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Abstract
This dissertation examines the key choices that native-born Caribbean women make in forming and/or rejecting connections to various communities while also problematizing the construction of black identities in the United States. I discuss how the changing demographics of the Black American population have forced us to recognize the striking diversity between and within Black ethnic groups. By analyzing how black women see themselves in different nation spaces, I show how these women attempt to move beyond or work within the boundaries of race, gender and nationalism as constructed by American and Caribbean societies. Furthermore, I examine the ways in which women of Caribbean ancestry view conceptions of nation and diaspora as well as their distinct relationships to the, sometimes, competing constructions of these ideas. Consequently, I examine the work of black writers who, through their writing, have given voice to the experiences of immigration, assimilation and the formation of ethnic identities as black people of Caribbean ancestry in the United States manage them. Ultimately, this project will examine how identity constructions have shifted from the 1960s to the present—moving from the space of a, sometimes, totalitarian idea of race solidarity to a "mosaic" within black America comprised of many black ethnicities.
