Erzulíe's Skirt

Erzulíe's Skirt PDF Author: Ana-Mauríne Lara
Publisher: Redbone Press
ISBN:
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 284

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Book Description
Fiction. African American Studies. LGBT Studies. Finalist for the Lambda Literary Award in Lesbian Debut Fiction. Set in the age of urbanization in the Dominican Republic over the course of several lifetimes, ERZULIE'S SKIRT is a tale of how women and their families struggle with love, tragedy and destiny. Told from the perspectives of three women, ERZULIE'S SKIRT takes us from rural villages and sugar cane plantations to the poor neighborhoods of Santo Domingo, and through the journey by yola across the sea between the Dominican Republic and Puerto Rico. It is a compelling love story that unearths our deep ancestral connections to land, ritual and memory.

Erzulíe's Skirt

Erzulíe's Skirt PDF Author: Ana-Mauríne Lara
Publisher: Redbone Press
ISBN:
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 284

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Book Description
Fiction. African American Studies. LGBT Studies. Finalist for the Lambda Literary Award in Lesbian Debut Fiction. Set in the age of urbanization in the Dominican Republic over the course of several lifetimes, ERZULIE'S SKIRT is a tale of how women and their families struggle with love, tragedy and destiny. Told from the perspectives of three women, ERZULIE'S SKIRT takes us from rural villages and sugar cane plantations to the poor neighborhoods of Santo Domingo, and through the journey by yola across the sea between the Dominican Republic and Puerto Rico. It is a compelling love story that unearths our deep ancestral connections to land, ritual and memory.

Ezili's Mirrors

Ezili's Mirrors PDF Author: Omise'eke Natasha Tinsley
Publisher: Duke University Press
ISBN: 0822372088
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 198

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Book Description
From the dagger mistress Ezili Je Wouj and the gender-bending mermaid Lasiren to the beautiful femme queen Ezili Freda, the Ezili pantheon of Vodoun spirits represents the divine forces of love, sexuality, prosperity, pleasure, maternity, creativity, and fertility. And just as Ezili appears in different guises and characters, so too does Omise’eke Natasha Tinsley in her voice- and genre-shifting, exploratory book Ezili's Mirrors. Drawing on her background as a literary critic as well as her quest to learn the lessons of her spiritual ancestors, Tinsley theorizes black Atlantic sexuality by tracing how contemporary queer Caribbean and African American writers and performers evoke Ezili. Tinsley shows how Ezili is manifest in the work and personal lives of singers Whitney Houston and Azealia Banks, novelists Nalo Hopkinson and Ana Lara, performers MilDred Gerestant and Sharon Bridgforth, and filmmakers Anne Lescot and Laurence Magloire—none of whom identify as Vodou practitioners. In so doing, Tinsley offers a model of queer black feminist theory that creates new possibilities for decolonizing queer studies.

The Sides of the Sea

The Sides of the Sea PDF Author: Johanna X. K. Garvey
Publisher: Univ. Press of Mississippi
ISBN: 1496850726
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 158

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Book Description
In The Sides of the Sea: Caribbean Women Writing Diaspora, Johanna X. K. Garvey examines the works of contemporary writers from eight Caribbean countries, including Haiti, Trinidad and Tobago, and the Dominican Republic. Authors from Anglophone, Francophone, and Spanish-speaking countries illustrate experiences across the African Diaspora, including enslavement, colonialism, revolt, marronage, and decolonization. Characters in fiction and poetry by such writers as Erna Brodber, Jan J. Dominique, Mayra Santos-Febres, Tessa McWatt, and Dionne Brand confront trauma, engage in struggle, forge connection, and act as agents of change. Complicating categories of identification and employing multiple strategies of resistance, these Caribbean women writers show us paths out of and beyond the binaries embedded in colonialism and its aftermath. As their texts remember moments and sites of trauma beginning with the Middle Passage, they embark on new passages, claim oceanic spaces, and suggest directions that stretch beyond the Black Atlantic to a more complex understanding of how to “pull the sides of the sea together” in the twenty-first century. The Sides of the Sea is organized in three sections: “Plumbing the Depths,” which examines representations of the Middle Passage and its legacies; “Voicing the Wounds,” which explores genealogies, inherited trauma, and potential healing; “Unsettling Borders,” which discusses decolonial epistemologies, transgressive sexualities, and new visions of citizenship.

Teaching Black

Teaching Black PDF Author: Ana-Maurine Lara
Publisher: University of Pittsburgh Press
ISBN: 0822988542
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 294

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Book Description
Teaching Black: The Craft of Teaching on Black Life and Literature presents the experiences and voices of Black creative writers who are also teachers. The authors in this collection engage poetry, fiction, experimental literature, playwriting, and literary criticism. They provide historical and theoretical interventions and practical advice for teachers and students of literature and craft. Contributors work in high schools, colleges, and community settings and draw from these rich contexts in their essays. This book is an invaluable tool for teachers, practitioners, change agents, and presses. Teaching Black is for any and all who are interested in incorporating Black literature and conversations on Black literary craft into their own work.

Let Spirit Speak!

Let Spirit Speak! PDF Author: Vanessa K. Valdés
Publisher: SUNY Press
ISBN: 1438442173
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 164

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Book Description
Interdisciplinary celebration of the cultural contributions of members of the African Diaspora in the Western hemisphere.

Women Warriors of the Afro-Latina Diaspora

Women Warriors of the Afro-Latina Diaspora PDF Author: Marta Moreno Vega
Publisher: Arte Publico Press
ISBN: 155885746X
Category : Literary Collections
Languages : en
Pages : 248

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Book Description
Hers is one of eleven essays and four poems included in this volume in which Latina women of African descent share their stories. The authors included are from all over Latin America-Brazil, the Dominican Republic, Haiti, Panama, Puerto Rico, Venezuela-and the United States. They write about the African diaspora and issues such as colonialism, oppression and disenfranchisement. Diva Moreira, a Brazilian, writes that she experienced racism and humiliation at a very young age. The worst experience, she remembers, was her mother's bosses' conviction that Diva didn't need to go to school after the fourth grade, "because blacks don't need to study more than that."

Experiments in a Jazz Aesthetic

Experiments in a Jazz Aesthetic PDF Author: Omi Osun Joni L. Jones
Publisher: University of Texas Press
ISBN: 0292779720
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 392

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Book Description
In Austin, Texas, in 2002, a group of artists, activists, and academics led by performance studies scholar Omi Osun Joni L. Jones formed the Austin Project (tAP), which meets annually in order to provide a space for women of color and their allies to build relationships based on trust, creativity, and commitment to social justice by working together to write and perform work in the jazz aesthetic. Inspired by this experience, this book is both an anthology of new writing and a sourcebook for those who would like to use creative writing and performance to energize their artistic, scholarly, and activist practices. Theoretical and historical essays by Omi Osun Joni L. Jones describe and define the African American tradition of art-making known as the jazz aesthetic, and explain how her own work in this tradition inspired her to start tAP. Key artists in the tradition, from Bessie Award–winning choreographer Laurie Carlos and writer/performer Robbie McCauley to playwrights Daniel Alexander Jones and Carl Hancock Rux, worked with the women of tAP as mentors and teachers. This book brings together never-before-published, must-read materials by these nationally known artists and the transformative writing of tAP participants. A handbook for workshop leaders by Lambda Literary Award–winning writer Sharon Bridgforth, tAP's inaugural anchor artist, offers readers the tools for starting similar projects in their own communities. A full-length script of the 2005 tAP performance is an original documentation of the collaborative, breath-based, body work of the jazz aesthetic in theatre, and provides both a script for use by theatre artists and an invaluable documentation of a major transformative movement in contemporary performance.

Matria Redux

Matria Redux PDF Author: Tegan Zimmerman
Publisher: Univ. Press of Mississippi
ISBN: 1496846362
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 181

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Book Description
In Matria Redux: Caribbean Women Novelize the Past, author Tegan Zimmerman contends that there is a need for reading Caribbean women’s texts relationally. This comprehensive study argues that the writer’s turn to maternal histories constitutes the definitive feature of this transcultural and transnational genre. Through an array of Caribbean women’s historical novels published roughly between 1980 and 2010, this book formulates the theory of matria—an imagined maternal space and time—as a postcolonial-psychoanalytic feminist framework for reading fictions of maternal history written by and about Caribbean women. Tracing the development of the historical novel in four periods of the Caribbean past—slavery, colonialism, revolution, and decolonization—this study argues that a pan-Caribbean generation of women writers, of varying discursive racial(ized) realities, has depicted similar matria constructs and maternal motifs. A politicized concept, matria functions in the historical novel as a counternarrative to traditional historical and literary discourses. Through close readings of the mother/daughter plots in contemporary Caribbean women’s historical fiction, such as Andrea Levy’s The Long Song, Edwidge Danticat’s The Farming of Bones, Paule Marshall’s Praisesong for the Widow, and Marie-Elena John’s Unburnable, Matria Redux considers the concept of matria an important vehicle for postcolonial-psychoanalytic feminist literary resistance and political intervention. Matria as a psychoanalytic, postcolonial strategy therefore envisions, by returning to history, alternative feminist fictions, futures, and Caribbeans.

Island Bodies

Island Bodies PDF Author: Rosamond S. King
Publisher: University Press of Florida
ISBN: 0813048893
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 275

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Book Description
In Island Bodies, Rosamond King examines sexualities, violence, and repression in the Caribbean experience. She analyzes the sexual norms and expectations portrayed in Caribbean and diaspora literature, music, film, and popular culture to show how many individuals contest traditional roles by maneuvering within and/or trying to change their society’s binary gender systems. She skillfully argues and demonstrates that these transgressions better represent Caribbean culture than the “official” representations perpetuated by governmental elites and often codified into laws that reinforce patriarchal, heterosexual stereotypes. Unique in its breadth and its multilingual and multidisciplinary approach, Island Bodies addresses homosexuality, interracial relations, transgender people, and women’s sexual agency in Dutch, Francophone, Anglophone, and Hispanophone works of Caribbean literature. Additionally, King explores the paradoxical nature of sexuality across the region: discussing sexuality in public is often considered taboo, yet the tourism economy trades on portraying Caribbean residents as hypersexualized. Ultimately King reveals that despite the varied national specificity, differing colonial legacies, and linguistic diversity across the islands, there are striking similarities in the ways Caribglobal cultures attempt to restrict sexuality and in the ways individuals explore and transgress those boundaries.

Crossing Waters

Crossing Waters PDF Author: Marisel C. Moreno
Publisher: University of Texas Press
ISBN: 147732562X
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 421

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Book Description
2023 Honorable Mention, Isis Duarte Book Prize, Haiti/ Dominican Republic section (LASA) 2023 Winner, Gordon K. and Sybil Lewis Book Award, Caribbean Studies Association An innovative study of the artistic representations of undocumented migration within the Hispanophone Caribbean Debates over the undocumented migration of Latin Americans invariably focus on the southern US border, but most migrants never cross that arbitrary line. Instead, many travel, via water, among the Caribbean islands. The first study to examine literary and artistic representations of undocumented migration within the Hispanophone Caribbean, Crossing Waters relates a journey that remains silenced and largely unknown. Analyzing works by novelists, short-story writers, poets, and visual artists replete with references to drowning and echoes of the Middle Passage, Marisel Moreno shines a spotlight on the plight that these migrants face. In some cases, Puerto Rico takes on a new role as a stepping-stone to the continental United States and the society migrants will join there. Meanwhile the land border between Haiti and the Dominican Republic, the only terrestrial border in the Hispanophone Caribbean, emerges as a complex space within this cartography of borders. And while the Border Patrol occupies US headlines, the Coast Guard occupies the nightmares of refugees. An untold story filled with beauty, possibility, and sorrow, Crossing Waters encourages us to rethink the geography and experience of undocumented migration and the role that the Caribbean archipelago plays as a border zone.