Includes bibliographical references (leaves 62-63). / Since the famous 9/11 terrorist attacks in America, the American government has increased their military presence across the world, most notably by occupying Iraq and Afghanistan. This they have done under the banner of spreading liberal democracy to oppressed peoples in far off places, arguing that their actions represent asense of moral clarity and are necessary if the world is going to be safe from evil. This paper argues that the term liberal democracy and all the ideological rhetoric of freedom that is employed give the Americans a moral high ground from which they seek to excuse and legitimise their actions. This thesis shows how the framework of spreading liberal democracy has been and is being used in order to legitimise actions which appear to be contradictory to the professed goals of spreading liberty and equality, to oppressed people.

Includes bibliography (leaves 193-196) and index.

Bibliography: pages 67-68. / This dissertation examines how ideology is constituted in texts, and how colonial texts generally support the hegemonic ideology, that is, they offer a point of view which is racialistic and a picture of blacks which is patronizing and denigratory. With regard to the colonial white population, colonial texts generally portray a strongly patriarchal, often authoritarian societal structure. William Plomer writes within the liberal tradition and therefore seeks to undermine the dominant ideology. He shows how contradictory the colonial attitude to the natives is and how the 'civilising' mission often runs counter to the colonial desire for the ease and luxury which require a subject and 'uncivilised' population. The dissertation looks particularly at the portrayal of family life in Plomer's South African short stories and in Turbott Wolfe. It sees that society limits the range of what the author can invent, that the author in many cases 'encounters the solution' (Macherey), and Plomer seems unable to present a work in which a couple of mixed race is able to find a role in society. In the short stories, Plomer portrays families as weak entities, with married people often yearning for partners of a different racial group. Marriage is shown to be undermined by the racialistic and authoritarian strictures placed upon it. In Turbott Wolfe, Plomer portrays several bigoted and vicious white families with the men having secret liaisons with black women and seldom acknowledging their progeny. The only couple of mixed race, seems to operate in a social vacuum and has symbolic value only. Plomer thus presents a society and a familial structure undermined by the very restrictions which are designed to safeguard them.

Inlcudes bibliographical references. / This paper examines representations of existential alienation in two early novels by the Ghanaian author Ayi Kwei Armah. The introductory chapter extrapolates an account of how the representational strategies of existential alienation produce specific effects on the act of self - writing. From there, the paper explores these effects in Armah’s The Beautyful Ones Are Not Yet Born (1968), arguing that alienation is a valuable heuristic in unlocking the novel’s complex meditation on how abstract, macrohistorical forces like neo - colonialism come to be registered in the most intimate aspects of the subject’s experience of the world. As such, if one restores the historical details of Ghana’s “post-colonial” moment, the novel is redeemed from Chinua Achebe’s assertion that the novel is “sick [...] not with the sickness of Ghana, but the sickness of the human condition”. Representations of alienation have a diagnostic function in The Beautyful Ones . The second chapter examines alienation under the new imaginative terrains of Armah’s Two Thousand Seasons (1973), and articulates the experiments in formal representation in that novel with Armah’s inaugural concern with the possibility of a prognostic appraisal of the alienation so widely thematised in his earlier trilogy. Both studies are undertaken, finally, to explore the ways in which modernity has been received in African literature, and to demonstrate the analytic value of existential alienation in understanding the crises of a specifically African modernity.

Bibliography: pages 102-112. / This dissertation locates Olive Schreiner as a nineteenth-century colonial woman writer who challenges the traditional association of men with culture, and women with nature. In Schreiner's writing the oppression of women is situated within an understanding of the social construction of "woman" as closer to nature than man. Through the lives of her central female characters, Schreiner shows how this definition of "woman" works to position women as "other" to culture, both preventing their access to public power and marginalising their fully social activities within culture. Schreiner attempts to displace definitions of culture constituted through a system of binary oppositions which inevitably privilege masculinity as opposed to femininity by redefining culture in three distinct ways. The patriarchal conception culture as the sole preserve of men is rejected in Schreiner's demands for women's educational and legal equality, and for their right to economic independence. Conventional notions of culture are equally refused in Schreiner's stress on women's traditional domestic labour as essential to the very emergence and continuation of culture. Finally, the deconstruction of sexual difference as a fixed immutable category within Schreiner's writing exposes the definition of "woman" as socially constructed and legitimated. The contradictions and tensions within and between these demands illustrate the limits of Schreiner's feminist and socialist politics, and point to how her writing both challenges and articulates aspects of dominant nineteenth-century ideology. At the same time, such contradictions were vitally important in motivating Schreiner's on-going attempt to change radically the position of women within culture. Moreover, the co-existence of apparently conflicting demands within Schreiner's redefinition of culture suggests the terms of a resolution of the perennial problem within feminist discourse around competing claims for women's equality or for a recognition of their difference.

This thesis explores representations of the littoral in South African literature. It analyses literature published in three broad historical periods with the specific focus on the littoral as a setting from which authors imagine histories differently, often as a corrective, to challenge and wrestle with the racialized categorization of bodies in space. Littoral settings are present throughout the history of South African literature and, when placed on a linear, progressive timeline, feature as a place of first encounters, a site of segregation, and the unmaking of these boundaries. This thesis argues, however, that sequencing representations of the littoral according to this model would subsume histories by those without the power to control official narratives, or whose histories are not well represented in official archives, under rigid nation-based paradigms of typical western historiography. By employing Kamau Brathwaite's theory of “tidalectics” as a method, metaphor and model, I conduct a recursive reading of the littoral's presence in South African literature to show that littoral moments resonate with each other across different historical moments. As such, tidalectics attend to multiple temporalities in a more open, fluid way. I argue that this manner of attending to history surfaces from and sits alongside formal historiography, gently disrupting its premises by offering alternative models for recognising and recording marginal narratives. The primary texts for this thesis include Portuguese expansionist texts, novels by prominent South African authors such as Olive Schreiner, Nadine Gordimer, Peter Abrahams, Zoë Wicomb, Lewis Nkosi, and Yvette Christiansë, and a poetry collection by Douglas Livingstone. In these texts, the littoral is presented as a space which is governed by the spatial politics of that era, but also challenges them, playing a valuable part in constructing spatial politics, and in turn racial politics, in South Africa. A tidalectic reading of these literatures therefore demonstrates that the littoral allows for a different spatio-temporal approach to the long history of social injustice in South Africa.

This thesis aims to assess the representations of Black same-sex desiring women, specifically in the contexts of the United States of America and Nigeria. The primary aim of this study is to explore and critique the notion of U.S. sexual exceptionalism and homonormativity as theorised by Jasbir Puar's Terrorist Assemblages. In doing so, I aim to show that while the United States of America positions itself as more progressive than countries that continue to criminalise and persecute same-sex desiring people, queer people in both contexts continue to be marginalised and face similar challenges that are a result or cause of this marginalisation. This comparative thesis of Chinelo Okparanta's Under the Udala Trees and Leona Beasley's Something Better Than Home examines the ways in which religion; notions of secrecy and censorship; as well as compulsory heterosexuality and homophobic violence contribute to the marginalisation of Black queer women in both the United States of America and Nigeria.

This dissertation explores the film adaptations of two of the novels of Herny James, namely Washington Square (1880) and The Portrait of a Lady (1881). The Introduction discusses issues relating broadly to the problems and attractions of film adaptation. I draw especially on the work of James Naremorc, Brian Mcfarlane and George Bluestone. Naremore surveys the history of film adaptation, pervasive in many countries with a film industry. Mcfarlane looks at the reasons for this interest in adapting novels to film as well as the issue of authenticity with regard to film adaptation. Bluestone looks at what film and literature have in common. In Chapter One, I discuss the novel Washington Square and two adaptations, William Wyler's 1949 version and Agnieszka Holland's 1997 version. The chapter opens with a discussion of the novel, focussing on themes such as marriage, money and status in society. I then examine selected aspects of the two films. In The Heiress, I look at the inclusion of scenes that don't appear in the novel, and how these scenes drive the narrative in the film. I also look at how the characters are portrayed in the film and how they bring their own uniqueness to the screen. In Holland's Washington Square, I examine both the characters and the sets, while also looking at Holland's feminist interpretation of the story. In Chapter Two, I examine the novel The Portrait of a Lady and Jane Campion's film version of this story. The discussion of the novel looks at themes like tragedy, the European experience, marriage, and the displaced American. I also discuss the various characters in the novel and the role that each of them plays. With regard to Campion's film, I look at unusual filmic devices that have been used as well as the way in which the characters from the novel have been translated to the screen. I conclude by noting how films have inspired people to read classic works once again.

In the 1980s Rainer Werner Fassbinders Der Müll, die Stadt und der Tod (1976) and Thomas Bernhard’s Heldenplatz (1988) caused two of the biggest theatre scandals in the history of German-language literature, leading to extensive debates in the media. A comparative examination of the “Fassbinder-Kontroversen” (1976, 1984, 1985) and the “Causa Heldenplatz” (1988) reveals many crucial similarities. Both scandals must be understood within their historical and political context. Der Müll, die Stadt und der Tod was highly criticized as an anti-Semitic play, while Heldenplatz was said to slander crassly the Austrian people. Bernhard was also attacked for using Jews in a way which could reinforce latent anti-Semitic sentiments. This thesis questions such premises for their reductive readings of these texts. Bernhard’s Heldenplatz can certainly be perceived as a play that was made to be scandal-provoking. Sigmund Freud’s and William G. Niederland’s theories on trauma, however, can lead to a deeper understanding of the text beyond the obvious level of provocation. Most commentary on the play criticizes it for portraying Jews as psychically diseased. My claim, by contrast, is that their neuroticism or traumatization should not be interpreted as limiting the political validity of their comments, but rather as an essential aspect of their protest against Austria’s repression of its involvement in Nazi crimes. Like Heldenplatz, Fassbinder’s Der Müll, die Stadt und der Tod can be seen as a text that refutes the denial that there is no anti-Semitism in post-war German-speaking societies. The difference is that Fassbinder deals with the traumatization of his characters counter-intuitively, namely, by introducing the ironic, distancing effects of camp. In her essay „Notes on ‚Camp‘“, Susan Sontag claims that camp “sees everything in quotation marks”. An analysis of Fassbinder’s play reveals it to be a montage of citations and stereotypes. He thereby deconstructs and denounces stereotypes about Jews.

ABSTRACT In this thesis, it is argued that the performance of three plays written by Daniel David Moses: Brébeuf's Ghost, The Indian Medicine Shows and Almighty Voice and his Wife function as healing ceremonies. This healing - so necessary after the cultural genocide wrought upon First Nations peoples by the Canadian government's attempts to legislate and educate them out of existence - is brought about through Moses' examination of the dichotic underpinnings of euro-western notions of absence and presence and how this dichotomy leads to conflict between the euro-western concept of disease as a purely physical phenomena and the indigenous view of disease as being the physical manifestation of spiritual imbalance, of not living in accord with the land. The link Heidegger makes between absence and the essence of things - an example of this being his assertion that the essence of a wine jug "does not lie at all in the material of which it consists, but in the void that holds" ("The Thing" 169) - is representative of the viewpoint of the euro-western characters of the play, most of whom base their understanding of the world and the things in it on their perception of voids. For both euro-western and native characters in these plays, physical and psychological disease is linked to the idea of absence. Disease, as a social construct, is argued as a manifestation of the physical and spiritual voids created by a preoccupation with absence. The euro-western relationship to 'things' and commodities to fill the absence of 'self' is. I argue that the performance of the text is a type of ceremony designed to physically manifest the spiritual, akin to such rituals as the Hopi katina ceremony and the Navajo red ant ceremony, whose aims are to restore the wellness of an individual and, thus, the group. It is the performance of absence which is the key to understanding the works' healing value.