Browsing by Subject "African diaspora"

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The balance of souls : self-making and mental wellness in the lives of ageing black women in Brazil
(2010-05) Henery, Celeste Sian; Vargas, João Helion Costa; Gordon, Edmund T.; Ali, Kamran; Visweswaran, Kamala; Cvetkovich, Ann
The dissertation explores new understandings about the uses of emotional work in the social struggles of racialized people. This project is a case study that analyzes how a singing group of ageing black women organized to improve the mental wellness of women in a low-income, peripheral neighborhood of the city of Belo Horizonte. This grassroots effort was a response to the women’s use of anti-anxiety medication, specifically Valium, and an attempt to attend to the women’s ongoing issues not addressed through the use of pharmaceuticals. The dissertation examines these women’s self-making as a critical window into how the embodied experiences of the interlocking forces of race, class, gender, age and place of residence are lived in the demanding material and psychological conditions of these women’s lives and the nature of the group’s healing work in their life narratives. Through considering these women’s self-making in discourses of madness, geographic landscapes of memory, musicality and performance, the dissertation investigates how the psycho-emotional transformations of these women illuminate the types of therapeutic work beneficial to anti-racist, sexist and age diversified modes of being and collective mobilization in the current social context of Brazil’s re-democratization. It also considers the group’s re-conceptualization of blackness and mental wellness as exemplary of and contributing to the personal and social work of black women’s struggle and praxis. The research methodology includes participant observation, interviews (structured and un-structured), oral histories, documentary photography and archival research conducted during an extended period (sixteen months) of fieldwork in Brazil.
Black Brazilian female dancer-choreographer-educators : creating alternative axes of action in the African diaspora
(2019-09-17) Oliveira, Agatha Silvia Nogueira e; Jones, Omi Osun Joni L., 1955; Rossen, Rebecca; Gutierrez, Laura; Anderson, Charles; Afolabi, Omoniyi
This dissertation examines the potential of black women dancer-choreographer-educators to re-imagine their artistic, cultural, and sociopolitical identities in the African diaspora. By introducing the concept of alternative axes of action as spatial longitudinal oblique lines established slightly outside of a mainstream vertical axis where bodily balance and motion - and sociopolitical actions - are often assumed to be performed, I argue that black women in the African diaspora have continuously faced systemic "pushes" off of this mainstream vertical "center-line" which expose them to what M. Jacqui Alexander calls the "nodes of instability." I contend that by playing with this instability in corporeal and sociopolitical dimensions, black women are developing the ability to find balance in motion and creating alternatives for their actions. By looking at Rosangela Silvestre's and Edileusa Santos's choreographies, methodologies, and participation in the history of dance - with especial emphasis on their travel and exchange between Brazil and the U.S. - I identify alternative movement languages, ways of performing Brazil, and ways of continuing to forge a black dance diaspora.
Black is the new Black : defining Afro-German Blackness through the influence of American media
(2022-05-09) Daniels, Alessandra T.; Fulk, Kirkland A.; Ibarrola, Mary E
Due to the lack of Black representation in Germany for Afro-Germans, many have turned to media from the United States to relate to and understand their identities. Using hip-hop, radio, and podcasts, Afro-Germans have expressed how they relate to both their Germanness and their Blackness unapologetically declaring where they come from and conferring with other Afro-Germans in a communal space about their experiences as Black people in Germany. In the 1980s, these kinds of conversations were often done in literary circles, however, from the 1990s and into the 21ˢᵗ century, oral media made the stories of Afro-Germans available to a wider audience. In this paper, I argue that American forms of media such as hip-hop, Black radio, and podcasts have influenced Afro-Germans to create their own media in a space where their narratives are not often heard. Hip-hop created by Afro-Germans specifically emphasizes how their identity is perceived in German society while radio that incorporates Afro-German experiences has connected their stories to that of the wider African diaspora. The connection to the United States through radio allows for a collective Black consciousness amongst diasporans and gives Afro-Germans the opportunity to explore how they relate to their nation and their heritage. In these discussions amongst people of African descent in both the United States and Germany, the theme of Afrocentrism is a core component of seeking out one’s heritage. Through the establishment of their own podcasts, Afro-Germans have created media to broadcast their intimate experiences of rediscovering their Black identities while growing up in a Eurocentric society. Ample research on the influence of American hip-hop and rap culture in Germany exists, and with my research, I expand the scope further to look specifically at how Afro-Germans discuss their identities with African Americans via radio and with each other through the art of podcasting. By creating their own media and touching on topics representing their community, Afro-Germans define how they wish to be seen by the rest of German society.
Constructing Afro-Cuban womanhood : race, gender, and citizenship in Republican-era Cuba, 1902-1958
(2011-08) Brunson, Takkara Keosha; Guridy, Frank Andre; Garfield, Seth; Gill, Tiffany; Arroyo, Jossianna; Smith, Cherise
This dissertation explores continuities and transformations in the construction of Afro-Cuban womanhood in Cuba between 1902 and 1958. A dynamic and evolving process, the construction of Afro-Cuban womanhood encompassed the formal and informal practices that multiple individuals—from lawmakers and professionals to intellectuals and activists to workers and their families—established and challenged through public debates and personal interactions in order to negotiate evolving systems of power. The dissertation argues that Afro-Cuban women were integral to the formation of a modern Cuban identity. Studies of pre-revolutionary Cuba dichotomize race and gender in their analyses of citizenship and national identity formation. As such, they devote insufficient attention to the role of Afro-Cuban women in engendering social transformations. The dissertation’s chapters—on patriarchal discourses of racial progress, photographic representations, la mujer negra (the black woman), and feminist, communist, and labor movements—probe how patriarchy and assumptions of black racial inferiority simultaneously informed discourses of citizenship within a society that sought to project itself as a white masculine nation. Additionally, the dissertation examines how Afro-Cuban women’s writings and social activism shaped legal reforms, perceptions of cubanidad (Cuban identity), and Afro-Cuban community formation. The study utilizes a variety of sources: organizational records, letters from women to politicians, photographic representations, periodicals, literature, and labor and education statistics. Engaging the fields of Latin American history, African diaspora studies, gender studies, and visual culture studies, the dissertation maintains that an intersectional analysis of race, gender, and nation is integral to developing a nuanced understanding of the pre-revolutionary era.
Diasporic dialogues in Black concert dance : racial politics, dance history, and aesthetics
(2014-05) Oliveira, Agatha Silvia Nogueira e; Jones, Omi Osun Joni L., 1955-
This report examines diasporic dialogues in Black concert dance focusing on dialogues between Brazil and the United States and analyzes how racial politics and cultural exchanges contributed to shape a Black aesthetic in Brazil. Since the beginning of the 20th century, both the presence/passage of US Black dancers/choreographers in Brazil and the presence/passage of Brazilian Black dancers/choreographers in the United States enabled the formation of socio-political networks among artists and cultural cross-fertilization between these countries. Katherine Dunham’s visit in Brazil and Mercedes Batista’s visit in the United States during the 1950s were formative of a Brazilian black concert dance and had left a lasting imprint in black modern dance in the U.S. as well. This report attempts a close reading of the dialogues between Dunham and Batista that shaped the dance techniques and repertoire that make up black modern and postmodern dance in the African diaspora.
Framing Afrodescendants in a country "donde no hay negros” : a critical analysis of the 2010 Argentine census survey of African descent
(2013-05) Jensen, Katherine Christine; Auyero, Javier
In 2010, for the first time since 1895, the Argentine census asked those living within its national territory if they were of African descent. While the inclusion of this question followed broader regional shifts to integrate questions on race and ethnicity into national censuses, this historic disjuncture is most astounding in Argentina. No country in Latin America has more successfully constructed itself as a nation donde no hay negros, where there are no blacks, than Argentina. Through a frame analysis of digital texts produced in Argentina between 2010 and 2012 regarding the new census question, this Master's thesis uncovers how government, media and Afro organizational actors understood the meaning of Afrodescendant and the purposes of the census question. As such, this research seeks to expand research on the African diaspora in the Americas by analyzing how racial politics of identification work in a nation-state of hegemonic whiteness.
Groundings in anti-racism : racist violence and the 'War-on-Terror' in East London
(2011-05) Ambikaipaker, Mohan; Vargas, João Helion Costa; Rudrappa, Sharmila; Foley, Douglas E.; Gordon, Edmund T.; Carrington, Ben
The interlocked social struggles waged by overlapping and diverse Britons of color for racial and social equality and everyday survival is the dynamic corollary of the contradictions engendered by the ruling relations of racial differentiation and racism in Britain. Grassroots struggles against routine racist violence and state violence, conceptualized as politically interlinked, are the critical sites that contribute to the recursive racial domination experienced by Britons of color in contemporary Britain, and forms the key ethnographic research focus of this study. Prior studies have already critiqued the dominant state framework of viewing racist violence as random, de-racialized and nonpolitical events – as individual incidents, neighborhood disputes, inter-personal conflict, and robberies gone wrong. These studies have alternately identified the social dehumanizing functions of racist violence, the possessive local white territorialism that they materially support and their relationship with macro-level socio-economic crises and changing racial exclusion ideologies of the liberal democratic nation. What I add to these studies is the argument that the racial subordination and ruling relations inherent in the social processes of racist violence and, by formal extension, state violence are not only derivative of broader ideological forces or local social relations but are in fact constitutive of white racial state formation in Britain’s postcolonial era. I argue that the processes of racist violence and state violence are productive of the domination and hierarchy that is secured for whites, through unevenly empowered and routinized contestations within the re-configurations of white racial state formation and an emergent neoliberal-multicultural national security state. It is within this framework of analysis that the politics of black mobilization by Britons of color and their allies, in the context of contemporary multiculturalism’s contradictions, and against the many-sided form of racial subordination is made legible -- not as an anachronism -- but as socially meaningful, interlocked and politically urgent.
The impotent toolkit : challenges and limitations of co-design for societal value in Southeast Louisiana's landscapes of African American dispossession
(2015-05) McDowell, Robin Boeun; Lee, Gloria; Tang, Eric, 1974-; Lewis, Randolph
This report details a reflexive practice that lies in the emerging field of co-design for societal value. This territory marks a move from user participation to equal empowerment of stakeholders--that is, designers, users, and other project constituents defining objectives and working through design processes together via a shared vision for more just and sustainable ways of living. The body of design work examined in this report is a combination of traditional products of graphic design, participatory design methods, and ethnography. Initiated around a physically demolished and institutionally repressed history of enslaved Africans in St. Charles Parish, Louisiana, the value of this work is not found in formal qualities of designed objects or in a groundbreaking process model, but in detailed documentation of consistent reflection on the role of the designer as outsider. This broadened analysis offers an expansion of the repertoire of co-design case studies.
(Re)framing resistance and (re)forging solidarity : negotiating the politics of space, race, and gender in Maria Magdalena Campos-Pons’ Habla La Madre
(2016-05) Townsend, Phillip A.; Smith, Cherise, 1969; Chambers, Edward
This study provides one of the first examinations of Habla La Madre, a 2014 performance by Afro-Cuban artist Maria Magdalena Campos-Pons launched in the Guggenheim Museum. The performance stems from practices that resulted in the marginalization and exclusion of artists of color from hegemonic cultural institutions such as the Guggenheim. Habla La Madre concerns itself with the politics of identity in its desire to function as a tool for (re)building African Diasporic solidarity. The project looks at historical, cultural, religious, and mythological texts in order to investigate Habla La Madre as a manifestation of Campos-Pons’ hybridized “exilic,” “female,” “African,” and “Cuban” identities. (Re)Framing Resistance and (Re)Forging Solidarity: Negotiating the Politics of Space, Race, and Gender in Maria Magdalena Campos-Pons’ Habla La Madre situates the performance in a history of public performative acts of resistance enacted by enslaved Africans, Afro-Cubans, and African American communities which is a primary goal of this study. The project pays close attention to Habla La Madre as it intersects with the politics of space. A critical objective of this study is to understand the sociopolitical implications of Campos-Pons’ acts of spatial transformation and spatial appropriation around and within the museum. The project also looks at Campos-Pons’ introduction of Santería into the Guggenheim as an attempt at its institutionalization. A history of African and African Diasporic altar production structures an investigation into Campos-Pons’ construction of an altar within the Guggenheim. As a performance that challenges discriminatory practices of art institutions, Habla La Madre situates itself within the genre of institutional critique. The project highlights its consistencies, deviations, and contributions to the field. This research also draws upon conversations with the artist to determine the extent to which her peers have influenced the production and goals of Habla La Madre. Most prior research on Campos-Pons focuses on her practice as mourning; however, this project focuses on the cultural diffusion and celebration the performance brings about.
Reconciling Black geographies : the nature of African American archaeology in Texas
(2012-05) Scott, Jannie Nicole; Franklin, Maria; McDavid, Carol
This report is an assessment of archaeological research conducted on sites related to African American history that have been examined within the state of Texas. The research conducted had four broad research goals. The first goal was to understand the nature of African American archaeology in Texas. The second goal was to compare African American archaeology as practiced in the state of Texas to that of the wider discipline of African American archaeology as practiced within academia. The third goal was to integrate data of historic sites that have an African American component to assess sites within the state that hold archaeological promise. Finally, the fourth goal was to compare and contrast between the common types of historic and archaeological sites related to the life and history of Black Texans in order to assess gaps in the archaeological understanding of African American life and history.
Refashioning Blackness, Refashioning Our Histories
(LLILAS Benson Latin American Studies and Collections, 2013) Zamora, Omaris
Reimagined family ties : redressing memory through photography in the work of Castiel Vitorino Brasileiro, Aline Motta and Juliana dos Santos
(2022-08-12) Fernandez, Maria Emilia, M.A.; Nelson, Adele
This thesis investigates the work of Castiel Vitorino Brasileiro, Aline Motta and Juliana dos Santos, three contemporary Brazilian artists who are proposing different ways of looking at the past while also addressing the interlocking forms of oppression at work in the present. Through their collaborations with relatives and ancestors, in which photography plays a crucial role, the artists reflect on the colonial trauma of over three centuries of genocide, slavery and colonization in Brazil. However, I argue that they go beyond that, proposing a way of reimagining frameworks of kinship as a form of redress. By articulating new lines of descent that constitute a (re)membering of those fragmented narratives that remain in the archives, I contend that the artists are addressing present structural, everyday racism while also performing and expanding the possibilities of inhabiting the future. In establishing a relation between their artistic practices, this thesis analyzes the ways they appeal to personal and collective memories brought to the foreground in family photographic records to conceive paths towards repairing, or at least naming, the wounds inflicted by the forms of class, gender and race violence that continue to plague the country. Moreover, this text reveals how their works invite a rearrangement of our perception of time and contribute to a critique of linear temporality, evincing the falseness of any narrative of the past as single, stable and flowing in only one direction. My research is guided by questions such as: How can photography serve as a medium of fabulation and of imagining family ties across time and space? If photographs help constitute a family’s affective archive, how can these intergenerational dialogues become a form of thinking about the future and inventing new lines of filiation? Furthermore, how can these gestures signal the way, if not toward healing, towards an ever-incomplete practice of redress?
The subject domain in Cabo-Verdean Creole : combining variationist sociolinguistics and formal approaches
(2019-12-09) Rodríguez-Riccelli, Adrian; Sessarego, Sandro; Toribio, Almeida Jacqueline; Nishida, Chiyo; Hinrichs, Lars; Quint, Nicolas
This dissertation explores Subject Pronoun Expression (SPE) in Cabo-Verdean Creole (CVC), a Portuguese-based language spoken in the Republic of Cabo Verde. The CVC subject domain has at least three types of nominative anaphora: a subject clitic, a null subject, and a double-subject construction. This study is the first to examine the distribution of these subject categories by combining a quantitative methodology with formal syntactic theory, as well as insights from functionalist, usage-based, cognitive linguistic, and typological approaches. In so doing, it offers a new perspective on this issue that is intended to move the field past protracted theoretical debates over the morphosyntactic status and discursive functions of these grammatical elements. For instance, the formal category underlying subject clitics has been contested in CVC and cross-linguistically; some have claimed that they are independent pronouns that cliticize at the phonological level (Déprez 1994; De Cat 2005; Costa & Pratas 2013), others have identified them as inflectional affixes in the VP layer (DeGraff 1993; Baptista 1995; Culbertson 2010), while in language typology they are analyzed as ‘person markers’ that can engage in local grammatical agreement or nonlocal anaphoric agreement (Bresnan & Mchombo 1987; Zribi-Hertz & Diagne 2002; Siewierska 2004; Creissels 2005; Kari 2017). Sociolinguistic interviews and picture description narratives were collected from native speakers of CVC from the islands of Santiago and Maio. Sampled speech was transcribed prosodically (Chafe 1993; Du Bois et al. 1993; Torres Cacoullos & Travis 2019) in order to evaluate several aspects of discourse organization. Data were submitted to descriptive and inferential inspection in four analyses using R (R Core Team 2019): one was an exploratory test that served to delimit the variable context for SPE in CVC, the second involved a fixed-effects multinomial logistic regression, and the third and fourth were based on mixed-effects binomial logistic regressions. Results revealed highly significant effects for linguistic structural priming: double-subject and singleton tonic pronouns primed subsequent double-subjects, while null subjects primed additional null subjects. Lexical Determiner Phrase (DP) antecedents that were semantically referentially deficient (i.e. they bore inanimate, indefinite, or nonspecific reference) also promoted anaphoric zeros. These results lend partial support to the claims regarding the semantic properties of strong pronominals proposed under the Typology of Structural Deficiency (Cardinaletti & Starke 1994, 1999), and suggest that, as in Brazilian Portuguese, there is an “avoid referentially deficient pronoun” constraint (Kato & Duarte 2003, 2005; Duarte & Soares da Silva 2016) that is probabilistically active in CVC. The zero-to-zero priming effect and the favoring effect from referentially deficient lexical DPs were only active at short anaphoric distances, and were promoted when adjacent intonational units were prosodically linked or simultaneously prosodically and syntactically linked (Torres Cacoullos & Travis 2019). The priming effect for double-subjects obtained at longer anaphoric distances; they are promoted when their antecedent is in a non-adjacent clause. Results suggest that double-subjects function as switch-reference devices, can establish contrastive focus, and reintroduce old discourse referents. These are much the same functional and discursive values that singleton tonic pronouns have cross-linguistically (Givón 1976; 2001[1984]; 2017). The realization of zero subjects is mostly contingent on antecedent accessibility (Givón 1976; 2017, Ariel 1990), but is also modulated by the aforementioned “avoid referentially deficient pronoun” constraint. Inferring from the results for zero and double-subjects, it appears that CVC subject clitics are ‘ambiguous person agreement markers’ (Bresnan & Mchombo 1987; Siewierska 2004): like independent pronouns, they engage in nonlocal anaphoric agreement, but like inflectional affixes, they also engage in local grammatical agreement. This in-between morphosyntactic status is related to the infinitival origin of CVC verbs (Quint 2008b): the absence of bound person-number inflection is likely to have initiated grammaticalization on tonic pronouns, causing them to be eroded into subject clitics, and eventually become ambiguous person agreement markers, which are probabilistically dropped according to the properties of their controllers and the dynamics of antecedent accessibility. In line with Wratil’s (2011) ‘Null Subject Cycle’, it could be argued that CVC subject clitics are grammatical elements that have stagnated at an early stage of a grammaticalization cline, which entails the transformation of independent pronouns into clitics, and then eventually into bound affixes. Sociolinguistic interviews and picture description narratives were collected from native speakers of CVC from the islands of Santiago and Maio. Sampled speech was transcribed prosodically (Chafe 1993; Du Bois et al. 1993; Torres Cacoullos & Travis 2019) in order to evaluate several aspects of discourse organization. Data were submitted to descriptive and inferential inspection in four analyses using R (R Core Team 2019): one was an exploratory test that served to delimit the variable context for SPE in CVC, the second involved a fixed-effects multinomial logistic regression, and the third and fourth were based on mixed-effects binomial logistic regressions. Results revealed highly significant effects for linguistic structural priming: double-subject and singleton tonic pronouns primed subsequent double-subjects, while null subjects primed additional null subjects. Lexical Determiner Phrase (DP) antecedents that were semantically referentially deficient (i.e. they bore inanimate, indefinite, or nonspecific reference) also promoted anaphoric zeros. These results lend partial support to the claims regarding the semantic properties of strong pronominals proposed under the Typology of Structural Deficiency (Cardinaletti & Starke 1994, 1999), and suggest that, as in Brazilian Portuguese, there is an “avoid referentially deficient pronoun” constraint (Kato & Duarte 2003, 2005; Duarte & Soares da Silva 2016) that is probabilistically active in CVC. The zero-to-zero priming effect and the favoring effect from referentially deficient lexical DPs were only active at short anaphoric distances, and were promoted when adjacent intonational units were prosodically linked or simultaneously prosodically and syntactically linked (Torres Cacoullos & Travis 2019). The priming effect for double-subjects obtained at longer anaphoric distances; they are promoted when their antecedent is in a non-adjacent clause. Results suggest that double-subjects function as switch-reference devices, can establish contrastive focus, and reintroduce old discourse referents. These are much the same functional and discursive values that singleton tonic pronouns have cross-linguistically (Givón 1976; 2001[1984]; 2017). The realization of zero subjects is mostly contingent on antecedent accessibility (Givón 1976; 2017, Ariel 1990), but is also modulated by the aforementioned “avoid referentially deficient pronoun” constraint. Inferring from the results for zero and double-subjects, it appears that CVC subject clitics are ‘ambiguous person agreement markers’ (Bresnan & Mchombo 1987; Siewierska 2004): like independent pronouns, they engage in nonlocal anaphoric agreement, but like inflectional affixes, they also engage in local grammatical agreement. This in-between morphosyntactic status is related to the infinitival origin of CVC verbs (Quint 2008b): the absence of bound person-number inflection is likely to have initiated grammaticalization on tonic pronouns, causing them to be eroded into subject clitics, and eventually become ambiguous person agreement markers, which are probabilistically dropped according to the properties of their controllers and the dynamics of antecedent accessibility. In line with Wratil’s (2011) ‘Null Subject Cycle’, it could be argued that CVC subject clitics are grammatical elements that have stagnated at an early stage of a grammaticalization cline, which entails the transformation of independent pronouns into clitics, and then eventually into bound affixes.
Three bozals : an exploration of possibility
(2014-05) Flewellen, Ayana Aisha; Berry, Daina Ramey; Franklin, Maria
In Gargi Bhattacharyya’s text, Tales of Dark-Skinned Women: Race, Gender and Global Culture, she explores how dominant ways of knowing and understanding the world are based on Western epistemologies that attach value and truth to what is seen without recognizing the violence that this type of knowledge production directs onto brown and black bodies, in particular dark-skinned women. She demonstrates how story-telling has been used throughout time by black and white people to theorize the world around them, particularly offering a critique to the ways black female bodies are ill configured in white Western imaginations. In this article, I pull from Bhattacharyya’s theory on story-telling as a means of counter-history and place it in conversation with Saidiya Hartman’s Venus in Two Acts, where she discusses a methodology to counter archival violence through a blending of the imaginative and the historical. In what follows I critique Daniel Schafer’s text Anna Madigine Jai Kingsley: African Princess, Florida Slave, Plantation Slaveowner, by interrogating the language and framework used to construct a biography of Anna Kingsley. I then present my own tale of dark-skinned women as an imaginative counter-history to Schafer’s text, which blurs understandings of truth, collapses time and dances with the ethereal to present a story outside of the truncated narrative Schafer provides. My tale of dark-skinned women, a creative piece, Three Bozals, is my attempt at imagining possibility in impossible spaces.
Umbanda's relationship with the natural environment & religious intolerance
(2021-05-07) Costa Kott, Alex; Crosson, J. Brent (Jonathan Brent)
This work explores one of Brazil’s most important syncretic religion, Umbanda. The first chapter focuses on how Umbanda and umbandistas relate and interact with the natural environment in its various forms. One of the main themes of this section is the importance of the orixás for the religion’s relationship with nature. This chapter also explores: plant taxonomy in Umbanda, Umbanda’s National Sanctuary in the city of Santo André (SP), the establishment Umbanda’s Magna Carta in 2013, the appearance of political-partisan movements for African derived religions in Brazil, the use of sacred food offerings in Umbanda, and how Brazil’s process of urbanization has impacted how umbandistas interact with nature in midst of the Anthropocene. The second chapter explores how religious intolerance has been manifesting against indigenous and African religiosity. The first section of the chapter focuses on the history of how Catholicism has demonized indigenous and African spirituality. This chapter also explores: the Kingdom of Kongo’s process of Catholicization, the establishment of Zélio de Morães’ Tenda Espírita Nossa Senhora da Piedade in Cachoeiras de Macacu, Rio de Janeiro, and also the spread of religious intolerance through evangelization, televangelism, Kardecian Spiritism and Eurocentrism.
Unsettling Ideas about Africa and Blackness: Contemplating Race and Belonging in the Dominican Republic
(LLILAS Benson Latin American Studies and Collections, 2016) Romain, Jheison
Visions of Liberian modernism
(2022-05-06) Knuckles, Nectar; Okediji, Moyosore B. (Moyosore Benjamin)
Liberia is a site of the African diaspora, and yet cultural nationalism cultivated in dignity for the mobility and breadth of African heritage has never emerged in the republic. From its founding days, Liberia has been the home of sixteen indigenous groups, as well as three groups belonging to Africa’s diaspora: African Americans, repatriated Africans, and Afro-Caribbeans. Though Black Atlantic exchanges between Liberia’s diasporic groups could have produced a complex modern art movement in the country in the nineteenth century, African American pioneers were detrimentally resistant to encouraging the assimilation of Liberia’s cultures. Liberian leadership—which has primarily been held by those of African American descent—has consistently remained resistant to acknowledging the country’s various ethnic groups with equity and pride. This resistance is rooted in African American settler colonialism’s encouragement of a modernity in Liberia that oriented Blackness around whiteness, rather than as a quality intrinsic to being of African descent. As a result, Liberia’s ethnic groups have existed within a caste system that has deterred access to a cultural nationalism that makes use of cultural development in Liberia as a tool to build the nation and mobilize a Liberian modernism that articulates the various expressions of African heritage. While the conditions that often produce artistic modernism—notably multicultural exchanges—have always been present in Liberia, these conditions alone, without being united through cultural nationalism, did not compel the emergence of Liberian modernism in the nineteenth or twentieth centuries. The historic fragility of cultural nationalism in Liberia has in recent decades been detrimental to the country’s visual landscape and has continued to deprive the practices of Liberian artists with the support necessary to establish Liberian modernism in the country. Although Liberian modernism has yet to form, its qualities have been envisioned. This thesis determines how this vision has shifted over Liberia’s history, and how Liberian modernism might finally begin to materialize in the post-war country.
Yoruba Day Celebration
(2016-01) Chambers, Eddie; Doroba, Mark (photographer)
Currently on display in the periodicals section on the 3rd floor, the FAL is proud to present a celebration of the University of Texas at Austin’s annual Yoruba Day, hosted during the Spring Semester by the John L. Warfield Center for African & African American Studies. The exhibit was curated by Eddie Chambers, Associate Professor in Art History here at UT. The Yoruba people are an ethnic group of Nigeria, including the Southwestern region of the country, and other parts of West Africa. The Yoruba people are one of the largest ethnic groups in Africa, and Yoruba culture has had a profound impact on the nature of the African Diaspora, in different parts of the world. The British Empire controlled vast swathes of the continent of Africa, and in West Africa, the country that became known as Nigeria was, until Independence, one of the largest of Britain’s colonies. The name Nigeria was taken from the Niger River running through the country, and was said to have been coined in the late 19th century by British journalist Flora Shaw, who later married Baron Frederick Lugard, a British colonial administrator, whose career included being Governor-General of Nigeria, 1914–1919. This display shows something of the range of materials relating to the Yoruba peoples, and the history of Nigeria. It ranges from various published histories of Nigeria, including several written for children, through to various publications and items related to Yoruba art and culture. Beyond the materials in this display, a great many publications exist, including a number written by professors at the University of Texas at Austin. Where material in this display is available in the libraries at the University of Texas at Austin. photos and design by Mark Doroba
Young, gifted and Black : journey through/to a PhD in white-ass Austin, Texas
(2017-05) De Oliveira Pereira, Amanda Caroline; Arroyo, Jossianna
Young, “Gifted” and Black: Journey To a PhD in Whiteopia is a “Biomythical”¹ play that focuses on daily experiences in the life of a Black Brazilian woman named Semente. Semente is a 23-year-old pursuing a PhD in Black Studies at The University of Whiteopia (UW). New to this strange land and institution, Semente recounts her experiences of moving through spaces that perpetuate and create new forms of systematic oppression as a person marked as “object” and “abject”. Depicting moments of both subjugation² and fugitivity³. YGB provides a glimpse into the everyday realities and “colored contradictions” of Black life in the wake of the “new-neo-liberal” landscape of late and post-Obama hipster-gentrified US cities. This play deals with issues of gender, sexuality, race, migration, capitalism and many other themes that emerge from a Euroheteropatriarchial society.