The thesis aims to analyse Sam Selvon's fiction between 1950 and 1990 in relation to the colonial subjects' identity crisis. The thesis will argue that Selvon's fiction is independent of traditional and canonical categories because his representation of colonial subjects is entirely innovative and unprecedented. I will analyse Selvon's novels A Brighter Sun (1952), An Island is a World (1955), The Lonely Londoners (1956), The Housing Lark (1965), Moses Ascending (1975), and Moses Migrating (1983). Each novel sheds light on a different facet of the colonial subject. Nevertheless, colonisation, migration, and identity crisis are common themes for the novels chosen. From A Brighter Sun to Moses Migrating, Selvon destroys the caricatured image of the colonised subject. He reaches authenticity on the level of character depiction and through the vernacular, ballad-like narrative. Additionally, the novels represent different aspects of colonisation and migration: "back at home", "the motherland", and "back and forth". I will display how every aspect is fluid and undefinable. A Brighter Sun takes place in the West Indies. An Island is a World displays "back and forth" experience in the West Indies, USA, and Britain. The Lonely Londoners, The Housing Lark, and Moses Ascending take place in "the motherland"....

This research explores the challenges the Namibian government faces in the planning process when implementing policies for strategic spatial planning (SSP). The study considers the entire Namibian planning process which primarily is governed top-down but has since independence adopted policies to decentralize power. Thus, this process has been slow and resulted in constant changes in governance settings and responsibilities. The aim of the research is, therefore, to assess the evolving nature of the governance structure in Namibia’s SSP system, and to enhance its impact on postcolonial planning strategies against urban sprawl. The rapid development of urban sprawl has been selected because it is one of the major contemporary issues for SSP practices, extending across multiple jurisdictions and demanding stakeholder coordination. The support question focuses on the nature of Namibia's governance structure in SSP and how it has evolved from the colonial to postcolonial eras. The following research questions explore the effectiveness of spatial strategies for urban sprawl and the communication links within the governance system, as well as the impact of statutory plans for SSP. Together they aim to answer if Namibia is facing challenges in the implementation of SSP, and if so, what can be done to improve the situation.  The methods for data collection consist of semi-structured interviews and a document study. The data enables a comprehensive understanding of the Namibian planning system related to the research questions. The results are analyzed through a theoretical framework with three main themes: land use intentions, governance processes, and external conditions. Identifying relevant planning strategies, hierarchies, and power relations. The empirical material consists of 11 interviews. Six of these are made with officials from all planning levels; the national, regional, and local, and the others by key informants. Key informants are experts on Namibia’s planning system and political climate. This is complemented by an analysis of public planning documents used for spatial planning, referred to by the respondents.  The result shows that decentralization from the national to subnational planning levels has taken place to a certain extent, although the autonomy among local and regional planning authorities is limited. This is because of the national government's reluctance to surrender control over the economy as well as due to a local lack of knowledge about strategy-making for land use. Furthermore, the main issues are the lack of strategic plans that coordinates and guides SSP, weak communication links between government levels, and the gap between political initiatives for decentralization and the subnational demand. The lack of communication links affects the governance process between planning levels as well as the coordination inside each government. This prolongs decision-making and connects to the gap between the national intentions for decentralization and the weak local demand for it. Moreover, the partial decentralization has confused stakeholders by delegating responsibility without the actual mandate to act, leading to limited strategies and poor execution of actions against urban sprawl. External pressures from international agencies influencing the governance process also add to the challenges for postcolonial planning. The thesis suggests several improvement opportunities to increase the implementation rate of spatial strategies. These include strengthened support systems from the national to the subnational level, alignment among strategic plans, and stronger communication links to improve governance processes. External pressures could become a more rewarding asset if international involvement began to support local knowledge instead of channeling Western ideals. These understandings matter because they provide theories of the urban with a global south narrative instead of the dominant Western perspective of governance, decentralization, and SSP.

This thesis explores the role of translation in the production and manipulation of identities in the contemporary Americas as exemplified in the work of Guillermo Gómez-Peña. Underscoring the instrumentality of borders vis-à-vis dominant constructions of identity and in connection with questions of language, race, and citizenship, I argue that translation not only functions as an agent of hegemonic superiority and oppression, but also as a locus of plurivocity and hybridization. Drawing from the concepts “continuous variation” (Deleuze and Guattari [1987] 2004), “coloniality of power” (Mignolo 2000), and “hybridization” (García-Canclini 1995), I discuss the connection of translation with three main topics: monolingualism, globalization, and racial hybridity. First, I discuss the influence that the dominant ideology of the nation-state has exerted on the way translation has been conceptualized since translation studies emerged as a field. Then I turn to colonial legacies in the Americas and the role of translation in situations of language hegemony as shaped by forces of assimilation and diversification. Finally, I look at translation as a crucial agent for the production and legitimization of Latin American identity throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Viewing translation as a performative and transformative activity, I critique a number of contemporary approaches to translation and I point to new understandings of translation as a cluster concept (Tymoczko 2007) in order to expand translation theory and practice beyond Western paradigms.

Since the release of Nelson Mandela in 1990 and his subsequent election to the presidency in 1994, South Africa certainly has not achieved the hopes and dreams of its people or for the rest of the continent. But despite bleak conditions, there are many who still have hope for their country. One of those people is Zakes Mda, and his hope is reflected in his novels. Yet, his novels remain complex. They do not provide all-encompassing solutions or answers to the problems that face the nation. But they do address questions with possibilities, suggestions, and innovation. The South Africa he creates, both in the past and the present, embodies what the real South Africa is and isn’t, and what it has the potential to be. Mda is not afraid to be critical of his own people, he is not afraid to face the history of his country with an equally critical lens, and even more importantly, he is not afraid to face the future of his country with that same critical gaze. This open approach to the people of his country, to its history, and current policies opens up his narrative to imagination, allowing his characters to re-envision themselves more completely and form a more complete and encompassing cultural identity that was previously denied to them.

I write performance autoethnography as a methodological project committed to evoking embodied and lived experience in academic texts, using performance writing to decolonize academic knowledge production. Through a fragmented itinerary across continents and ethnicities, across religions and languages, across academic and vocational careers, I speak from the everyday spaces in between supposedly stable cultural identities involving race, ethnicity, class, gendered norms, to name a few. I write against colonizing practices which police the racist, sexist, and xenophobic cultural politics that produce and validate particular identities. I write from the intersections of my own living experiences within and against those cultural practices, and I bring these intersections with me into the academic spaces where I live and labor, intertwining the personal and the professional. Within the academy, colonizing structures manifest in ways that value disembodied and objectified Western knowledges about people, while excluding certain bodies and lived experiences from research texts. My thesis locates the academy as both a site for struggle and an arena for transformative work, turning from Others as objects of study and toward decolonizing academic knowledge production, making Western epistemologies themselves the objects of inquiry (Smith 1999; Denzin 2003; Moreira 2009). Connecting with a tradition and community of scholars in the ‘seventh moment’ of qualitative research (Denzin & Lincoln, 2005b), I disrupt acts of academic(s) writing as the textual labor most privileged in the academy. In this thesis I write messy acts of embodied knowledges (Weems 2003; Moreira 2007), including this abstract itself, while each act resists and breaks forms of ‘traditional’ academic writing to varying degrees, ranging from subtle to overtly transgressive. My ‘fieldwork’ invokes my 35 years of perpetual migration: observed through my messy and unvalidated perspectives, recorded and transcribed through my messy and unreliable body, distorted by my messy and deceptive memories, and experienced every single day in messy encounters out of my control, while I live and labor as a perpetual betweener. I write visceral texts as performance acts that invite us all, as betweeners, to write and read from the flesh in order to turn our gaze toward decolonizing academic knowledge production.

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The intent of this thesis is to discuss the manner in which four black newspapers covered the U.S. Masters Tournament, hosted annually at the Augusta National Golf Club, Georgia, from 1994 through 2001. The four black newspapers include two from the North, the New Pittsburgh Courier and the Chicago Defender, and two from the South, the Atlanta Voice and the Birmingham Times. It is my contention that U.S. Masters coverage in the aforementioned black papers is dependent upon the presence of Tiger Woods. Without Woods' participation at the Masters, coverage of the event would be diminished in the four black newspapers. The years 1994 through 2001 (excluding the Birmingham Times which was only microfilmed to 1999) have been analyzed in each of the four newspapers in order to present my case. The thesis proves that to the four black newspapers Tiger Woods is the deciding factor in its Masters coverage.

This study analyzes the rhetoric of William "Parson" Brownlow during the Civil War era. Within the pages of the Whig, Brownlow's famous newspaper, he created a fixed image of African Americans. Brownlow argued that when removed from slavery, people of African descent naturally became barbaric, and thus slavery was needed to ensure the safety of the white population. Despite this consistency in racial thought, Brownlow, through the course of the 1850s shifted from defending slavery as a necessary evil to promoting slavery as an unqualified blessing in the years before the Civil War. Furthermore, during Brownlow's governorship of Tennessee during Reconstruction, Brownlow argued that slavery was economically deleterious to poor white farmers. These findings have important implications for the history of Appalachia. Most specifically, Brownlow's racist rhetoric suggests that race perceptions in East Tennessee were not significantly separable from the race sentiments of the larger South.

This study examines recurring motifs and personas in hip-hop. Interviews with influential hip-hop scholars, writers and music industry personnel were conducted and analyzed using qualitative methods. Interview subjects were selected based on their insider knowledge as music critics, hip-hop scholars, ethnomusicologists, publicists, and music industry positions. The vast majority of constructed imagery in hip-hop is based on a single persona, the gangsta. This qualitative analysis reveals why gangsta personas and motifs have become the de facto imagery of hip-hop. Gangsta imagery is repeatedly presented because it sells, it is the most readily-available role, and because of music industry pressures. This study is significant because gangsta imagery impacts African American social knowledge and the generalized perception of blackness. Gangsta imagery has also served to alienate black culture and has caused rifts in the African American community.

My research examines the enslaved black woman's reclamation of self through the use of voice and resistance from enslavement into freedom. I argue that the enslaved black woman's voice was one that grew stronger and louder, in an effort to have her story heard, through her attempts of reclamation of self and transition from slave to a free woman. I begin with an introduction to the purpose of my research. Chapter one describes my approach to my research. Chapter two describes the conditions of slavery for black women. Chapter three describes enslaved black women's mechanisms of resistance. Chapter four examinations the reclamation of self in slavemade quilts and the controversial Underground Railroad Quilt Code. Chapter five examines the reclamation of voice in Harriet Jacobs' narrative, Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, written under a pseudonym, Linda Brent, after she escaped from slavery. Chapter six examines the reclamation of womanhood is Dr. Anna Julia Cooper's text, A Voice from the South. My conclusion describes how these historical events are still relevant to present-day society.