In the span of one hundred years, the Borana pastoralist communities of Northern Kenya experienced relative changes and transformation in their social, political and economic life. During their almost seven decades rule (1890-1963), the British introduced a number of policies to facilitate political control and economic exploitation. In the subsequent three decades after independence (1963-1990), the Kenyan government also introduced social and economic policies to enable the integration of the pastoral economy into that of the nation. Although the policies under both regimes affected the life of the Borana, they neither led to a complete end to Borana nomadic pastoralism, nor did they bring the Borana too close to the center. The Borana responded to the policies innovatively neither totally rejecting them nor wholly incorporating them. This dissertation examines the social and economic impact of colonial and postcolonial state polices from the 1890s to the 1990s on the Borana. The study emphasizes how the Borana responded to the strategies through getting formal education, innovation in gender roles, engagaing in modern livestock trade, and migration and settlement in towns to earn cash and pay taxes. Through a critical examination of oral, archival and secondary sources, this dissertation concludes that the Borana were not passive recipients of system imposed on them by both regimes, but they adjusted their social and economic life to new realities that they encountered without totally abandoning their established livelihood. This study concludes that, despite the transformations that have taken place in the last century, pastoralism is still important to the Borana socioeconomic and cultural life. This study's findings suggest that the Borana neither completely rejected changes in their situation nor whole-heartedly incorporated them. They used patterns of accommodation and adaptation to balance their traditional ways of life with that of the new world to deal with internal and external forces of disruption. This has implications for post-colonial scholarship as well as Kenyan policymakers who have been dealing with recent political and social reforms.

This comparative study of Zimbabwean immigrants in Britain illustrates why they should not be viewed as reified communities with fixed essence, but as a product of ethno-racial identities and prejudices developed and nurtured during the phases of Zimbabwe’s history. Through an analysis of personal interviews, participant observation, and secondary and primary sources, the thesis identifies and engages historical experiences which had been instrumental in not only constructing relations between Zimbabwean immigrant communities, but also their economic and social integration processes. The quest to recognise historic legacies on Zimbabwean immigrants’ interactions and integration processes necessitated the first thematic chapter to engage the construction of ethno-racial identities in the pre-colonial, colonial and post-colonial phases of Zimbabwe’s history. With contemporary literature on the Zimbabwean communities in Britain tending to create perceptions that Zimbabwean immigrants are a monolithic community of Blacks, the thesis’ examination of inter-community relations between Blacks, Whites, Coloureds and Asians unveils Zimbabwean immigrants fragmented by historic racial and ethnic allegiances and prejudices. Examining education and employment as economic integration indicators has also facilitated the identification of historical experiences that have been influential in determining economic integration patterns of each Zimbabwean community. Intermarriage, language, religion and relations with the indigenous population were critically engaged to gauge the influence of historical socialisation on Zimbabwean communities’ interaction with Britain’s social structures. While it is undeniable that colonial Zimbabwe was beset with a series of political and economic policies which set in motion salient racist discourses that inevitably facilitated the construction of racially divided diaspora communities, the thesis also unveils a Black diaspora community imbued with historic communal tensions and prejudices. By focusing on Black Zimbabwean immigrants, the thesis will not only be acknowledging an increase of Sub-Saharan Africans in Britain, but also offers an alternative perspective on Black British History by moving away from the traditional areas of study such as eighteenth century slavery and post-1945 African-Caribbean migration. Exploring the dynamics of diaspora relations of the Shona and the Ndebele will expose how both the Nationalist Movement and the post-colonial government failed to implement nation building initiatives needed to unite Africans that had been polarised along ethnic lines. Black Zimbabweans therefore migrated as products of unresolved ethnic conflicts that had been developed and nurtured throughout the phases of Zimbabwe’s history. In the absence of shared historic socio-economic or cultural commonalities within the Black community and between the Zimbabwean diaspora communities demarcated by race, the thesis will be tackling the key question: are Zimbabweans in Britain an imagined community?

No abstract available. / Dissertation (MA(Theology))--University of Pretoria, 2008. / New Testament Studies / unrestricted

This thesis examined how skin-tone, gender, and sexuality, within the entertainment industry, help shape the micro-level process by which racial identity is constructed in American culture. The thesis analyzed and critiqued existing ideologies of race across the Americas, with specific reference to Jamaica and the United States. Issues and questions of re-representation within American popular culture are central concerns: in particular, the ways that Black women's roles are defined and redefined through the positionality of female performance artists within the male-dominated music culture. The thesis argued then that skin-tone is fundamental to the understanding of blackness, as American society continues to view race through the lens of the popular entertainment industry. The study examined the positionality of the light-skinned/or biracial Black woman's identity is fixed sexually within the racialized context of American society. The thesis concluded that the glorification of the light-skinned/or biracial Black female recreates a socio-historical and cultural-political context that simultaneously devalues the darker-skinned Black woman.

This investigation focuses on representations of the physical construction and landscape of Southern slave plantations in order to explore the power relationships among inhabitants of those plantations and how those power relationships attempted to function and failed to establish a system of discipline and governance. While every plantation functioned violently in some form, many plantations appear to have attempted to instill a sense of place and permanence of status in slaves with more than just physical violence or obvious and overt forms of mental coercion and abuse. As a supplement to the strategic (and oftentimes random) physical violence inflicted on slaves in the attempts to control their behaviors, owners seem to have also attempted to discipline their slaves through strategic constructions of the plantation landscapes. While concluding that this strategy ultimately failed, this thesis examines attempts by owners to implement particular strategies in regulating and disciplining the behavior of slaves which can be compared with the strategies implemented in a panoptic system as described by Michel Foucault.

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Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis (IUPUI) / This project endeavors to move beyond traditional conceptualizations of voice in conventional qualitative research and instead focuses on embodied, liminal experiences of Latina adolescents, the intersections of identity, gender, spirituality, ethnicity, etc., how these junctures broadly impact mental health, and more specifically, how we perceive mental health and well-being within educational institutions. The study draws upon an intervention pilot study that sought to increase resiliency and self-mastery in Latino adolescents while simultaneously reducing their depressive symptoms. However, this project aims to take these findings and focus upon the complex and multiple factors that influence depression, including citizenship status, trauma in crossing the border from Mexico into the United States, and racial and gendered oppression specific to the experiences of Latina adolescent immigrants. Thus, this project explores ways in which four Latina adolescents make sense of their lived experiences through a critical feminist theoretical framework that integrates post/anti colonial feminism. The framework provides a nuanced conceptualization of power, oppression, and marginalization that creates opportunities to explore alternative notions of thinking that encourages new paths to transform interdisciplinary, university, community, and family relationships surrounding mental health concerns within educational institutions. Finally, theory, research, epistemology, and ontology are interwoven to inform a methodology that is fluid, interchanging, and always becoming.

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