Stitching time: artisanal collaboration and slow fashion in post-disaster Haiti

The promotion of the textile and garment industries as a development strategy following the 2010 earthquake in Haiti and a US-backed return to garment assembly lines has prompted an interrogation of some of the local impacts of transnational manufacturing practices in this context. This essay seeks to evaluate alternative fashion practices and social enterprises in Haiti that are currently challenging and disassembling the contemporary forms of slavery predominant in offshore low-wage garment manufacturing. These slower “ethical fashion” cooperatives integrate traditional Haitian skills and cultural konesans (knowledge) with international design languages and market savoir-faire to produce unique handcrafted pieces for the global fashion market. Yet, as this paper argues, these collaborations reveal ongoing neo-colonial inequalities that side-line Haitian agency. Their uneven modes of production and marketing strategies often involve short-term interventions by Western fashion designers that undermine Haitian expertise. This examination of artisan “development” therefore seeks to situate these enterprises in a longer history of sustainability in Haiti, and considers how stitching cloth in response to disaster can retrace the stories of loss and survival of communities and mediate cultural knowledge

Bordering on (In)visibility: The Mobility and Containment of Haitian Migrant Women in the Dominican Republic's Linea Noroeste

203 p.Thesis (Ph.D.)--University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, 2009.This research sterns from twelve months of ethnographic research with Haitian migrant women who reside in Batey Sol, a former sugar-company labor camp located along the Linea Noroeste (northwest line) linking the Dominican Rebulic's border town of Dajabon with the urban center of Santiago. The multi-sited study considers the larger network of political, social, and economic structures and relations of power in which these women are positioned in their daily lives and through their livelihoods as market women. Through key anthropological and feminist theoretical frameworks, I offer a commentary on the political economy of racism and gender inequality in the contexts of Caribbean colonial history, Dominican nationalism, and globalization. By mapping both figurative and literal border crossings and inspections across space and time and the complex relationships between mobility and containment, I bring greater visibility to the daily experiences of Haitian women as workers, as migrants, as mothers, and as activists. I argue for the necessity of making visible the unique positionings of these women within the contexts of both structural power and individual agency as they play out in the interstices of capitalism and poverty, neoliberal democracy and state violence, globalization and feminism, migration and the informal economy, and citizenship and human rights. We need to pay attention to what they are saying and what they are doing to carve out creative spaces that contend with and contest in strategic ways the contradictions derivative of their simultaneous visibility and invisibility as migrant women.U of I OnlyRestricted to the U of I community idenfinitely during batch ingest of legacy ETD

From margin to center: feminism in an era of mainstream co-optation

Contemporary American culture is witnessing the phenomenon of many high-profile celebrities proudly calling themselves, feminist--I refer to these individuals as celebrity feminists. This phenomenon comes as a shift from the historical avoidance with the term feminist and the feminist movement due to mainstream media's portrayal of feminism using negative and fallacious stereotypes. The current shift to "feminism is wonderful," in the mainstream media--as a reflection of a white supremacist and patriarchal society--de-politicizes feminism, making it less of a radical movement that seeks social change and more a portrayal of individual empowerment on the part of exceptional women. In essence, it seeks to separate the personal from the political. Following the lead of bell hooks, we must combat this co-optation and de-politicization of feminism and reclaim it as a transformative politics. We must come to a consensus on what feminism is, even if the definition is fluid and broad, determine the goals of feminism so that we do not mistake the individual success of women as proof of feminism accomplished, and challenge the so-called sex positivity of feminism as portrayed by the mainstream media for its lack of inclusion of all people and its portrayal of sex as the last frontier of feminism. In spite of these misrepresentations, feminism has a bright future in an era of social media that gives the power of media and message to more people who can portray a feminism that is radical and uses an intersectional lens. (Published By University of Alabama Libraries

Ashri and i: exploring "knowledge" through creative writing

A female protagonist simply identified as "She" remembers and relives acts of violence over a span of years and attempts to cope through poetry and an attachment to an imaginary `other.' Through poetry She imagines Ashri and her kidnap, abused, and descent into madness at the hands of Fin, connecting the pain of her own life with that of Ashri's. This combination of poetry and creative non-fiction is not only about the relation between men and women but also about sharing truths through the retelling of real events. This thesis focuses on the issue of how "knowledge" is created and sanctified by social and academic structures. The story shares the knowledge and the theory explains why it is important. (Published By University of Alabama Libraries

Can't take my soul: exploring and illuminating the spirituality and spiritual activism within British hip-hop

Hip-hop is a transnational musical genre that has historically affected the lives of marginalized youth in powerful ways across the "Black Atlantic." By using a womanist framework of analysis, this thesis illuminates the ways in which three British hip-hop MC's-Akala, Logic, and Lowkey-employ their music to enact spiritual activism. I explore how their music explicitly and implicitly centers on spirituality and seeks to break down the barriers necessary for spiritual awareness and growth through the awakening and/or transformation of consciousness. (Published By University of Alabama Libraries

The other collectives of the left: reading Black left feminisms in sites of transatlantic cultural praxis

Paul Gilroy writes, "It would appear that there are large questions raised about the direction and character of Black culture and art if we take the powerful effects of even temporary experiences of exile, relocation, and displacement into account" (Paul Gilroy, The Black Atlantic, 18). Transnationality and citizenship are tangled discourses, acted out in real time, on real people, effecting not only the exiled, relocated, and displaced as individuals, but the communal relations they leave, enter, and/or produce. In this research, grounded in issues of collective cultural praxis, I examine the relationship between lived experience, mechanizations of power, and how collectivity -in the formation of community action groups and artists collectives. I argue that in this way cultural production is instrumental in the transgressing of the real and imaged borders of race, nation, gender, and class. I look at the cultural work of Afro-Caribbean, and American exile, Claudia Jones, American Lorraine Hansberry, and Black artist collectives working in and between the U.S. and U.K. My central argument is that by looking at the work of Black radicals, specifically Black left feminists and their strategic use of collaborative cultural practice, we can deepen our understanding of the strategic use of cultural in bringing about social change. I also argue for a rethinking of the histories and representations of Black radicalism, and the re-imagining of the Black radical subject. This new historicization of the Black radicalism - which is inclusive of leftist feminisms, transnational subjectivity, cultural workers and artists - pushes us toward a radical revision of cultural and identity politics. (Published By University of Alabama Libraries

"What don't Black girls do?": constructions of deviance and the performance of Black female sexuality

This research interrogates the ways in which Black women process and negotiate their sexual identities. By connecting the historical exploitation of Black female bodies to the way Black female deviant identities are manufactured and consumed currently, I was able to show not only the evolution of Black women's attitudes towards sexuality, but also the ways in which these attitudes manifest when policing deviancy amongst each other. Chapter 1 gives historical insight to the way that deviancy has been inextricably linked to the construction of Blackness. Using the Post-Reconstruction Era as my point of entry, I demonstrate the ways in which Black bodies were stigmatized as sexually deviant, and how the use of Black caricatures buttressed the consumption of this narrative by whites. I explain how countering this narrative became fundamental to the evolution of Black female sexual politics, and how ultimately bodily agency was later restored through sexual deviancy. Chapter 2 interrogates the way "authenticity" is propagated within the genre of reality TV. Black women are expected to perform deviant identities that coincide with controlling images so that the "authenticity" of Black womanhood is consumed by mainstream audiences. Using Vh1's Love and Hip Hop Atlanta and Basketball Wives I analyze the way these identities are performed and policed by the women on both shows. Lastly, Chapter 3 is a reflexive analysis detailing the ways in which Black women process the performances of deviant Black female identities on reality TV using ethnographic methods. (Published By University of Alabama Libraries