Bakare-Yusuf, Bibi (2000) In the sea of memory : embodiment and agency in the black diaspora. PhD thesis, University of Warwick.

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Abstract

This thesis is a sustained meditation on the relationship between embodiment, memory
and cultural creativity in the black diaspora. It seeks to generate a theoretical vocabulary
outside the stale polarisation between essentialism and anti-essentialism. Using the
phenomenology of lived experience, I contend that black diasporic memory and identity
are actively constructed within each present. I argue that bodily expression is part of a
broader set of cultural strategies of self-definition, self-maintenance and self-preservation.
In the case of the black diaspora, the past is evoked, invoked and provoked
into existence once again through each expression of embodiment. A key concern in the
thesis is therefore to highlight the active capacity of the body to recreate its world and in
the process empower, renew and re-orient itself in the face of adversity and oppression.
Rather than succumb to an account of black diasporicity as either a history of pain or the
background of cultural hybridity, I argue that the pleasures and pains of black
diasporicity are different aspects of the same ongoing phenomenon. Through the
example of Jamaican dancehall culture, I show how the adorned, transgressive dancing
body of dancehall women creates a dynamic of eroticised autonomy in an otherwise
hostile environment. In sum, my thesis provides an analysis of the dynamics of diasporic
identity and the antiphonies of continuity and discontinuity.

Item Type:	Thesis or Dissertation (PhD)
Subjects:	D History General and Old World > DT Africa G Geography. Anthropology. Recreation > GN Anthropology
Library of Congress Subject Headings (LCSH):	African diaspora, Blacks -- Race identity, Dance halls -- Jamaica
Official Date:	September 2000
Dates:	Date Event September 2000 Submitted
Institution:	University of Warwick
Theses Department:	Centre for the Study of Women and Gender
Thesis Type:	PhD
Publication Status:	Unpublished
Extent:	vii, 316 leaves
Language:	eng

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