater attention to the particularly gendered ways in which processes of state violence, structural adjustment, and economic exclusion impact their communities. Their political participation is concentrated around several key areas: urban land conflicts; women’s work in the regional and national economy; and the struggle for racial justice and full citizenship in Nicaragua. Through their participation in these social movements, Afro-Nicaraguan women are gendering and reshaping local and national struggles for racial equality. I argue that this model of community and place-based activism suggests that scholars of Latin American and Caribbean women’s social movements might more fruitfully analyze these movements not by searching for the ideal feminist subject or narrowly defining the terms of feminist politics but rather by understanding how women’s engagement in the politics of place creates space for them to interrogate intersecting processes of racial, gender, and economic subordination.Item White lies : the White epistemology of race and Blackness in a White upper class school(2013-05) Reed, Naomi Beth; Franklin, Maria; Pierre, JemimaDuring eighteen months of ethnographic fieldwork in the suburbs of southwest Houston, Texas I examined the ways in which White upper class students, teachers, administrators, and parents think about race. As a result of exploring racial language, racial discourse, and racial texts in two US history textbooks, classroom lectures and activities, students' conversations and interviews, and local parents' political organizing, I explored the ways in which White people often think about, construct, and employ race. More specifically I learned the ways in which the White elite residents of this particular suburb know race. I am calling their way of knowing race a "White epistemology of race." I demonstrate how this White epistemology of race has informed, shaped, and guided this particular White community's attitudes toward their own education and residential resources as well as the education and residential resources of their Black and Brown intra-district peers. This dissertation aims to theorize the White epistemology of race and show it to be the unyielding source of a White "redemptive" ideology that is supported and created by the deployment of certain racialized discourses that insist and depend upon representations of Black cultural pathology.