Slavery is something that cannot be taken lightly. Even Butler says no matter how harsh the slavery in her novel is, it does not compare to how gruesome actual slavery was: “As a matter of fact, one of the things I realized when I was reading the slave narrative…was that I was not going to be able to come anywhere near presenting slavery as it was. I was going to have to do a some-what cleaned-up version of slavery, or no one would be willing to read it” (qtd. in Kenan 497). Octavia Butler knew that if she presented slavery directly and in a way that called people, most likely white males, that there would not be an audience for the novel. Instead she had to present slavery as something society shaped, rather than a specific group of individuals. An analysis of Octavia Butler’s Kindred reveals that societal expectations alter the dynamics of such interracial relationships as those between Dana and Kevin, Dana and Rufus, and Rufus and Alice, determining their success or failure without regard to the foundations upon which these relationships were initially built.

This dissertation argues that racism in Brazil is largely a product of the Eurocentrism that presides over the formation and formulation of Brazil(ianness). The ideological construction of the nation on notions of identity and difference rooted in a Eurocentric definition of modernity has translated into an epistemological division between modern subjects (the Colonial Self: the Portuguese) and subjects of modernity (the Colonised Others: the Indian and the African). That is, between subjects and objects. The objectification of the Others can be found within the realm of the social (the Other as social object: the Slave), the cultural (the Other as cultural object: the Exotic), and the biological (the Other as sexual object: the Erotic). This epistemological division enabled the hierarchisation of differences between the Civilised Self and the Savage Other(s) and the racist (re)invention of Brazil in the 19th century. This dissertation re-examines racism in Brazil by means of the analysis of the three historical events that have come to define the nation (Discovery, Independence and Abolition) as well as the so-called essence of the nation (Hybridity). The analysis reveals that the reinvention of Brazil as a hybrid nation has not eliminated the hierarchy of differences. On the contrary, the celebration of hybridity has served to obscure the largely exploitative character of the processes of cultural hybridity [mestiçagem or transculturation] and biological hybridity [miscegenação or miscegenation] and to mask secular prejudices and discrimination against the Indian and African Others. In Brazil, hybridity still operates within the Eurocentric discourse of Brazilianness that incorporated the Indian and African Others as objects or, at best, dependent subjects in the formation and formulation of Brazil(ianness). The corollary of this is that without unthinking and undoing the Eurocentrism that informs the national imagination there is little that hybridity can do to undermine racism and white hegemony in Brazil. / Thesis (Ph.D.) - University of Adelaide, School of History and Politics, 2008

Asian/American women occupy a highly circumscribed subject position in popular Western culture that entails a unique reading of our bodies. My discussion of this group will gain greater depth and scope by using Black body theory as a theoretical framework to better understand how Asian/American bodies become a site to enact a multitude of fantasies, fears, and anxieties. I will examine three case studies: the construction of the interracial “romance” featuring Asian/American women produced in classical Hollywood cinema, interracial pornography featuring Asian/American female performers, and the independent works of Asian/American feminist filmmakers. Topics interrogated include the over-determination of non-White bodies and possibilities for destabilizing bodies and crafting their new legibility.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--Lehigh University, 2003. / Includes vita. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 323-331).

Gilberto Freyre's Casa-grande & senzala (1933) (The Masters and the Slaves) and William Faulkner's Absalom, Absalom! (1936) revisit and reevaluate Romantic notions of history, especially national progress and attendant accounts of racial purity and whiteness of "the people." The plantation home emerges in their texts as the common locus of historical and cultural experiences and as the principle symbol and metaphor for the domination of colonial forces. This dissertation explores how Freyre and Faulkner both take up the contemporary issue of miscegenation as the primary theme in their respective works. They elaborate this theme and explore its ramifications through the central, grounding image of the plantation home, which they approach through a historical sensibility and from a historical perspective. Freyre and Faulkner work from within paradigms from Europe to rewrite them, as they re-think the legacies of colonialism and of the plantation organization in non-national, non-ethnic, non-Hegelian, generative, deterministic terms. Their works seek to offer viable and independent counter-discourses to the dominant European cultural models -- new, non-nationalist narratives of historical destiny based on culture and economics rather than on any overarching political-historical destiny, as the epics of Europe's nations had been told in the era. This dissertation hopes to contribute to the scholarship that questions the essentialist notions of race and nation, as they were conceived on the plantation in rural regions of the New World. This project recovers a transnational tradition of political opposition -- a tradition that roots itself in the anthropology of experience rather than in the determinism of origin and inheritance. It will also argue for disciplinary realignments in the literature of the Americas, by proposing that further efforts be made to study the New World plantation and its effective geography. On the basis of the discussion on Faulkner, Southern literature ought to observe a new division between the Upper South and the Lower South, demarcated by the border between North and South Carolina, on the basis of the demographics, economics, and, in turn, self-understanding of these respective regions. / text

For over forty years, at the turn of this century, the white settlers of Southern Rhodesia devoted considerable energy to the discussion and the regulation of inter-racial sexual relations. The settlers' worries about maintaining their position in power were expressed, in part, in the periodic outbreaks of 'black peril' hysteria, a term which well-captures white fears about the threat that African men were thought to represent to white women. Although voluntary sexual encounters between white women and black men were prohibited from 1903 onwards, no such prohibition existed for white men in their relations with black women. The white women made several attempts to have legislation passed prohibiting such liasons, and failed largely because in doing so they were perceived to be challenging the authority of the white men. The regulation of interracial sexual intercourse thus served to reinforce the white male domination of Rhodesian society.

A key aim of this study is to shed light on the representation of coloured women with reference to racial passing, using fictive characters depicted in Sarah Gertrude Millin’s (1924) God’s Stepchildren,Zoë Wicomb’s (2006) Playing in the Light, and Pat Stamatélos’s (2005) Kroes, as presented by these three racially distinct female South African authors.Since I propose that literature provides a link between a subjective history and the under-represented narratives from the margins, I use literature to reimagine these. I analyse the ways in which the authors present ‘hybrid’ identities within their characters in different ways, and provide an explanation and contextual basis for the exploration of the theme of ‘passing for and as white’ within South Africa’s complex history. I provide a sociological explanation of the act of racial passing in South Africa with reference to the United States by incorporating Nella Larsen’s (1929) Passing. Since the analyses will concentrate on coloured females within the texts, gendered identity and female sexuality and stereotypes will be the focus. I look at the act and agent of passing, the role of raced and gendered performance in giving meaning to social identities, and the way in which the female body is constructed in racial terms in order to confer identity. Tracing the historical origins of coloured identity and coloured female identity, I interrogate this colonial, post-colonial, apartheid and post-apartheid history by employing a feminist lens. A combination of postcolonial feminist discourse analysis, sociological inquiry and feminist narrative analysis are therefore the methods I use to achieve my research aims. / Magister Artium - MA

Thesis (M.A.)--Baylor University, 2008. / Includes bibliographical references (p. 89-94)

Thesis (Ph.D.)--Michigan State University. Dept. of English, 2008. / Title from PDF t.p. (viewed on July 22, 2009) Includes bibliographical references (p. 248-259). Also issued in print.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Canterbury, 2004. / Typescript (photocopy). Includes bibliographical references (leaves 319-379). Also available via the World Wide Web.