Master of Arts in English, Cleveland State University, 2021, College of Liberal Arts and Social Sciences

While scholars who investigate the works of African diasporic authors Edwidge Danticat, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, and Claudia Rankine acknowledge the importance between form and audience in their works, critics have either yet to fully recognize how and/or for what purpose each author implements specific techniques. Paying close attention to what I propose are formal affective strategies in Danticat's Everything Inside, Adichie's The Thing Around Your Neck, and Rankine's Citizen: An American Lyric, allows us to see how each author infuses experimental forms that are strategically bound to how their future readers will react to their texts with the hope that these reactions will prove more socially and politically moving than just moving—as in readers simply turning the page. Black diasporic women authors, including Danticat, Adichie, and Rankine, destabilize traditional literary paradigms and invent new formal affective strategies in their works. Upon closer consideration, these strategies not only help expose the continuous exclusivity of the American Dream and contemporary problems associated with the enduring patriarchal hegemony, but by engaging the audience with commonly felt affects, reconfigure future possibilities for intersectional solidarity through the very conflicts and difficulties their writings explore and formally embody.

Committee: Julie Burrell Ph.D. (Committee Chair); Frederick Karem Ph.D. (Committee Member); Melanie Gagich Ph.D. (Committee Member) Subjects: African American Studies; African Literature; American Literature; Black Studies; Caribbean Literature; Gender; Literature; Modern Literature; Rhetoric; Womens Studies

MFIS, Kent State University, 2020, College of the Arts / School of Fashion

Afrofuturism is a cultural and aesthetic movement within the African Diaspora that draws on the present and historical experiences of Black people and reimagines a future filtered through a Black cultural lens. There has been a growing number of fashion creatives and enthusiasts throughout the African Diaspora who are adopting this aesthetic in order to celebrate Black culture and identity. However, the role of Africa in Afrofuturism continues to be debated as many believe the term to be inherently centered on Black American experiences and cultures and not necessarily on the African experience. The purpose of this research is to explore the connection between Afrofuturism, fashion, and cultural identity in the African Diaspora. A qualitative approach using interviews and an arts-based creative online collage exercise was used to uncover the role and signification of cultural identity in the Afrofuturistic expressions of West Africans in Africa, West Africans living in America (Diasporic Africans) and African Americans. Because fashion has been likened to a form of symbolic language, this study also aims to uncover the “codes” involved in each group's communication of their cultural identities. Through the data gathered, a 3- look capsule collection was created to represent a visual summary of the views of each group on Afrofuturistic fashion expressions.

Committee: Tameka Ellington Ph.D. (Committee Chair); Linda Ohrn-McDaniel MFA (Advisor); Kendra Lapolla MFA (Committee Member); Felix Kumah-Abiwu Ph.D. (Committee Member) Subjects: Aesthetics; African American Studies; African Americans; African Studies; American Studies; Art Education; Black Studies; Communication; Curriculum Development; Design; Divinity; Ecology; Education; Educational Theory; Fine Arts; Gender Studies; Health; Individual and Family Studies; Instructional Design; Marketing; Mass Communications; Mass Media; Mental Health; Minority and Ethnic Groups; Modern History; Multicultural Education; Music; Pedagogy; Performing Arts; Personality Psychology; Philosophy; Psychology; Religion; Sub Saharan Africa Studies; Textile Research

Master of Arts in English, Cleveland State University, 2019, College of Liberal Arts and Social Sciences

ABSTRACT …A-Minor is an one-act play that examines the relationship between a Black artist and the predominantly white society and industry he must assimilate into in order to be considered a success. The main character Jacque Bonnet is used as a vessel to interpret the life and career of Joseph Bologne Chevalier de St. George. Despite Bonnet and Bologne being from different eras (Bologne mid to late 1700's, Bonnet Mid 1800's) I used Bonnet as a device to investigate the lesser explored life of Bologne. By creating a meta-gothic world for Jacque Bonnet to exist in, the crowd can watch his mental decay in real time. This play relies heavily on pace and aesthetic. A minimalist set with several props and original music will assist in the telling of the story. This play is heavily influenced by Suzan Lori-Parks' Topdog/Underdog and Picasso's Harlequin with a Violin and has to be told through a gothic lens with Victorian tendencies. These are the fears of the Black artist learning to assimilate. This is a problem that spreads beyond the history of America. There have long been Complaints of the field of medieval studies being too white and failing to pay attention to the African Diaspora that populated much of Europe between the year 500 and 1500. Joseph Bologne has been long forgotten in the annals of European history. The romanticized version of a continent that is rarely challenged. …A-Monor serves as a revisioning of one, Joseph Bologne's life using a fictional character. The white world that surrounds Jacque represents the smothering of a black artist in a white dominated market. In the end this play serves as a loose interpretation of how history, specifically of the African Diaspora can be consumed and forgotten about by a mass white elite. The aristocracy controls Jacque's work just as much as the majority white corporate hands control today's art and entertainment market. Keeping to the tradition of the downtrodden black artist, the historical set (open full item for complete abstract)

Committee: Michael Geither (Committee Chair); Karem Jeff (Committee Member); Plum Hilary (Committee Member) Subjects: African Americans; History; Music; Theater

Doctor of Philosophy, University of Akron, 2017, History

During the antebellum era, black activists organized themselves into insurgent networks, with the goal of achieving political and racial equality for all black inhabitants of the United States. The Negro Convention Movement, herein referred to as the Black Convention Movement, functioned on state and national levels, as the chief black insurgent network. As radical black rights groups continue to rise in the contemporary era, it is necessary to mine the historical origins that influence these bodies, and provide contexts for understanding their social critiques. This dissertation centers on the agency of the participants, and reveals a black insurgent network seeking its own narrative of liberation through tactics and rhetorical weapons. This study follows in the footing of Dr. Howard Holman Bell, who produced bodies of work detailing the antebellum Negro conventions published in the 1950s and 1960s. Additionally, this work inserts itself into the historiography of black radicals, protest movements, and racial debates of antebellum America, arguing for a successful interpretation of black insurgent action. Class, race, gender, religion, and politics, all combine within this study as potent framing devices. Together, the elements within this effort, illustrates the Black Convention Movement as the era's premier activist organization that inadvertently pushed the American nation toward civil war, and the destruction of institutionalized slavery.

Committee: Walter Hixson Ph.D. (Advisor); Elizabeth Mancke Ph.D. (Committee Member); Zachery Williams Ph.D. (Committee Member); Kevin Kern Ph.D. (Committee Member); Daniel Coffey Ph.D. (Committee Member) Subjects: African American Studies; African Americans; American History; Black History; Black Studies; Gender; History; Journalism; Minority and Ethnic Groups; Religion

Ph.D., Antioch University, 2017, Leadership and Change

The purpose of this study is to examine the lived experiences of 18 African American women who went to Kenya, East Africa as part of a Cultural Reconnection delegation. A qualitative narrative inquiry method was used for data collection. This was an optimal approach to honoring the authentic voices of African American women. Eighteen African American women shared their stories, revelations, feelings and thoughts on reconnecting in their ancestral homeland of Africa. The literature discussed includes diasporic returns as a subject of study, barriers to the return including the causes of historic trauma, and how Black women as culture bearers have practiced overcoming these barriers by returning to the ancestral homeland. The data revealed that Cultural Reconnection delegations created an enhanced sense of purpose and a greater understanding of their roots and themselves. Participants further experienced a need to give back, participated in womanism, and gained a greater spiritual connection to their ancestors. Stereotypes and myths were dispelled. Leadership skills were improved. Participants gained a clear vision of the next step in their personal lives, an overall greater understanding of themselves. This dissertation offers significant insights into the nature and benefit of ancestral returns, and the cultural components of leadership and change, especially for diasporas who were involuntarily stolen from their native lands. The electronic version of this dissertation is available in open access at AURA, Antioch University Repository and Archive, http://aura.antioch.edu/ , and OhioLINK ETD Center, http://etd.ohiolink.edu

Committee: Philomena Essed Ph.D. (Committee Chair); Laura Morgan Roberts Ph.D. (Committee Member); W. Joye Hardiman Ph.D. (Committee Member); Filomina Steady Ph.D. (Other) Subjects: Adult Education; African American Studies; African Studies; American Studies; Black History; Black Studies; Educational Leadership; Multicultural Education; Sociology; Womens Studies

Master of Arts (MA), Ohio University, 2017, Art History (Fine Arts)

African Village in America is an expanded altar to God. It is the result of a vision from God, and its intended use is to spread the message of God's glory and righteousness, and portray the sins of the world. While Joe Minter's work shares characteristics of other art environments, yard shows, and African diaspora art and folk, self-taught and outsider art, it is distinct in its own right. Minter is a performer and his work is a performance that is inseparable from its environment of Birmingham, Alabama, and a commentary on civil injustice and Christian morality.

Committee: Jennie Klein (Advisor) Subjects: Art History

PHD, Kent State University, 2016, College of Arts and Sciences / Department of English

With an increased interest in the literature of the African Diaspora, scholars have concurrently begun to call upon theories of transnationalism. This joint emphasis has created a critical discussion of the significance of global studies in examinations of modern black identity. One aspect that remains unexamined is the impetus for transnational transition that arises at the crossroads of race and self-identity. This dissertation addresses this gap through the concept of liminality, which refers to an in-between state characterized by marginalization and figurative homelessness. The presence of a perpetual liminality frequently leads to geographical relocation, often transnational in nature, as liminal subjects attempt to discover a place where their self-identity will not result in compromise or tragedy. The Harlem Renaissance presents a microcosm wherein writers frequently traveled internationally and incorporated these dynamics and themes in their literature. The theory of transnational liminality thereby provides a critical lens for underscoring the significance and necessity of a global understanding of the Harlem Renaissance—specifically the fictional and autobiographical writings of Claude McKay, Nella Larsen, Jessie Redmon Fauset, and Langston Hughes. These texts demonstrate the intellectuals' irrevocable challenge of racist milieus of the early twentieth century. Therefore, Harlem Renaissance writers and their protagonists looked to a transnational world in their quest for self-identity and home. In a similar vein, liminality is central to the study of Black Transnationalism in the twenty-first century, as contemporary writings of the African Diaspora continue to use international travel as an essential tool highlighting disillusionment in modernity's ability to eradicate racism and the ubiquitous quest for home. The lens of transnational liminality offers a cultural theory capable of illuminating and addressing these recurring concerns.

Committee: Babacar M'Baye (Advisor) Subjects: African American Studies; American Literature; Black Studies; Ethnic Studies; Literature

Master of Music, Youngstown State University, 2010, Dana School of Music

The purpose of this thesis is to examine and explain the importance and the use of the partido alto rhythm in Brazilian popular music, particularly Aquarela Do Brasil by Joao Bosco. The thesis will briefly discuss the beginning of partido alto as a genre, as well as the rhythm itself. The study will reveal the ways partido alto is realized on Brazilian traditional instruments such as cuica, tamborim, and agogo. Modern usage on Western instruments such as guitar, bass guitar, drumset, and piano will also be covered. A section of the Brazilian classic, Aquarela Do Brasil by Ary Barroso, as played by guitarist/singer/composer Joao Bosco. The transcription includes a comparison between the bass notes, chords, and sung notes. Ultimately, the paper will show that the partido alto rhythm is used as a rhythmic basis in the context of Brazilian popular music.

Committee: Kent Engelhardt PhD (Advisor); Dave Morgan DMA (Committee Member); Glenn Schaft DMA (Committee Member) Subjects: Latin American History; Music; Music Education

Doctor of Philosophy, The Ohio State University, 2012, History

In the 1970s and 1980s, African Americans and Black Britons placed community activism at the center of their work. Understanding their communities as imperiled or neglected, they directed their efforts towards exposing and dismantling institutional racism in State agencies. This project considers Black activism around educational inequalities, police harassment, and health care to demonstrate various expressions of Black community activism. Because of the focus on local and national communities, activists participated in an expression of a politics of care, which placed the survival of Black families, children and communities, writ large, as the center of a socio-political platform. Connected to expressions of familial responsibilities, care, and love, activists saw their work on behalf of other Black people as central to the maintenance of Black communities locally, nationally, and sometimes globally.

Committee: Leslie Alexander (Advisor); Judy Wu (Committee Member); Tiyi Morris (Committee Member) Subjects: African American Studies; African Americans; American History; Black History; Black Studies; Womens Studies

Doctor of Philosophy, The Ohio State University, 2006, English

This manuscript comparatively examines the production of speculative fiction by black women writers from Brazil, Jamaica, the United States and Canada. Examination of each text reveals the way in which black female subjectivity, African-based spiritual epistemology, and African diasporic spaces converge to create multiply liminal discourses, which are the counterhegemonic articulations of black agency—particularly through the use of African spiritual paradigms—in envisioning liberated futures. Multiply liminal discourse as an interpretive frame establishes the shared position of black female liminality and African epistemological frames of reference while remaining attendant to the particulars of difference generated by varied historical developments in African diasporic spaces. The examinations of the works within this text, utilizing multiply liminal discourse as an interpretive methodology, reveal the potential for enactment of “strategic essentialism” toward an integrated theoretical and practical liberatory discourse and politics. This occurs within the texts through reclaiming agency for black womanhood and black romantic relationships in Aline Franca's A Mulher de Aleduma; embracing African heritage particularly through one of the most demonized cultural legacies, African spirituality, in Erna Brodber's Louisiana and Nalo Hopkinson's Brown Girl in the Ring; and the expansive and inclusive vision of liberation ideology that embraces difference and change through Octavia Butler's Parable of the Sower and Parable of the Talents. This manuscript concludes by discussing the integration of ideology and activism through multiply liminal discourse, the ways in which speculative fiction enables that integration and ultimate implications for black liberation.

Committee: Valerie Lee (Advisor) Subjects:

MA, Kent State University, 2010, College of the Arts / School of Music, Hugh A. Glauser

Black Gospel and Southern Gospel quartet singing expresses the soul of Christian experience in America, but in ways that reference the distinct cultural and musical heritages of their respective communities. This thesis uses the semiological method demonstrated by Kofi Agawu to identify musical features for analysis from the Black Gospel and Southern Gospel quartet styles. The cultural-factor approach proposed by Joseph H. Kwabena Nketia is applied to key musical features to reveal the uniqueness of African-American and Euro-American communities in four key aspects: musical behavior, the contexts for music making, the perceptions of musicians in the two communities, and the cultural frame of reference that gives rise to the two musical styles. The conclusion of this study is that Black Gospel quartet music is unique because “improvisation” is organized according to the principles of Ensemble Thematic Cycle (ETC) as defined by Meki Nzewi. ETC form in Black Gospel expresses interconnectedness in the community. Southern Gospel quartet music is unique because improvisation is organized according to the principles of tonal harmony as suggested by Douglas Harrison. Improvisation in tonal harmony present in Southern Gospel quartet music expresses self-determinism of the individual.

Committee: Kazadi wa Mukuna PhD (Advisor); Linda B. Walker PhD (Committee Member); Mr. Chas Baker (Committee Member) Subjects: African American Studies; African Americans; African Studies; American Studies; Cultural Anthropology; Ethnic Studies; European Studies; Folklore; Music; Performing Arts; Philosophy; Religious History

Master of Arts (MA), Bowling Green State University, 2024, History

This ethnographic study is situated at the confluence of the enduring scholarly discourse on Black retention or loss of their African culture and identity resulting from their enslavement and slavery. Thus, this thesis identifies and explores the manifestations of Africanisms among Black Americans regarding their cultural resilience, retention, and adaptation. With the case study of Oyotunji in South Carolina, an African (Yoruba) village in America, this thesis underscores how Black people reclaimed their identity by invoking, appropriating and preserving their African cultural traditions and values through the agency of spiritualism and the adoption and veneration of the Yoruba gods. Besides, Oyotunji was a product of Black cultural protests and the search for authentic identity and nationalism in the aftermath of the Civil Rights Movement. The study is significant in highlighting Oyotunji's place in fostering the connection and genuine immersion of African Americans to their African ancestral roots while navigating the complexities of identity rediscovery in the Americas

Committee: Apollos Nwauwa Ph.D (Committee Chair); Nicole Jackson Ph.D (Committee Member) Subjects: African American Studies; African Americans; African History; African Studies; Black Studies; History

Doctor of Philosophy (PhD), Ohio University, 2020, Mass Communication (Communication)

This dissertation analyzes the ways Eritrean migrants adapted PalTalk chatrooms as venues for political deliberation, activism, and peacebuilding. By relating to annihilated traditional and modern civic spheres in the country, I explore how diaspora Eritreans build dynamic communities of solidarity and engage in counter activities against their government. Primarily using in-depth interviews and archival analysis, I have documented some milestone achievements this online community was able to accomplish in the period between 2000 and 2016, identifying breaking the spiral of silence in the diaspora, mobilizing protests, and consolidating clear political opinions. I also examine the role of Eritrean PalTalk chatrooms in building peace and deterring violence in relation to the overarching question about the role of new media in building peace. By focusing on a popular PalTalk chatroom called Smer, I identify the promotion of non-violent struggle, peace education, and truth sharing as important communicative exercises that can serve as examples that new media can contribute positively for peace and national healing. I also underscore how a sense of enervation with war and violence has inclined many Eritreans to pursue a negative peace that aspires the end of militarized governance and forced conscription.

Committee: Steve Howard Prof. (Advisor); Wolfgand Suetzl Dr. (Committee Member); Devika Chawla Prof. (Committee Member); Ghirmai Negash Prof. (Committee Member) Subjects: Mass Communications

Master of Music (MM), Bowling Green State University, 2018, Music Ethnomusicology

The Afro-Brazilian martial art of capoeira has become an increasingly popular sport in the United States. Capoeira performances consist of a back-and-forth exchange of movements between two players in conjunction with a musical ensemble to accompany the physical display. Since the introduction of capoeira in the United States in the 1970s, capoeira has become the focus of various social institutions. The objective of this thesis is to acknowledge and problematize the impact American culture has made on capoeira aesthetics. The methods for this thesis included research in the fields of ethnomusicology, anthropology, post-colonial theory, and transatlantic studies. Fieldwork was conducted to acquire first hand accounts of capoeira practitioners from the Michigan Center for Capoeira. Lastly, an analysis of the portrayal of capoeira in the media examines how capoeira is showcased to audiences in the United States. Historical accounts, academic discourse, capoeira practitioners, and popular culture reveal how American culture has received capoeira. My research has shown that capoeira culture is represented and interpreted by various groups, such as scholars, American capoeira academies, and the media. These different interpretations have resulted in the displacement, fragmentation, or misrepresentation of capoeira history in the context of American culture. I conclude that dominant social structures have inherently changed how capoeira is discussed in academia, practiced in American academies, and portrayed in the media. Dominant social structures in the United States favor product over process. For capoeira, valuing product over process means highlighting performance and devaluing various Afro-diasporic rituals and practices. My solution to avoid fragmentation and misinterpretation of capoeira culture is to reiterate the importance of the African diaspora to practicing capoeira students in the United States. Acknowled (open full item for complete abstract)

Committee: Kara Attrep (Advisor); Megan Rancier (Committee Member) Subjects: African Studies; Dance; Ethnic Studies; History; Latin American History; Latin American Studies; Music; Music Education

Doctor of Philosophy, Case Western Reserve University, 2018, Musicology

In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Cleveland, Ohio became an increasingly important destination for European immigrants and African American migrants from the rural South. The blossoming industrial metropolis promised newcomers job opportunities, upward social and economic mobility, and a thriving arts culture. By 1920, the city was checkered with ethnic neighborhoods that tempered local and national assimilation efforts with vibrant cultural institutions, including parochial schools, churches, ethnic newspapers, and sites of entertainment. For new arrivals, the music and drama of neighborhood theaters aided in their negotiation of individual, communal, and national identities at a time when assimilatory pressures were increasingly prevalent. In this dissertation, I examine Cleveland's diasporic music theater traditions— namely German, Yiddish, African American, and Slovenian—and their connection to issues of ethnicity and immigration. As a diverse, multi-ethnic city, Cleveland hosted a variety of theatrical traditions, but these four stand out due to their ties to prominent communities in the city and their rise in popularity in the early twentieth century. Surveying the commercial culture of these groups, their texts and practices, I offer evidence of how the theater constructed, represented, and reflected the identities of its audience. As I argue, the theater afforded immigrants and migrants the opportunity to witness and even participate in the construction of an ethnic-American identity. While the ethnic groups I study used the theater as a way to celebrate, preserve, and instruct—and, of course, entertain—they each navigated issues of identity in unique ways. For Slovenians facing the disappearance of their homeland after the 1918 formation of Yugoslavia, they sought to maintain cultural distinctiveness; peasant Jews from Eastern Europe worked to adopt American customs and adapt to their new urban environment; African Americans in the (open full item for complete abstract)

Committee: Daniel Goldmark (Committee Chair); Georgia Cowart (Committee Member); Susan McClary (Committee Member); John Grabowski (Committee Member) Subjects: African American Studies; American Studies; Black Studies; Ethnic Studies; History; Judaic Studies; Music; Slavic Studies; Theater History; Theater Studies

Doctor of Philosophy (Ph.D.), Bowling Green State University, 2017, American Culture Studies

This study examines the community-based political work of the pionero generation of Puerto Rican migrants to New York City from their collective naturalization under the Jones Act in 1917 to 1948, when political changes on the island changed migration flows to North America. Through discourse analysis of media narratives in black, white mainstream, and Spanish-language newspapers, as well as an examination of histories of Puerto Rican and allied activism in Harlem, I analyze how Puerto Ricans of this era utilized and articulated their own citizenship- both as a formal legal status and as a broader sense of belonging. By viewing this political work through the perspectives of a range of Harlem political actors, I offer new insights as to how the overlapping and interconnected multicultural communities in Harlem contributed to New York's status (in the words of historian Juan Flores) as a "diaspora city." I argue that as Puerto Ricans came to constitute a greater social force in the city, dominant narratives within their discursive and political work shifted from a search for recognition by the rest of society to a demand for empowerment from the bottom up and emanating from the Puerto Rican community outward, leading to a diasporic consciousness which encompassed both the quotidian problems of life in the diaspora and the political and economic issues of the island. A localized process of community-building bound diaspora Puerto Ricans more closely together and re-constituted internal social connections, supported an analysis of social problems shared with other Latinx people and African Americans, and utilized ideological solidarities to encourage coalitional politics as a means for mutual empowerment. In drawing Puerto Ricans into a broad and rich history of Harlem, I consider the insights of a range of neighborhood individuals and groups, including African American and West Indian (im)migrants, allied white populations such as progressive Italians and pacif (open full item for complete abstract)

Committee: Susana Peña Dr. (Advisor); Lara Lengel Dr. (Other); Vibha Bhalla Dr. (Committee Member); Nicole Jackson Dr. (Committee Member) Subjects: African American Studies; African Americans; American History; American Studies; Black History; Black Studies; Ethnic Studies; Hispanic American Studies; Hispanic Americans; History; Latin American History; Minority and Ethnic Groups; Sociology

Doctor of Philosophy, The Ohio State University, 2017, Spanish and Portuguese

This dissertation studies black confraternities and their festive practices in the early modern Iberian Atlantic, from the fifteenth to the eighteenth century, through the analysis of lesser-known texts from Spain, Portugal, Mexico, and Brazil. I argue that early modern black subjects availed themselves of confraternities in order not only to ameliorate their enslaved and marginalized condition and build community, but, more importantly, to preserve and adapt their African celebratory and life rituals. Focusing primarily on sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Mexico and eighteenth-century Brazil, I trace continuity and change as I compare festive practices throughout the common cultural space of the Iberian Atlantic. This study shows how blacks used confraternities and festive practices to exert agency in the early modern Iberian Atlantic. While agency has been traditionally associated with resistance, this dissertation shows that it took other, more subtle forms. Thus, what may be seen as conforming to domination—forming confraternities and participating in public festivals, which often celebrated Iberian hegemony—this dissertation reads as means of exerting agency.

Committee: Lisa Voigt (Advisor); Ignacio Corona (Advisor); Lucia Costigan (Committee Member) Subjects: Ethnic Studies; Latin American Literature; Latin American Studies; Literature; Modern Literature

Ph.D., Antioch University, 2017, Antioch New England: Environmental Studies

This research explores intentional food practices and journeys of consciousness in a network of people in The Bahamas. Intentional food practices are defined as interactions with food chosen for particular purposes, while journeys of consciousness are cumulative successions of events that people associate with healing, restoration, and decolonization personally and collectively. This research examines (1) experiences and moments that influenced people's intentional food practices; (2) food practices that people enact daily; and (3) how people's intentional food practices connect to broader spiritual, philosophical, and ideological perspectives guiding their lives. The theoretical framework emerges from a specific lineage of theories and philosophies of hybridity, diaspora, creolization, poetics, critique, and aesthetics from the Caribbean. The research explores how intentional food practices reflect expressions of emerging foodways and identities in the Caribbean and joins them with the history of consciousness and intentional food practices in African and Caribbean diasporas. Ethnographic research methods, poetic analysis, and constant comparative analysis provided a foundation for an exploratory approach grounded in the realities of everyday lives. A purposeful snowball sample of twenty-seven (27) in-depth semi-structured interviews provided a primary method of data collection, supported by personal journals, field notes, and document review. No food security research has been published that explores intentional food practices in The Bahamas generally or on the island of New Providence specifically. Key findings suggest a broad variation in people's intentional practices. The intentions underlying these practices reflect desires for individual and collective healing, restoration, and decolonization in their daily lives. By exploring their food practices, interviewees express how they find restoration and healing through visceral experiences with their bodies.

Committee: Elizabeth McCann Ph.D. (Committee Chair); Jean Kayira Ph.D. (Committee Member); Selima Hauber Ph.D. (Committee Member); Jean Amaral (Committee Member) Subjects: Caribbean Studies; Environmental Studies; Ethnic Studies; Philosophy; Sustainability

Doctor of Philosophy (Ph.D.), Bowling Green State University, 2016, English (Rhetoric and Writing) PhD

In my project, "Towards a Cultural Rhetorics Approach to Caribbean Rhetoric: African Guyanese Women from the Village of Buxton Transforming Oral History,"I build a Cultural Rhetorics approach by listening to the stories of a group of African Guyanese women from the village of Buxton (Buxtonians). I obtained these stories from engaging in a long-term oral history research project where I understand my participants to be invested in telling their stories to teach the current and future generations of Buxtonians. I build this approach by using a collaborative and communal methodology of asking Wah De Story Seh? This methodology provides a framework for understanding the women's strategies in history-making as distinctively Caribbean rhetoric. It is crucial for my project to mark these women's strategies as Caribbean rhetoric because they negotiate their oral histories and identities by consciously and unconsciously connecting to an African ancestral heritage of formerly enslaved Africans in Guyana. In my project, I enact story as methodology to understand how the rhetorical strategies of the Buxtonian women make oral histories and by so doing, I examine the relationship between rhetoric, knowledge, and power.

Committee: Andrea Riley-Mukavetz Ph.D (Advisor); Sue Carter Wood Ph.D (Committee Member); Lee Nickoson Ph.D (Committee Member); Alberto Gonzalez Ph.D (Committee Member) Subjects: African Studies; Black History; Black Studies; Caribbean Literature; Caribbean Studies; Composition; Cultural Anthropology; Gender Studies; History; Literacy; Pedagogy

PhD, University of Cincinnati, 2015, Arts and Sciences: Germanic Languages and Literature

While the Afro-/Black German population in the Federal Republic of Germany continues to seek national recognition, the volume and diversity of their cultural output has begun to receive its own international attention. This dissertation is an interdisciplinary study that assesses the multiplicity of the discursive constructions and performances of the imagined, yet real concept of Heimat in Black German cultural productions. These productions introduce a decolonization of the culturally and politically laden, as well as hegemonically and heteronormatively conceived, exclusionary space of (German) Heimat. In studying these re-imaginings and reconfigurations and the performative acts that constitute them in select Black German political and aesthetic works, I contend that Heimat is not only performed in resistance to a singularly imagined German origin and space of whiteness, but is also revealed to be a more vital construct than other forms of imagined communities. Black Germans, while rooted by their German cultural inheritance, simultaneously traverse the borders of the bounded German nation and interact on a global scale in the realm/s of the transnational Black diaspora. Heimat encompasses elements of both of these imagined communities; yet, it still can be distinguished from them. Persisting through contradictions, the plural Heimat/en of Black Germans become geographically situated, but also internalized (non-)spaces/places that are simultaneously individual and collective (corporeal in both senses of the `body'), voluntary and involuntary, inclusive and exclusive, local, national, and transnational, and dangerous and safe.

Committee: Tanja Nusser Ph.D. (Committee Chair); Tina Marie Campt Ph.D. (Committee Member); Jana Braziel Ph.D. (Committee Member); Katharina Gerstenberger Ph.D. (Committee Member); Harold Herzog Ph.D. (Committee Member) Subjects: Germanic Literature