This thesis on Dominica is the only study in the social sciences which deals extensively and exclusively with the life experience of Dominicans. The study has three interrelated purposes. It analyses and interprets the life experience of Dominicans as subjects of their own experiences rather than as objects or victims of colonial forces. It seeks to reveal to Dominicans that, despite their colonization, they have a positive identity of which they can be proud and which can be useful to them in the realization of their future aspirations. Finally, it argues consistently against more common metropolitan perspectives used in the analysis of Caribbean experience. The thesis attempts to accomplish these interrelated purposes by an examination of those significant activities in the Dominican life experience which have been directed towards human survival and change in the colonial situation. Specifically, the study shows how Dominicans themselves, beginning with the slave period, through the emancipation era, the creation of political organizations, right up to the Castle Bruce Cooperative Movement, have acted constantly on their own behalf in order to achieve the dual objectives of survival and change. Finally, given the emphasis of the thesis and because Dominica is probably the least studied Island in the British Caribbean, the study is considered a contribution not only to the understanding of Dominican political and social life, but also to Caribbean and general social science literature. / Thesis / Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)

This study analyzes the news texts of Typhoon Morakot, applying news discourse analysis and post-colonial concepts to discuss the specific types of aboriginal representation in the media, and the media also shape some specific discourse for aboriginal people. After analyzing the news texts, it shows that mainstream media represent aboriginal as the negative other, while alternative media represent them as the subjects who can acclaim their own rights. These two different discourses imply that there are some complex power relations behind the news texts, the mainstream media reinforce the power from central government and the charity organization. They build a strong and powerful discourse to rationalize their dominance over aboriginals, which excludes aboriginals¡¦ opinions from the public policy. However, this study also shows there is an alternative direction of power; alternative media try to subvert the mainstream discourse. They point out the central government is the trouble maker, aboriginals shouldn¡¦t be scapegoats. Hence, we can find that aboriginals are on the way to establish their own subjects.

This study describes case managers' perceptions of the association between methamphetamine and child neglect. The analysis indicates that out of 30 women, 100.0% agreed that the use of methamphetamine is associated with child neglect. Children are being neglected due to methamphetamine causing impairment in the parents' ability to appropriately care for their children. The study findings note a statistically significant relationship between the variables at the .05 level of probability.

My thesis analyzes James Joyce’s engagement with Catholic-nationalist Ireland’s (mis)understanding of women in Dubliners, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, and Ulysses. I argue that, while Joyce shows both men and women struggling against the constraints of Catholic-nationalist gender roles, he implies that neither can be free from those constraints until Irish artists seek to more thoroughly understand women. After explaining how Catholic-nationalist rhetoric influenced the Irish understanding of women, I argue that Joyce not only recognizes and engages with Irish gender oppression but also believes that Irish art both constructs and is constructed by this oppression. With analyses of some of Joyce’s female characters, Stephen Dedalus, and Molly Bloom, I demonstrate how Joyce critiques Irish culture’s concept of women and Irish art’s representation of them, and then establishes a new paradigm of artistic representation.

This thesis investigates testimonies of three female authors from Latin America and the Middle East through scriptotherapy narratives which "give voice to previously repressed memories," defined by Sidonie Smith and Julia Watson. Through the genre of autobiography, women have an opportunity to showcase acts of resistance towards the inner turmoil of colonial trauma that has been brought upon their existence. Decoloniality re-integrates the roots of colonial power into re-invigorated narratives that will become lineage. The only way that they can create their own identity is through "legending," Gilles Deleuze's conceptualized theoretical framework, which does not offer an escape from colonialism but utilizes its power to offer narratives of healing. As "scriptotherapy" narratives, these female authors are displaying resistance by circulating their stories to the global public and bringing communities together to understand that it is possible to stop the cycle of trauma and abuse that exists to keep the women of their culture repressed. I argue that Julia Alvarez and Azar Nafisi's scriptotherapy narratives encode trauma as acts of resistance in relation to turbulent political situations in their home countries. Julia Alvarez's Something to Declare: Essays (1998) details her experiences as a Latin American woman who has been displaced, bodily, from the Dominican Republic during its revolutionary period from April to September of 1965. Azar Nafisi's Things I've Been Silent About: Memories of a Prodigal Daughter (2008) paints a historical portrait of her Iranian family life during the Islamic Revolution of 1978–1979 and the toll the colonial powers had on cultivating her journey into womanhood. Adriana Páramo's My Mother's Funeral (2013) showcases writing as trauma reintegrated into a narrative in which personal ideologies and native Spanish language construct an intersectional space. Through storytelling, women are advocated for globally and consciously brought into the major Western culture to instigate change.

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Although the field of German Romantic Orientalism has been growing in recent years, the prolific writer E.T.A. Hoffmann has largely escaped critical attention. This study of his oeuvre reveals, however, that it was shaped and influenced by both the scholarly and popular orientalist discourses of his time. Furthermore, Hoffmann satirises literary orientalist practices even as he takes part in them, and so his work exposes the ambivalence of the apparent German veneration for the ‘Romantic’ Orient. While Hoffmann responds to the Romantic image of the Orient set up by his predecessors (J.G. Herder, Novalis, Friedrich Schlegel), he does so in order to reveal both the uses and the limits of this model for the Romantic artist in the modern world. The Orient serves as an inspiration for Romantic art, and thus Edward Said’s claim that the Romantics appropriated the East merely for the rejuvenation of European literature must be acknowledged. Nevertheless, as an extremely self-aware writer, Hoffmann does not utilise this approach uncritically. My thesis shows how Hoffmann responded to the image of the Orient as it was produced by writers, musicians, and scholars inside the German-speaking lands. The Orient resists successful imitation, as his texts acknowledge when they turn a critical eye towards German cultural production. Furthermore, Hoffmann’s famous criticism of nineteenth-century society is enhanced by comparison of German and oriental characters, with the latter often coming out more favourably. Hoffmann’s tales therefore demand a reassessment of the view that the Romantics constructed the Orient exclusively as a paradisaical land of poetic fulfilment. His (self-) reflective response to the nineteenth-century treatment of the Orient in Germany marks him out as an original – and essential – voice in Romantic Orientalism.

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Recent studies of globalization provide contrasting views of the cultural and sociopolitical effects of such major corporations as Disney as they invest transnationally and circulate their offerings around the world. While some scholars emphasize the ubiquity of Disney’s products and its promotion of consumerism on a global scale, accompanied by cultural homogenization, faltering democracy, and diminishing state sovereignty, others highlight signs of contestation and resistance, questioning the various state-capitalist alliances presumed to hold in the encounter between a global company, a local state, and the people. The settlement process and the cultural import of Hong Kong Disneyland in Hong Kong complicate these studies because of the evolving post-colonial situation that Disney encounters in Hong Kong. While Disney specializes in “imagineering” dreams, Hong Kong itself is messily imagining what “Hong Kong” is and should be, and how it should deal with others, including transnational companies and Mainlanders. In this thesis, I appropriate Doreen Massey’s ideas of space-time in order to examine Hong Kong Disneyland not as a self-enclosed park but as itself a multiplicity of spaces where dynamic social relations intersect in the wider context of post-colonial Hong Kong. I illuminate the shifting relationship between Disney, Mainlanders, and the locals as this relationship develops in its discursive, institutional, and everyday-life aspects. Through interviews and ethnographic research, I study how my respondents have established and interpreted the meanings of Hong Kong Disneyland, and how they have made use of the park to support their own constructions of place, of politics, and of identity.