Browse

Motivated by a growing need to address questions of transnationalism, female mobility, and citizenship, this book offers an in-depth study of selective texts of Audre Lorde (Barbadian-American), Edwidge Danticat (Haitian-American), Maryse Condé (Guadeloupean-American) and Grace Nichols (Guyanese-British). The book examines transnational migration or movement not only in terms of physical journeys, but it also employs the trope of migration as resistance, as dissent. Examining the pervasive circulation of bodies, this book challenges the pathologization ascribed to black female sexuality/body, subverting its assumed definition as diseased, passive, and docile. Investigating how black female identities and sexualities circulate globally, it focuses on issues of embodiment, how women's bodies are read and seen; how bodies “perform” and are performed upon; how they challenge hierarchical constructs and disrupt normative standards. Furthermore, it depicts how female subjects not only discursively engender a parallel “migration” that disrupts and debunks hierarchical structures, but how they also engender a politics of resistance and subversion of mainstream/dominant discourse, a detour from normative categorizations and ideologies, a migration from and challenge of single, fixed, heteronormative, heterosexual definitions of self. In essence, it examines the politics and economics of migratory movements, re-examining and reconfiguring the definition of citizenship to reflect transnational movements and subjectivities, and the shifting definitions of home. The book's engagement with critical race theory, adds another layer to its uniqueness by engaging “disability” studies, albeit peripherally, as it challenges the construct of disease, wellness and able-bodiedness as configured by Western medical science.

Driven by exacting methods and hard data, this volume reveals gender dynamics within the dance world in the twenty-first century. It provides concrete evidence about how gender impacts the daily lives of dancers, choreographers, directors, educators, and students through surveys, interviews, analyses of data from institutional sources, and action research studies. Dancers, dance artists, and dance scholars from the United States, Australia, and Canada discuss equity in three areas: concert dance, the studio, and higher education. The chapters provide evidence of bias, stereotyping, and other behaviors that are often invisible to those involved, as well as to audiences. The contributors answer incisive questions about the role of gender in various aspects of the field, including physical expression and body image, classroom experiences and pedagogy, and performance and funding opportunities. The findings reveal how inequitable practices combined with societal pressures can create environments that hinder health, happiness, and success. At the same time, they highlight the individuals working to eliminate discrimination and open up new possibilities for expression and achievement in studios, choreography, performance venues, and institutions of higher education. The dance community can strive to eliminate discrimination, but first it must understand the status quo for gender in the dance world.

Dancing in Blackness: A Memoir explores a black female dancer’s personal journey over four decades across three continents and numerous countries. The author situates herself in the 1960s Black Arts Movement in the S.F. Bay Area, the dynamics of being a black woman dancing in Europe in the late 1960s, and dancing professionally in New York City in the early 1970s, while participating in racial inroads into important arts venues like Lincoln Center. She recounts friendships and collaborations with major artistic figures like Katherine Dunham, Ntozake Shange, Rod Rodgers, Diane McIntyre, Donald McKayle, Dr. Kwabena Nketia, and many others. She explores dancing in Ghana for almost a year, the inspiration for her return to the Oakland Bay Area in the late 1970s to help create the city’s black dance scene while being an adjunct dance lecturer at Stanford University. She also considers how her arts activism helped to engender more cultural equity in the arts nationally. She remembers the 1980s national multicultural arts movement and regional community dance activism, including her own national dance initiative, Black Choreographers Moving Toward the 21st Century. Finally, she ponders her self-reinvention in her 50s into a noted black studies and hip-hop scholar in academia.

Key to the New World is the first comprehensive English-language history of early colonial Cuba published in the last 100 years. It is divided into eight chapters that cover a range of topics since the island’s geological formation up to 1700, including geography; the indigenous inhabitants; first encounters between Europeans and Amerindians (otherwise known as the discovery of the New World); the conquest and colonization of Cuba; demographic realities such as race, gender, and social structure; cultural developments such as transculturation; piracy and other forms of aggression; slavery; and sugar production.

In the years since his death in 1993, Colombian drug lord Pablo Escobar has become a globally recognized symbol of crime, wealth, power, and masculinity. In this long-overdue exploration of Escobar’s impact on popular culture, Aldona Bialowas Pobutsky shows how his legacy inspired the development of narcoculture—television, music, literature, and fashion representing the drug-trafficking lifestyle—in Colombia and around the world. Pobutsky looks at the ways the “Escobar brand” surfaces in bars, restaurants, and clothing lines; in Colombia’s tourist industry; and in telenovelas, documentaries, and narco memoirs about his life, which in turn have generated popular interest in other drug traffickers such as Griselda Blanco and Miami’s “cocaine cowboys.” Pobutsky illustrates how the Colombian state strives to erase his memory while Escobar’s notoriety only continues to increase in popular culture through the transnational media. She argues that the image of Escobar is inextricably linked to Colombia’s internal tensions in the areas of cocaine politics, gender relations, class divisions, and political corruption and that his “brand” perpetuates the country’s reputation as a center of organized crime, to the dismay of the Colombian people. This book is a fascinating study of how the world perceives Colombia and how Colombia’s citizens understand their nation’s past and present.

Polygyny explores the practice of multiple-wife marriage among African American Muslims who follow the leadership of Imam W. D. Mohammed. The dominant voices in this work are those of my female informants--some who welcome polygyny, some who oppose it, others who acquiesce to it, and still others who locate their negotiating power within the practice. This book examines husband sharing as one remedy for and a demographic challenge to the absence of marriageable African American men and/or the high number of female-led households. A core feature of this work is the attention devoted to Qur’anic interpretation that posits husband sharing as a cultural struggle that good Muslim women endure for the maintenance of community life. The book promotes the exercise of agency among women and explores the contradictions and paradoxes that abound for those who share their husbands. It recognizes the pluralities of polygyny as practiced in the United States and invites readers to acknowledge realities and choices experienced by individuals who are often loathed because of them. Polygyny expands debates about the regulation and recognition of consenting adult relationships beyond questions related to same-sex marriage. It further draws attention to other ways multiple-wife marriage, coupled with a certain cultural and religious consciousness, can constrain and/or liberate women.

In recent years, site-specific dance has grown in popularity. In the wake of groundbreaking work by choreographers who left traditional performance spaces for other venues, more and more performances are cropping up, on skyscrapers, in alleyways, on trains, on the decks of aircraft carriers, and in myriad other unexpected locations worldwide. In this anthology of site-specific dance, the editors explore the work that choreographers create for non-traditional performance spaces and the thinking behind their creative choices. Combining interviews with and essays by practitioners of site dance, they look at the challenges and rewards of embracing alternative spaces. Examination of the work of artists such as Meredith Monk, Joanna Haigood, Stephan Koplowitz, Heidi Duckler, Ann Carlson, and Eiko Otake provides insights into why choreographers leave the theater to embrace the challenges of unconventional venues. The book also includes more than 80 photographs of site-specific performances, revealing how the arts, and movement in particular, can become part of and speak to our everyday lives.

Who Owns Haiti addresses a provocative and complex question, one arguably at the heart of Haitian studies and Haiti’s history. This edited volume calls into question the role of external actors in Haiti’s sovereign affairs, while highlighting the ways in which Haitians continually enact their own independence and sovereignty. Chapters consider Haiti’s sovereign roots and the contemporary encroachment on them by international actors, as well as the corresponding response, acquiescence, or resistance by Haitian institutions, including ‘sovereignty from below’ as wielded by grassroots organizations and religious ritual. Contributing authors consider how external actors and institutions have interacted historically with Haitian elites and government actors. Importantly, the volume examines parallel responses from historically marginalized urban and rural populations. The volume takes up issues long at the heart of Haitian studies and argues that otherwise disparate discussions of ownership and independence are in fact central to historical and contemporary considerations of Haiti and Haitians.