This thesis uses affect theory and studies of emotion to analyse literary representations of the everyday in fictional and non-fictional writing about Muslim migrant women in the UK from 1906 to 2012. Postcolonial literary studies tend to value exceptional events over mundane life, which causes possible issues of exoticism and a danger of homogenising distinct experiences. This thesis offers a theorisation of migration that foregrounds everyday experience through an engagement with theories of objects, bodies and space, as well as emotional experiences that are specific to migrant subjectivity. It analyses two groups of texts: early twentieth century travel writing by Atiya Fyzee, Shahbano Begum Maimoona Sultan and Zeyneb Hanoum, and contemporary literary texts by Yeshim Ternar, Farhana Sheikh, Monica Ali, Leila Aboulela, Elif Shafak and Fadia Faqir. The thesis is structured thematically into three sections, each section containing two chapters, one about travel writing and another about contemporary texts. In the first section, in order to examine how the texts negotiate foreignness in daily life, I consider hospitality theory, which describes how social power relations are based on roles of host and guest. In the second section, I argue that melancholia is an emotional experience endemic to migrancy. The texts demonstrate how this emotion is manifest communally as well as individually, which also shows the political potential of emotion. In the third section, I investigate how emotional processes of migration are described spatially in the texts. The findings of this research show that emotional knowledge is a major concern for migrant writers as a way of engaging with and critiquing the social and political climates of each text. This is produced through narrations about feeling in general and specific emotions, such as irritation or anxiety. Emotional experience is illustrated in conjunction with identities that are both fluid and intersectional, where gender and class converge with ethnicity and religion. The texts also show specifically affective styles of writing that concentrate on focalising women's intimate experiences through, for example, diary entries, bildungsroman or psychological realism. While the differing contexts reflect the particularities of each experience, there are sufficient similarities of narrative content and style to suggest that affective experience is a major concern for this body of literature. Overall, this thesis demonstrates the productive uses of affect theory as a critical stance for analysing postcolonial literature.

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Made available in DSpace on 2014-07-29T16:19:01Z (GMT). No. of bitstreams: 1 Dissertacao Clovis Meireles Nobrega Junior.pdf: 714176 bytes, checksum: b2e12462432e58c21f0de2b3188c186b (MD5) Previous issue date: 2011-02-17 / Caio Fernando Abreu always tried to create his fiction beyond conventionalisms of all kinds. In his works he exposes his particular themes through a personal use of language, considered by literary critics as very far away from the conventionalities of the Brazilian Literature of his time. This affirmation can be confirmed in great part of his narratives, such as in the following short stories selected for analysis in this thesis: "Photo","Sunday", "Flight", and "Owls", from Inventory of the Ir-remediable (1996);"Visit" and "The Canned Daisy", from The Stabbed Egg (1976);"The True Story/History of Sally Can Dance (and The Kids)",from Stones of Calcutta (1996),"For the Passage of a Great Pain" and "The Survivors" from Musty Strawberries (1995). In this study we tried to analyze certain aspects of the characters' common traits presented in Caio's narratives such as loneliness, disenchantment, disbelief and faithlessness, to demonstrate the strategies through which the writer creates these characters. The reason for this analyzes is due to a certain dissatisfaction in relation to the research conducted and published about Caio s works whose recurrent themes are, in its majority, related to the representation of homosexuality and counterculture, the Military Dictatorship in Brazil and exile because of it, the hippie movement and the emergence of AIDS, in which the text by the author is continually dismissed or considered as secondary. Using ideas by Mário de Andrade and José Paulo Paes, who respectively delineated the "failed hero" and the "poor devil" kinds of character, as well as others by Freud, Benjamin, Kristeva, Scliar and Klein, who dealt with the themes of melancholia and loneliness, we tried to present in this thesis Caio's characters as ―"melancholic-solitary" as they feel themselves strange and/or displaced in the world they live in. Furthermore, through ideas by Osman Lins, Genette and Friedman, we have tried to put into evidence the elements which create in the narratives, especially in the characters themselves and in the spaces they live in, the atmosphere of absolute loneliness and melancholia which characterizes Caio's works. / Caio Fernando Abreu always tried to create his fiction beyond conventionalisms of all kinds. In his works he exposes his particular themes through a personal use of language, considered by literary critics as very far away from the conventionalities of the Brazilian Literature of his time. This affirmation can be confirmed in great part of his narratives, such as in the following short stories selected for analysis in this thesis: "Photo","Sunday", "Flight", and "Owls", from Inventory of the Ir-remediable (1996);"Visit" and "The Canned Daisy", from The Stabbed Egg (1976);"The True Story/History of Sally Can Dance (and The Kids)",from Stones of Calcutta (1996),"For the Passage of a Great Pain" and "The Survivors" from Musty Strawberries (1995). In this study we tried to analyze certain aspects of the characters' common traits presented in Caio's narratives such as loneliness, disenchantment, disbelief and faithlessness, to demonstrate the strategies through which the writer creates these characters. The reason for this analyzes is due to a certain dissatisfaction in relation to the research conducted and published about Caio s works whose recurrent themes are, in its majority, related to the representation of homosexuality and counterculture, the Military Dictatorship in Brazil and exile because of it, the hippie movement and the emergence of AIDS, in which the text by the author is continually dismissed or considered as secondary. Using ideas by Mário de Andrade and José Paulo Paes, who respectively delineated the "failed hero" and the "poor devil" kinds of character, as well as others by Freud, Benjamin, Kristeva, Scliar and Klein, who dealt with the themes of melancholia and loneliness, we tried to present in this thesis Caio's characters as ―"melancholic-solitary" as they feel themselves strange and/or displaced in the world they live in. Furthermore, through ideas by Osman Lins, Genette and Friedman, we have tried to put into evidence the elements which create in the narratives, especially in the characters themselves and in the spaces they live in, the atmosphere of absolute loneliness and melancholia which characterizes Caio's works. / Caio Fernando Abreu sempre procurou desenvolver sua ficção acima dos convencionalismos de toda e qualquer ordem. Em suas obras, expôs uma temática própria, através do uso de uma linguagem tida por críticos literários como fora dos padrões tradicionais cultivados na literatura brasileira de sua época. Tal afirmação pode ser percebida em grande parte de suas narrativas, tais como nos seguintes contos, que selecionamos para análise nesta dissertação: "Fotografia", "Domingo", "Fuga" e "Corujas", de Inventário do ir-remediável (1996); ''Visita"' e "A margarida enlatada", de O ovo apunhalado (1976);"A verdadeira estória/história de Sally Can Dance (and The Kids)", de Pedras de Calcutá (1996) e "Pela passagem de uma grande dor" e "Os sobreviventes", de Morangos mofados (1995). Procuramos, neste estudo, evidenciar certos aspectos dos traços comuns às personagens apresentadas nas narrativas do escritor, como solidão, desencanto, descrença e falta de fé, buscando demonstrar as estratégias através das quais o autor criou essas personagens. A razão para essa análise é resultado de certa insatisfação em relação às pesquisas feitas e publicadas a respeito da obra de Caio, cujos temas recorrentes estão, em grande parte, relacionados com a representação da homossexualidade, bem como com a contracultura, a Ditadura Militar e exílio por causa dela, o movimento hippie e o surgimento da AIDS, nos quais o texto do autor muitas vezes é relegado a um segundo plano. Assim, recorrendo a Mário de Andrade e José Paulo Paes, que respectivamente delinearam a figura do "herói fracassado" e do "pobre diabo", assim como a Freud, Benjamin, Kristeva, Scliar e Klein, que trataram do tema da melancolia ou da solidão, apresentamos, neste trabalho, as personagens de Caio como "melancólico-solitárias", tomadas pela sensação de estranhamento e deslocamento diante do mundo em que vivem. Além disso, retomando autores como Osman Lins, Genette e Friedman, tentamos evidenciar os elementos que criam nas narrativas, especificamente nas personagens e nos espaços nelas representados, a atmosfera de total solidão e melancolia, que caracteriza a obra do escritor. / Caio Fernando Abreu sempre procurou desenvolver sua ficção acima dos convencionalismos de toda e qualquer ordem. Em suas obras, expôs uma temática própria, através do uso de uma linguagem tida por críticos literários como fora dos padrões tradicionais cultivados na literatura brasileira de sua época. Tal afirmação pode ser percebida em grande parte de suas narrativas, tais como nos seguintes contos, que selecionamos para análise nesta dissertação: "Fotografia", "Domingo", "Fuga" e "Corujas", de Inventário do ir-remediável (1996); ''Visita"' e "A margarida enlatada", de O ovo apunhalado (1976);"A verdadeira estória/história de Sally Can Dance (and The Kids)", de Pedras de Calcutá (1996) e "Pela passagem de uma grande dor" e "Os sobreviventes", de Morangos mofados (1995). Procuramos, neste estudo, evidenciar certos aspectos dos traços comuns às personagens apresentadas nas narrativas do escritor, como solidão, desencanto, descrença e falta de fé, buscando demonstrar as estratégias através das quais o autor criou essas personagens. A razão para essa análise é resultado de certa insatisfação em relação às pesquisas feitas e publicadas a respeito da obra de Caio, cujos temas recorrentes estão, em grande parte, relacionados com a representação da homossexualidade, bem como com a contracultura, a Ditadura Militar e exílio por causa dela, o movimento hippie e o surgimento da AIDS, nos quais o texto do autor muitas vezes é relegado a um segundo plano. Assim, recorrendo a Mário de Andrade e José Paulo Paes, que respectivamente delinearam a figura do "herói fracassado" e do "pobre diabo", assim como a Freud, Benjamin, Kristeva, Scliar e Klein, que trataram do tema da melancolia ou da solidão, apresentamos, neste trabalho, as personagens de Caio como "melancólico-solitárias", tomadas pela sensação de estranhamento e deslocamento diante do mundo em que vivem. Além disso, retomando autores como Osman Lins, Genette e Friedman, tentamos evidenciar os elementos que criam nas narrativas, especificamente nas personagens e nos espaços nelas representados, a atmosfera de total solidão e melancolia, que caracteriza a obra do escritor.

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A written thesis to accompany the M.F.A. Exhibition Cumulative Grief, in which the artist's personal and familial narrative explores the complexity and nuances of racial grief.

This dissertation examines lesbian and queer desire in texts in Catalan and Spanish written in Barcelona, Montevideo, and Buenos Aires from the 1960s to the present. In the texts, desire includes but is not limited to the erotic; it encompasses issues of queer textuality, relationality, and literary transmission. I focus on the works of three authors who have spent the majority of their lives in Barcelona. However, the city appears almost incidentally in their works; the genealogies that the authors trace are transnational. The texts combine literal movement (through exile or diaspora) and a metaphorical sense of being “out of place” that prompts writers to take refuge in writing. I demonstrate that despite depicting affinities beyond the family and nation, the works reveal the persistence of familial and national ties, albeit in spectral or queer ways. Rather than tracing continuous lines of descent that emphasise origins, the works are principally concerned with futurity and fragmentation, as in Michel Foucault’s reading of genealogy. Chapter One on Maria-Mercè Marçal’s La passió segons Renée Vivien (1994) traces a literary genealogy from Sappho to Renée Vivien in fin de siècle Paris to Marçal. The novel represents a merging of literary desire and erotic desire; Marçal’s search for symbolic mothers turns out to be a search for symbolic lovers that is oriented towards the present and future. In Chapter Two, I posit that in Cristina Peri Rossi’s La nave de los locos (1984) “happiness” consists of being open to chance and unpredictability unlike in conventional “happy” scripts in which a valuable life is believed to consist of (heterosexual) marriage, children, and property ownership. In Part II I argue that through fragmentation, allegory, and ambiguity, Peri Rossi’s El libro de mis primos (1969) contests authoritarian discourse without itself becoming a site of hegemonic meaning. In inviting the reader’s collaboration, it ensures authorial legacy. Part I of Chapter Three is an analysis of the temporality of obsession in Flavia Company’s Querida Nélida (1988). I propose that obsession and melancholia may point to a utopian future rather than signalling an entrapment in the past. My study of Melalcor (2000) in Part II suggests that queer forms of relationality that are not centred on procreation and monogamy offer ethical models of sociality. Part III focusses on Company’s return to biological family in Volver antes que ir (2012) and Por mis muertos (2014). The resurgence in these texts of family members who have died signals that just as the queer haunts the family, the family haunts the queer.

Living Disability: Ways Forward from Decontextual Models of Disability consists of six articles that provide both theoretical and pragmatic commentaries on decontextual approaches to vulnerability and disability. In What Contemporary Models of Disability Miss: The Case for a Phenomenological Hermeneutic Analysis I argue many commonly accepted models for understanding disability use a vertical method in which disability is defined as a category into which people are slotted based on whether or not they fit its definitional criteria. This method inevitably homogenizes the experiences of disabled people. A hermeneutic investigation of commonly accepted models for understanding disability will provide an epistemological tool to critique and to augment contemporary models of disability. In A Phenomenological Hermeneutic Resolution to the Principlist- Narrative Bioethics Debate Narrative, I note narrative approaches to bioethics and principlist approaches to bioethics have often been presented in fundamental opposition to each other. I argue that a phenomenological hermeneutic approach to the debate finds a compromise between both positions that maintains what is valuable in each of them. Justifying an Adequate Response to the Vulnerable Other examines the possibility of endorsing the position that I, as a moral agent, ought to do my best to respond adequately to the other’s vulnerability. I contend that, insofar as I value my personal identity, it is consistent to work toward responding adequately to the vulnerability of the other both ontologically and ethically. Who Can Make a Yes?: Disability, Gender, Sexual Consent and ‘Yes Means Yes’ examines the ‘yes means yes’ model of sexual consent, and the political and ethical commitments that underpin this model, noting three fundamental Ph.D. Thesis – C. Kavanagh; McMaster University - Philosophy v disadvantages. This position unfairly polices the sexual expression of participants, particularly vulnerable participants such as disabled people, it demands an unreasonably high standard for defining sexual interaction as consensual, and allows perpetrators of sexual violence to define consent. In Craving Sameness, Accepting Difference: The Possibility of Solidarity and Social Justice I note realist accounts typically define solidarity on the basis of a static feature of human nature. We stand in solidarity with some other person, or group of people, because we share important features in common. In opposition to such realist accounts, Richard Rorty defines solidarity as a practical tool, within which there is always an ‘us’, with whom we stand in solidarity, and a ‘them’, with whom we are contrasted. I argue that by understanding Rorty’s pragmatic solidarity in terms of the relational view of solidarity offered by Alexis Shotwell, it is possible to conceptualise solidarity in a manner that allows for extending the boundaries of the community with whom we stand in solidarity. In Translating Non-Human Actors I examine Bruno Latour’s position that nonhuman things can be made to leave interpretable statements, and have a place in democracy. With the right types of mediators, the scientist can translate for non-humans, and those voices will allow for nonhuman political representation. I wish to suggest that, like scientists, people with disabilities are particularly capable of building networks that facilitate translation between humans and non-humans. / Thesis / Doctor of Philosophy (PhD) / Living Disability: Ways Forward from Decontextual Models of Disability consists of six separate articles that provide both theoretical and pragmatic commentaries on decontextual approaches to vulnerability and disability. The first three articles examine contemporary approaches to understanding vulnerability and disability, and explore what a contextual theoretical approach, one that puts the experiences of people with disabilities at the centre, might look like. The second three articles provide a bioethical examination of practical ethical questions associated with the treatment of people with disabilities when it comes to social and political positions on disability and sexuality, solidarity with people with disabilities, and the relationship between people with disabilities and objects.

Aiming to make an intervention in both emerging Slow Cinema and classical Trauma Cinema scholarship, this thesis demonstrates the ways in which the post-trauma cinema of Filipino filmmaker Lav Diaz merges aesthetics of cinematic slowness with narratives of post-trauma in his films Melancholia (2008), Death in the Land of Encantos (2007) and Florentina Hubaldo, CTE (2012). Diaz has been repeatedly considered as representative of what Jonathan Romney termed in 2004 “Slow Cinema”. The director uses cinematic slowness for an alternative approach to an on-screen representation of post-trauma. Contrary to popular trauma cinema, Diaz’s portrait of individual and collective trauma focuses not on the instantenaeity but on the duration of trauma. In considering trauma as a condition and not as an event, Diaz challenges the standard aesthetical techniques used in contemporary Trauma Cinema, as highlighted by Janet Walker (2001, 2005), Susannah Radstone (2001), Roger Luckhurst (2008) and others. Diaz’s films focus instead on trauma’s latency period, the depletion of a survivor’s resources, and a character’s slow psychological breakdown. Slow Cinema scholarship has so far focused largely on the films’ aesthetics and their alleged opposition to mainstream cinema. Little work has been done in connecting the films’ form to their content. Furthermore, Trauma Cinema scholarship, as trauma films themselves, has been based on the immediate and most radical signs of post-trauma, which are characterised by instantaneity; flashbacks, sudden fears of death and sensorial overstimulation. Following Lutz Koepnick’s argument that slowness offers “intriguing perspectives” (Koepnick, 2014: 191) on how trauma can be represented in art, this thesis seeks to consider the equally important aspects of trauma duration, trauma’s latency period and the slow development of characteristic symptoms. With the present work, I expand on current notions of Trauma Cinema, which places emphasis on speed and the unpredictability of intrusive memories. Furthermore, I aim to broaden the area of Slow Cinema studies, which has so far been largely focused on the films’ respective aesthetics, by bridging form and content of the films under investigation. Rather than seeing Diaz’s slow films in isolation as a phenomenon of Slow Cinema, I seek to connect them to the existing scholarship of Trauma Cinema studies, thereby opening up a reading of his films.