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In The Ripple Effect: Gender and Race in Brazilian Culture and Literature, Barbosa adopts a comparative, multilayered, and interdisciplinary line of research to examine social values and cultural mores from the first decades of the twentieth century to the present. By analyzing the historical, cultural, religious, and interactive space of Brazil’s national identity, The Ripple Effect surveys expressive cultures and literary manifestations. It uses the martial art-dance-ritual capoeira as a lynchpin to disclose historical ambiguities and the negotiation of cultural and literary boundaries within the context of the ideological construct of a mestizo nation. The book also examines laws governing gender in Brazil and discusses honor killings and other types of violence against women. The Ripple Effect appraises the contributions that some iconic female figures have made to the development of Brazil’s distinctive cultural and literary production. Drawing on more than fifteen years of field, archival, and scholarly research, this work offers new interpretative venues, and broadens the critical focus and the methodological scope of previous scholarship. It reveals how literature and other arts can be used to document cultural norms, catalog life experiences, and analyze complex constructions of social values, ideas, and belief systems., https://docs.lib.purdue.edu/psrl/1009/thumbnail.jpg

Violence against women is a worldwide social problem that is far from being eradicated. Sociologists and psychologists have studied this complex issue rooted in the unbalanced distribution of power between the sexes and writers have portrayed it in their works since the Middle Ages to present. This dissertation provides a comparative study of recent representations of male violence in fictional and non-fictional works produced in different Hispanic countries. The works analyzed include: Icíar Bollaín´s film Te doy mis ojos (2003); recent documentaries such as Home Truth (2017) and Las tres muertes de Maricela Escobedo (2021); shortfilms like Disonancia (2005) and El orden de las cosas (2010); Juana Escabias´s plays Cartas de amor… después de una paliza and WhatsApp (2018); and novels like Algún amor que no mate (1996) by Dulce Chacón and Cien botellas en la pared (2003) by Ena Lucia Portela. This study explores how media and fictional works portray the interplay of psychological and social factors that contribute to the cycle of violence and victimization. Furthermore, it exposes the trope of romanticized violence, the erotization of the battered female body, and it critiques portrayals of physical or psychological cruelty that encourages readers to feel pity, horror, or even sexual attraction towards characters that suffer abuse. Finally, this dissertation includes works more interested in resistance than in capitulation, where characters immersed in victimization find new alternatives that offer different paths to autonomy within various social constraints. These works provide models for real women who need to abandon a victim and neurosis mentality and move towards agency.

The purpose of this feminist phenomenological dissertation was to explore the self-identity experiences of Afro-Caribbean women undergraduate college students. In doing so, self-identity experiences, ethnic marginalization, and counseling experiences were explored for six participants. Data was collected and analyzed using Simone De Beauvoir's feminist framework of self-discovery/ rediscovery where two semi-structured interviews were conducted for each participant. This study resulted in six individual profiles illuminating the voices of each participant as well as collective themes. Findings from this study show that Afro-Caribbean women undergraduate college students filter their self-identity experiences through their ethnicity; meaning that participants understand other pieces of their self-identity (i.e., gender and race) and self-identity as a whole through their primary social location of ethnicity. Also, the findings represent that ethnic marginalization fueled participants' push back against stereotypical and colonial narratives about the Afro-Caribbean community and having an inadequate counseling experiences affects college social and academic success. Based on the findings of this data, implications center on multicultural and intersectional training of college counselors and counselor educators; as well as implications for Afro-Caribbean women undergraduate college students. Recommendations for future research also showcases the need for larger research sample sizes, including qualitative and quantitative studies about self-identity and related subjects (i.e., self-concept, self-esteem, and ethnic identity development).

Canadian banks have been important components of an imperialist system since at least the 19th century. However, their long and rich history of operating as purely exploitative entities in the English-speaking Caribbean region is often overlooked— leading to many incomplete and conflicting narratives about Canada’s role within the global system. I argue that Canada is an imperial actor that exerts agency in supporting a Canadian banking oligopoly both within Canada and in the English-speaking Caribbean. Insufficient attention is given to these Canadian banks, especially considering the power they have wielded in the Caribbean over the centuries. By analyzing the relationship between Canadian banks and the Caribbean, this project helps compensate for a lack of attention given to the Caribbean region in international relations scholarship. The Caribbean region once informed the global political economy via the production of sugar using enslaved labor. In the present, Caribbean states provide incentives to foreign investors that maintain relationships of exploitation by foreign capital. My dissertation looks at how Canadian banks, in the context of global capitalism and structures of corporate power, have exploited their advantageous position in the Caribbean from the time of British colonialism to the present.

Through comparing the Hollywood films Arrival and The Shape of Water, this article explicates the films’ similar portrayals of gender, social collaboration, and monstrosity. Although the mainstream media in the United States has linked the idea of the monstrous to larger global forces, the two films suggest that “the monster” exists much closer to home. Hence, this article makes the case that monstrosity occurs in a variety of formulations such as the actions of national authorities like governmental officials that oppress and endanger a myriad of American citizens as well as newcomers. Further, this article makes the case that the films of Guillermo del Toro and Denis Villeneuve encourage viewers to reimagine the idea of monstrosity and its relationality to several spaces for the sake of the greater public good.

The disrupting visual and literary languages of the turn of the 19th century to the 1930’s constitute an area of research as a moment of crystallization of the Cuban national consciousness or identity. Writers and artists in Hispanic Caribbean region had to face the challenge of finding ways to include highly racialized elements (such as religion and popular culture) within the rhetorical space of the elites, in other words, what Angel Rama has labeled the "Republic of letters". The result of these efforts not only opened a new kind of negotiation of the idea of nation, but also meant the arrival of a cultural production that had to be transformed to assimilate blackness without rejecting or denouncing it. In this sense, my research tries to answer questions such as: How does the process of incorporating racialized elements of popular life in the many narratives of high culture work? What changes had an effect on the economy of literary and visual production in order to negotiate this incorporation? How did literary and visual texts create perceptions of blackness in the Cuban cultural landscape? How do representations of blackness in the nation context build transnational imaginaries and identity? In an effort to answer some of these questions, my research draws on the use of postcolonial theories applied on continental Africa to deconstruct literary and visual representations of the black presence in Cuba and Puerto Rico and trace these continuities through notions of black primitive degradation between the end of the 19th century to the first half of the 20th century. I contend that blackness in Cuba today is determined by colonial representations which persisted in the narratives of emancipation and cultural celebration. These colonial representations reflected the survival of colonial discourse and racial ideology in the Cuban popular consciousness, even when rendered invisible through postcolonial discourse. My research builds on the relations of reception and

This thesis seeks to illuminate the economic, cultural and social subjugation of Puerto Rico, and its people, through the stripping of personal and political self-determination imposed by U.S. colonization. This research explores historic examples of Puerto Rican perseverance and analyzes psychologically protective factors supporting survivorship and resilience, such as familism and ontological security. The effects of Hurricane Maria on mental health are highlighted in the research, as is the correlation between a lack of electrical power and adverse health/wellness outcomes. Models for collective liberation and social justice are discussed and exemplified through the case study of a march that took place in Boston, MA on the one-year anniversary of Hurricane Maria. The concepts of the shock doctrine and disaster capitalism are explained and connected to various historic moments in Puerto Rico, including after Hurricane Maria. Bomba and Afro-Caribbean dance/rituals are explained and connected to practices in liberation. The current absence of Bomba and Afro-Caribbean dance in the dance therapy field are used to exemplify areas of growth necessary for making dance therapy more inclusive and increase the field’s growth in cultural humility. This thesis also incorporates analysis of cultural competence and systemic oppression throughout and concludes with a call for dance therapists to be more active in advocating for social justice through their individual and clinical practice.

The range and reach of Afro-Cuban religions in the United States have been undertheorized just as their economic and intellectual contributions have been invisibilized in sociocultural production.This dissertation reexamines the key moments in the making of a sacred Cuba-U.S. history, in particular, the formative years of Espiritismo, Palo Monte, and Lukumí, with their foundations in New York and New Jersey from the Pre-Cuban Revolution period to the present. I ethnographically map these religions with particular attention paid to the Mariel Exodus and the Special Period, pivotal moments in the circulation of materials, money, ideas, and people between Cuba and the U.S., and among their intersectional spiritual communities. This work combines autoethnography, extensive qualitative fieldwork, and historiography to investigate the veiled movements [sacrotraffic] of people, money, goods, and knowledge across the distinctive timescapes of Afro-Cuban religious traditions in Cuba and the diaspora of New York and New Jersey. In this study, the concept of veiling is introduced as a model to imagine that which separates spiritual and material worlds. Veils both conceal and reveal at the same time, allowing for the relational nature of two or more dimensions to be considered, enabling spiritual connectedness within and across localized communities and their environments. Ancestor worship, initiation, possession, and divination are articulated here in what I term a “new religious ecology,” in an effort to apply even coverage to multicultural spiritual economies and routinely politicized translocal spaces, and to better situate the role of Cuban religions across time and spaceas a way to understand and interpret the complexity and relational nature of Afro-Cuban religiosity.In this manner, I present the cultural and sacred experiences of Afro-Cuban religious practitioners to reflect how their creative and entrepreneurial energies and memories impacted their experiences during e

In her article “A Sinful Reaction to Capitalist Ethics in No quiero quedarme sola y vacía (2006)” Celina Bortolotto analyzes how Lozada’s characterization of the main character, La Loca, questions the ideals of free agency offered by consumerist capitalism and the urban gay male ideal under the promise of a liberating gay lifestyle in a social context defined by identity politics. The novel is a fictionalized autobiographical account of Puerto Rican author Angel Lozada’s misadventures in the early 2000s gay scene in New York. This essay plays with the punitive sense of the word “capital” in the seven capital sins as a thematic thread to invite a reflection on the concepts of virtue and value constructed under U.S. Protestant capitalism: the former as emancipatory guilt; the latter as the specific status society grants to objects, practices and people creating, in turn, subjects whose value is purely economic versus those whose lives are deemed (morally) valuable in themselves.

In Wayuunaiki, verbal affixes cross-reference clausal arguments in various ways. Most notably, there are two ways to express transitive subjects, and two ways to express possessors. Much like voice alternatives, the variable expression of subject and possessor impart different perspectives on a situation type, but unlike traditional voice categories, syntactic valence remains equal. This dissertation characterizes these constructions with a specific question in mind: what do these two cross-referencing alternations communicate and what influences their usage? To answer these questions, I consider the linguistic properties observed in the usage of these constructions in narratives (Jusayú 1986, 1994), and informal conversations. Mosonyi (1975) describes the Subjective and Objective transitive clauses as focus alternatives. Álvarez (1993) discovered that the O in the Objective clause must be definite. Despite the association of definiteness and focus as a central factors, the usage of the alternatives in discourse has has not received enough attention. I here conclude that the Subjective variant is the pragmatically marked option, whose primary function is to defocus a 3rd person O that is typically inanimate, new and non-topical. This clause type has the effect of retaining its syntactic valency, but expresseing semantically low transitivity. Álvarez (1990) documents possessor ascension as a construction that involves unrestricted noun incorporation. Matera (2001) adds that the possessor of an incorporated noun can only assume the role of transitive object or stative subject. In the present corpus exploration, I conclude that the External Possessor construction is the functionally marked clause, whose function is primarily to defocus a possessed nominal that is typically inalienable, inanimate, and non-topical information. Additionally, whole-part relationships frequently participate in incorporation, while kinship relations do so rarely.

This dissertation explores the intellectual discourse on race in the early twentieth century, particularly from 1919 to 1958, examining how British and American eugenicists and Caribbean nationalists debated the limits of colonial politics in the British Caribbean using academic and scientific language. These discussions emerged in the aftermath of World War I, the economic crises that led to the Great Depression, the political and labor unrest in the British Caribbean, and consequences of the Second World War. The dissertation’s goal is to examine how residents of the British Caribbean understood, appropriated, and challenged some of the principles of eugenics, particularly those espousing ideas of white superiority. The dissertation has taken great consideration of both private and published sources from white and black intellectuals in the Anglophone Caribbean to document the dissemination of concepts of race, ethnicity, and identity in the region during the interwar period. Additionally, focusing on such critical areas as education and social policies, it explores whether eugenic ideas influenced the twentieth-century governance of British West Indian colonies.

The hurricane season of 2017 was a historic one, with mammoth storms making landfall one after another, in what seemed like an unrelenting assault on our coastal cities and communities. Hurricane Harvey inundated Houston, Irma plowed through Florida, and Maria devastated Puerto Rico, but one of these storms was unlike the others. Why is it that the American citizens of our southern states were able to recover so much more quickly than our citizens in Puerto Rico? In the era of climate change, we will be forced to reckon with the modern legacy of colonialism, as vulnerable communities must face the brunt of brutal environmental challenges, including more frequent and stronger storm events, increased flooding, and higher ocean and air temperatures. The events that unfolded following Hurricane Maria’s landfall allow us to examine the histories that led us to where we now stand politically, economically, and culturally with Puerto Rico, and provides an opportunity to reflect on how we may move forward in the face of an ever changing environment.

This thesis grapples with questions surrounding representation, mourning, and responsibility in relation to two literary representations of the ZONG massacre of 1781. These texts are M. NourbeSe Philip’s ZONG! and Fred D’Aguiar’s FEEDING THE GHOSTS. The only extant archival document—a record of the insurance dispute which ensued as a consequence of the massacre—does not represent the drowned as victims, nor can it represent the magnitude of the atrocity. As such, this thesis posits that the archival gaps or silences from which the captives’ voices are missing become spaces of possibility for additive representation. This thesis also examines the role voice and sound play in these literary texts and the deconstructive-ethical philosophies of Jean-Luc Nancy and Jacques Derrida. This thesis argues that these texts invoke the sonic materiality of voice in the service of responding to the disremembered dead through mourning and acknowledgment.

This dissertation addresses racism in contemporary Curaçao—a former Dutch colony in the Caribbean that remains a component of the Kingdom of The Netherlands. The dissertation theorizes racism as a partially hidden constituent of the island’s ideology of national identity, which throughout its history has emulated hybridity before being influenced, more recently, by multiculturalism. The research’s main objective is to uncover the ways race and racism have been entangled with Curaçao’s hegemonic ideology of national identity, a reality too often omitted and always under-theorized in Dutch and Dutch Caribbean scholarship. Using historical, ethnographic, statistic, and discourse analysis data, the dissertation reveals how profound the operations of race have been on Curaçaoan society, and on all Curaçaoans on the island and in the diaspora. It discusses the historical formation of ideologies of race and national identity in Curaçao, to contribute to the explanation of the current state of race relations on the island. It exposes the silencing impacts that the hegemonic ideology of national identity has had on individual Curaçaoans’ understanding of self through the reflexive presentation of an intergenerational family history. The dissertation ends with ethnographic analytic descriptions of five neighborhoods differently located in Curaçao’s racial/spatial order, which reveal the mechanizations of multiculturalism and the prevalence of racism.

During June of 2015, an anthropological and sociological study was conducted in the Dominican city of Bani. On the surface, the banilejo people appear to be devout Catholics. However, having had access to their personal lives, it was evident that their peculiar family traditions and folklore hinted at their liminal identities. This study involved interviewing 23 female subjects with questions found in the Spanish and Portuguese inquisitorial manuals. In addition, their mitochondrial DNA sequences were analyzed and demonstrated a high percentage of consanguinity and inbreeding within Bani's population. The genetic analysis of their mitochondrial DNA yielded genetic links with Jewish women from worldwide Jewish communities. Victor Turner's communitas theory and Geertz's thick description were used as the methodology. Ultimately, the sociological and anthropological analysis of their way of life evidenced how their ancestors preserved Jewish identity covertly throughout the inquisition time period (1481-1834) and how they continue to perpetuate it in contemporary times through consanguinity, and the power of superstition and taboo.

This thesis studied African-American and Caribbean fiction using models of African diasporization, creolization and womanism to discover how those theoretics affected understandings of black subjectivities. The diverse theoretics above-mentioned were examined to discover how their intersections enabled productive cross-fertilizations, notwithstanding differences. Black women's literary texts crossing diverse locations and experiences were examined. It was shown that their metadiscursivity enabled creative theorizations of creolization and African diasporization around the repeating text formulation. Their Eyes Were Watching God was analyzed as a prototypical womanist diasporic text, whose attributes were repeated and re-elaborated across various boundaries in Jane and Louisa Will Soon Come Home and No Telephone to Heaven. This study found that African diaspora womanist texts and theoretics, unbounded by location, engaged each other in conversations and contestations, affirmed kinship beyond differences and challenged various hegemonies. It concluded that the repeating text expanded parameters of black literary criticism and theory.

The Afro-Cuban Religious Complex (ARC), developed in Cuba, where the material used in their rituals was obtained trough different sources. However, the concept of a centralized store of religious goods, called bótanicas, for the ARC did not develop in Cuba alongside the religion. The reasons for the absence of these stores in Cuba until the early 1990s is explored via personal interviews with members of the ARC, participant observation, 200 questionnaires distributed in Cuba and Miami, and anchored in scholarly works about the psychology and economics of migration, as well as in those concerned with religious anthropology and sociology. Results indicate that class and religious conflicts prevented the development of bótanicas in Cuba. The absence of these factors, a free market economy, and the ARC's appeal to non-Cubans, facilitated the proliferation of bótanicas in the United States.

The purpose of this thesis is to evaluate the processes of consolidation and decomposition of the Venezuelan party system and their relation to democratic stability. Both processes are analyzed through a theoretical framework based on four conditions for institutionalization and three conditions for decomposition of a party system. Preliminary findings reveal that the Venezuelan party system became institutionalized as of 1969 but began to unravel during the 1980s. This particular order, whose legitimacy rested on the distribution of rents, solidified an arrangement that collapsed when confronted with a deteriorating economic environment combined with growing popular disenchantment stemming from its institutional inability to represent and respond to shifting demands. The thesis also concludes that current political developments do not respond to a process of institutionalization of a new party system but to the development of an inchoate system.

The purpose of this study was to examine the role of South Florida Haitian migrant radio with regard to its listeners' relations across national borders. The content of several commercials and announcements was analyzed. Different actors--especially broadcasters and Haiti's state and government officials--were found to use the medium to carry out at least one of the following instrumental processes: linking listeners across borders, deterritorialized nation-state building, transnational migrants' politics in the "host" country, and deterritorialization of the "local." The findings demonstrated that South Florida Haitian migrant radio operates in transnational social fields. It is recommended that researchers take a transnational approach to migrant media.

Although of all the Latin American states, the insular republic of Cuba has maintained the closest contact with the United States, there is nevertheless one aspect of that country's culture of which we have but little understanding. This aspect is the penetrating influence that the Negro has on Cuba's cultural development. Until recently even the white population of Cuba did not fully recognize the role that the Negro had played and is playing in its culture. Cultural traits that revealed definite Negro influence were frequently attributed to aboriginal sources, or their origin was politically ignored or treated with indifference. This pattern of behavior reminds one of Gunnar Myrdal's interesting observations of similar patterns of behavior in the deep south of the United States. Any discussion of the culture of contemporary Cuba, especially in connection with its Negro population, inevitably leads to the work of Dr. Fernando Ortiz y Fernández. He is the individual, in the writer's opinion, who has the clearest perspective of that aspect of Cuba's culture. This thesis, therefore, will deal with the life and works of Ortiz, and with some forces which seem to have influenced his intellectual development, with the intention of determining, wherever possible, his position on various topics that have created considerable interest during his lifetime.

Ian Randle, 2009