Quiet Dawn: Time, Aesthetics, and the Afterlives of Black Radicalism traces the unfulfilled utopian aspirations of the revolutionary past that haunt the present of the African diaspora. Taking its name from the final track on famed black nationalist musician Archie Shepp’s 1972 Attica Blues, this dissertation argues that the defeat of black radical and anticolonial projects witnessed during the turbulent years of the sixties and seventies not only represent past “failures” but also point to a freedom that has yet to arrive. Working at the convergence of literature, performance, and visual culture, Quiet Dawn argues that the unfinished projects of black and anticolonial revolution live on as radical potentialities that linger in the archive like a “haunting refrain.” Quiet Dawn offers a theory the haunting refrain of black sociality that emanates across seemingly disparate geopolitical nodes. The concept of the haunting refrain designates an affective register through which otherwise hidden and obscure regions of the past can be apprehended. The dissertation attends to the traces of black sociality that linger in the archive through an examination of the literary and critical works of black intellectuals such as Amiri Baraka, Nikki Giovanni, Kamau Brathwaite, Sylvia Wynter, Frantz Fanon, and Léopold Sédar Senghor. Rather than lay claim to political heroes, Quiet Dawn turns to the past in an attempt to give an account of the dispersed social forces that gathered around the promise of a black world. Each chapter offers an example of the haunting refrain of black social life that lingers in the past. In this way, the dissertation as a whole gives an account of the radical potentialities that register as hums, echoes, muted chants, and shadow songs of the “long sixties.” Quiet Dawn contributes to scholarship on black internationalism and intervenes in current critical debates around race, gender, and sexual violence in the fields of black studies, feminist studies, and postcolonial studies. Its theorization of black social life as a spectral presence is an attempt at attending to the other others that haunt contemporary critiques of power which merely seek redemption in an irredeemable world. To be sure, this project strikes neither an optimistic nor pessimistic note. Rather, it is rooted in the belief that there are infinite amounts of hope that we have yet to apprehend.

Since the end of the Cold War, the international system has become more cosmopolitan, communicative, and connected. These changes have taken place against a backdrop of intensifying processes of globalization, the unevenness of which has helped redefine possible fields of political action. This dissertation offers an interpretation of how we might go about understanding and representing the intercultural dynamics and forms of politics that constitute the transnational Tibet Movement.

This dissertation explores the means by which Hindus in the United States theorize and cultivate desires in the midst of the larger project of making Hindu subjectivities for themselves and their children. It suggests that the cultivation of desire—while significant in creating any type of subjectivity anywhere—is a centerpiece of making identities for Hindus in the diaspora. From its very beginnings, in reference to Jews, the language and sentiment of diaspora have always been associated with desires. Specifically, there is the longing for the homeland, which most diasporic communities have cultivated. For many Hindus, the idea of India as a desired ‘homeland’ is also fundamental, but for them, as throughout history, the desires associated with diasporic experiences have been enacted in a range of ways and they have always been about more than simply place. Hindu parents and community members are engaged in the development of other types of desires—moral-spiritual, theological, narrative-historical, “sanctioned” romantic and familial, gastronomic, and material. Many contemporary practices of Hindus in the diaspora—educational, ritual, representational, political, and consumer—revolve around the inculcation and fulfillment of desires, for both children and adults. Desire is a recurrent trope, articulated differently by parents, teachers, community leaders, married couples, students, young adults, devotees, and children. Not only do people express their own desires, but they negotiate, facilitate or hinder the desires, both real and perceived, of others. Through an examination of various Hindu realms and practices, I trace some of the types of Hinduism that are forming in the United States, as well as the affective cultures and desires that seem to animate them. The chapters explore: the development, content and cultures of Hindu supplementary educational programs; new modes of Hindu exhibition as ritual and devotional practices, and as reflections of collective desires about Hindu representation; the role of consumer cultures—particularly the place of ethnic stores and practices of shopping; the rise in forms of Hindu advocacy, particularly with respect to the concomitant desires to control representations of Hinduism and Indian history within educational and other public spheres; the place of Hindu nationalism and the motivations of participants in a variety of Hindu spaces; and the expression of ‘strategic citizenship’ on the part of a Hindu community seeking public recognition and acceptance. My hope is that this work not only sheds light on processes at work within contemporary Hindu communities in the U.S., but helps us to consider larger human questions about the development of religious selves and sensibilities, the shaping of identities, the cultivation of belonging, the negotiation of public and civic spheres, and the politics and poetics of nationalism and self-representation. The ways people locate themselves and are located by others, both consciously and unconsciously, are often artifacts of desire, and it is through desire that various identifications are negotiated.

This dissertation project examines the Ghanaian state's role in developing a heritage tourism industry that actively manipulates commemorative practices surrounding the legacy of the slave trade to redefine and institutionalize the ambiguous relationship Ghana holds with communities of African descent abroad. Developed in response to the renewed interest in African ancestry following the 1976 release of Alex Haley's novel Roots and its popular television adaptation, Ghana and other states in the region have since sought to incorporate African-Americans into their economic planning by providing them with opportunities to recover their lost heritage through tourism experiences. Not limited to the creation of heritage sites, monuments and museums dedicated to the legacy of slavery and dispersal from Africa, these states have also tailored investment opportunities to reflect a renewed spirit of Pan-Africanism and validate African-Americans' membership within a re-envisioned diasporic African community.

This dissertation explains how the Republic of China (ROC), overseas Chinese (huaqiao), and the Philippines, sometimes but not always working with each other, produced and opposed the threat of Chinese communism from the end of World War II to the mid-1970s. It is not a history of US-led anticommunist efforts with respect to the Chinese diaspora, but rather an intra-Asian social and cultural history of anticommunism and nation-building that liberates two close US allies from US-centric historiographies and juxtaposes them with each other and the huaqiao community that they claimed. Three principal arguments flow from this focus on intra-Asian anticommunism. First, I challenge narrowly territorialized understandings of Chinese nationalism by arguing that Taiwan engaged in diasporic nation-building in the Philippines. Whether by helping the Philippine military identify Chinese communists or by mobilizing Philippine huaqiao in support of Taiwan, the ROC carved out a semi-sovereign sphere of influence for itself within a foreign country. It did so through institutions such as schools, the Kuomintang (KMT), and the Philippine-Chinese Anti-Communist League, which functioned transnationally and locally to embed the ROC into Chinese society and connect huaqiao to Taiwan. Through these groups, the ROC shaped the experiences of a national community beyond its territorial boundaries and represented itself as the legitimate “China” in the world. Second, drawing upon political theory, I argue that the anticommunist relationship between the ROC, the Philippines, and the Philippine Chinese constituted a form of what I call shared, non-territorial sovereignty. Nationalist China did not secure influence over Chinese in the Philippines by exerting military or economic pressure, as a neocolonial regime might. Vast disparities in power did not obtain between Manila and Taipei, as they did between them and Washington. Rather, for reasons of law, culture, linguistic incapacity, and ideology, the Philippines selectively outsourced the management of its Chinese residents to the ROC. In turn, both depended on the Chinese being able to govern themselves with state support, coercive and otherwise. The Philippine Chinese, as in colonial times, were thus semi-autonomous actors who participated in the construction of shared sovereignty after World War II by forging ties with states to advance their anticommunist agenda. This three-way relationship provides a framework for thinking about postcolonial sovereignty in East Asia that focuses on relations of relative equality between states and the relative autonomy of the Chinese as a minority population, rather than between dominant and dominated or in terms of territory. Nationalist China and the Philippines’ nation-building projects had profound consequences for the Philippine Chinese. While these peoples were in many respects acted upon by the ROC and Philippine states through legal and coercive means, they by no means lacked agency. Rather, they performed their agency as consensual participants in making anticommunism. In focusing on them, the dissertation shifts from international and transnational history to social and cultural history and the history of civic life. Existing scholarship, whether in the social sciences or Sinophone Studies, largely depicts the postcolonial hua subject as a non-ideological businessman or cultural producer. I argue, by contrast, that the overseas Chinese could be eminently ideological and politically active. From informing on suspected Chinese communists to the ROC and Philippine states to proclaiming their loyalties to the ROC and Chiang Kai-shek, anticommunist social practices enabled Philippine huaqiao to come to terms with being legally disadvantaged and ideologically suspect minorities in their country of residence. Unlike racial and cultural Chineseness, which they could or would not give up, they could and did choose to behave ideologically; and in doing so, they legitimized their community to the Philippine state and Filipino society.

This thesis examines literary representations of the city of Brussels in Francophone diasporic writing. Drawing on and exploring the usefulness of memory and trauma studies, postcolonial theory, and spatial studies in a Belgian context, this thesis reads six novels, spanning a contemporary period from 1985 to 2011, by Francophone writers, who themselves or whose parents originate from countries with a history of Belgian and French colonialism: Leïla Houari’s Zeida de nulle part (1985), Pie Tshibanda’s Un fou noir au pays des Blancs (1999), Saber Assal’s A l’ombre des gouttes (2000), José Tshisungu wa Tshisungu’s La Flamande de la gare du Nord (2001), Mina Oualdlhadj’s Ti t’appelles Aїcha, pas Jouzifine (2008) and Patrick François’s La dernière larme du lac Kivu (2011). In doing so, this thesis investigates the multiple ways in which these writers imagine and construct the urban space of Brussels through intersecting transnational trajectories and histories of violence. By analysing how they ‘write’ Brussels, the very architecture and landscape of which are clearly marked by colonialism and labour migration, this thesis offers a critical exploration of how experiences and memories of displacement and exile shape the perception of the urban space in these texts. I argue in particular that these writers either recode certain urban spaces or create new ones in order to construct narratives of marginalisation and belonging. Finally, this thesis aims to join the emerging discussion of ethnic-minority writing in Belgium by providing an understanding of the ambiguous role of Brussels as a postcolonial metropolis and post-war destination for labour migration, while seemingly remaining a peripheral location for Francophone literary production in a cultural sphere that still gravitates towards Paris.

This dissertation is a comparative and transnational study of the techniques of racial impersonation used by white performers to represent black Afro-diasporic people in early modern England, Spain, and France. The racialization of blackness that took place in England at the turn of the sixteenth century has been well studied over the course of the last thirty years. This dissertation expands English early modern race scholarship in new directions by revealing the existence of a multi-directional circulation of racial ideas, lexemes, and performance techniques that led to the development of a vivid trans-European stage idiom of blackness across national borders in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. While early modern race scholarship has traditionally focused on the rhetorical and dramatic strategies used by playwrights to create black characters, this dissertation brings to the fore the ideological work inherent in performance. It does so by arguing that the techniques of racial impersonation used in various loci of European performance culture, such as blackface, blackspeak (a comic mock-African accent), and black dances, racialized Afro-diasporic people as they led spectators in a variety of ways to think of those people as belonging naturally at the bottom of any well-constituted social order. This dissertation shows how the hermeneutic configurations and re-configurations of techniques of racial impersonation such as blackface, blackspeak, and black dance responded to social changes, to the development of colonization and color-based slavery, and to changing perceptions of what Afro-diasporic people’s status should be in European and Atlantic societies across the early modern period.

This thesis explores selected texts by the contemporary author Colum McCann (b.1965), situating his work within a larger transnational Irish canon. The project traces how notions of Irish identity interact with experiences of diaspora, migration and race; throughout the thesis, close attention is paid to the role and function of literary form. After an introduction which maps out the material covered in the thesis, the project opens with a contextual chapter entitled ‘Deoraí: Exile, Wanderer, Stranger: (Post)colonial Ireland and making sense of place’. This chapter sets up the methodological frameworks that guide the thesis through a meditation on exile in an Irish and postcolonial context. My second chapter, ‘Deterritorialised novels: McCann’s short stories as Minor Literature in an (Northern) Irish Mode’, focuses on McCann’s short stories, paying particular attention to those set in the North of Ireland. Invoking Thomas MacDonagh’s notion of an Irish Mode and Deleuze and Guattari’s concept of Minor Literature, I argue that the rejection of the novel in favour of the short story is a form of literary politics inflected with anti-colonial sentiment. Continuing my examination of literary form, my third chapter, ‘Nomadism and Storytelling in Zoli: oral culture, embodiment and travelling tales’, highlights the ambivalence of orality within McCann’s novel Zoli and works towards establishing what a textual practice of storytelling might be, in addition to probing at the representation of nomadic peoples across McCann’s work. The next chapter is entitled ‘Topography of Violence’: race, belonging and the underbelly of the cosmopolitan city in This Side of Brightness’. This discusses the cosmopolitan ethics that underpin McCann’s novel and how these are grounded by the close attention McCann pays to the experiential realities of America’s (often racialised) underclass through McCann’s depiction of interracial love. My final chapter ‘TransAtlantic: Frederick Douglass, the Irish Famine and the Troubles with the black and green Atlantics’, maps out the overlapping histories of the black and green Atlantics, tests the validity of the ostensible affinity between the two groups and asks how useful conventional chronological narratives are in the representation of their histories. Finally, I finish with ‘Minor Voices, race and rooted cosmopolitanism’, which concludes that McCann’s fiction articulates a need for rooted cosmopolitan and critically engaged nomadic thought which embraces Minor Voices and rejects exclusionary politics.

FundaÃÃo Cearense de Apoio ao Desenvolvimento Cientifico e TecnolÃgico / The immigration process of Africans to Brazil and Cearà for the purpose of studying has been straightening in the last decades, especially since 2012, after the first selection processes for the Universidade da IntegraÃÃo Internacional da Lusofonia Afro-brasileira (UNILAB). These young people have suffered the daily experience of prejudice and racism, related to their condition of belonging to a social minority, being the psychosocial implication the research problem of this dissertation. The general objective, then, was to analyze the psychosocial implications of the prejudice and racism in the UNILAB Africans students; and the specific objectives are to identify the demonstrations of prejudice and racism from the reports about the experience of immigration for the purpose of studying, to analyze the psychosocial implications - such as thoughts, actions and feelings from these demonstrations and to describe strategies developed by African students at UNILAB in order to face prejudice and racism. This investigation has a qualitative approach, being fourteen the interviewed students, belonging to different African nationalities of Portuguese as official language (Angola, Cape Verde, Guinea Bissau, Mozambique, SÃo Tomà and PrÃncipe). All of them are students at UNILAB, living in Cearà as beneficiaries of social programs for student assistance. The data were run through Content Analysis with software Atlas Ti. Our main results describe different exclusion practices, as much as individual, institutional and cultural manifestations of racism, predominantly understood as cordial racism. These practices are related to processes of social categorization and stigmatization, which, by its turn, result in the assignment of social stereotypes, as well as processes of social discrimination and social suffering (shame, humiliation, fear, rejection). As a way to face this reality, we observe the importance of assertion policies for black and african identity by these young people, as much as support offered by established social networks and collective organization in search of acknowledgment and respect. We conclude that racism suffered by these young people in Brazil is enhanced by processes of distinction between Brazilian and African groups, which have a strong impact upon the psychosocial experience of migration for educational purposes. / O processo imigratÃrio ao Brasil e ao Cearà de jovens africanos para fins estudantis vem se fortalecendo nas Ãltimas dÃcadas, contexto que ganha forÃa maior a partir de 2012, apÃs os primeiros processos seletivos da Universidade da IntegraÃÃo Internacional da Lusofonia Afro-brasileira (UNILAB). Estes jovens sofrem a cotidiana experiÃncia do preconceito e do racismo, relacionados à sua condiÃÃo de pertencentes a uma minoria social, sendo nosso problema de pesquisa as suas implicaÃÃes psicossociais. Nosso objetivo geral, assim, foi analisar as implicaÃÃes psicossociais do preconceito e do racismo nos estudantes africanos da UNILAB; e nossos objetivos especÃficos: identificar as manifestaÃÃes de preconceito e racismo a partir dos relatos sobre a experiÃncia de imigraÃÃo para fins estudantis; analisar as implicaÃÃes psicossociais â pensamentos, aÃÃes e sentimentos provenientes destas manifestaÃÃes; descrever estratÃgias desenvolvidas pelos estudantes africanos da UNILAB para o enfrentamento do preconceito e do racismo. Esta investigaÃÃo possuiu carÃter qualitativo, onde foram entrevistados quatorze estudantes de diferentes nacionalidades africanas de lÃngua oficial portuguesa (Angola, Cabo-verde, GuinÃ-Bissau, MoÃambique, SÃo Tomà e PrÃncipe). Todos os participantes sÃo estudantes da UNILAB no Cearà e beneficiÃrios de programa de assistÃncia estudantil. Os dados foram trabalhados atravÃs de AnÃlise de ConteÃdo, com auxÃlio do software Atlas Ti. Nossos resultados principais descrevem diferentes prÃticas de exclusÃo, alÃm de manifestaÃÃes individuais, institucionais e culturais de racismo, predominantemente compreendidas a partir do racismo cordial. Estas prÃticas relacionam-se aos processos de categorizaÃÃo social e estigmatizaÃÃo, que, por sua vez, resultam na atribuiÃÃo de estereÃtipos sociais, em processos de discriminaÃÃo social e em sofrimentos sociais (vergonha, humilhaÃÃo, medo, rejeiÃÃo). Como forma de lidar com esta realidade, observamos a importÃncia de estratÃgias de afirmaÃÃo da identidade negra e africana por parte destes jovens, assim como o apoio prestado pelas redes sociais estabelecidas e a organizaÃÃo coletiva em busca de reconhecimento e respeito. ConcluÃmos que o racismo sofrido por estes jovens no Brasil à potencializado pelos processos de distinÃÃo entre os grupos âos/as brasileirosâ e âos/as africanosâ, impactando sobremaneira na experiÃncia psicossocial de imigraÃÃo para fins estudantis.

This study is about the Turkish diaspora in Sweden and how whose thoughts about being a Turk interact with how they perceive their work environment. The purpose of the paper is to analyse how four individuals with Turkish background interact with surrounding actors at their workplaces in Sweden and when, where, and how their Turkish identity is performed. Following are the questions asked to fulfil the purpose of the study;  How do high educated Turks in diaspora experience being Turkish in Sweden?  When, where, and how is the Turkish identity performed?  How do high educated Turks in diaspora interact with and perceive their surrounding actors in workplaces in Sweden? The results show that the participants do not have a direct experience of being a Turk. Their experiences are mostly a result of their interaction with others and of others’ perception of their Turkish identity. The results also show that the Turkish identity is often visible in interaction with actors outside the Turkish diaspora. However, the heterogeneous Turkish diaspora shows that perceptions of religion, politics and education can be identified as critical factors at play in interactions within the Turkish diaspora. Participants’ interaction with others and their perceptions of their workplaces are highlydependant on the workplace. Depending on the workplace’s heterogeneity or homogeneity the experiences differ. Some of the participants have developed strategies to eliminate conflicts associated with their Turkish identity.