Xing-ju literally means 'New Theatre' in Mandarin and denotes the non-traditional performing style in Taiwan. Xing-ju is regarded as the product of colonisation in Taiwan. The thesis began with the first emergence of Xing-ju in the Japanese colonial era at the beginning of the twentieth century, and went on to examine the development of Xing-ju and its sub-forms within a colonial historical context. Having gone through different colonial regimes, Xing-ju has developed into the local theatre form characterizing the hybridity of Taiwanese culture. My study aims to fill a gap in Taiwanese contemporary theatre history, to look at Xing-ju and its sub-forms from a post-colonial perspective, and to provide a continuous and complete Xing-ju history within a theoretical context. In addition, how Xing-ju has exemplified ‘Taiwaneseness’ while presenting multiple cultural characteristics is also examined. This thesis also draws on primary source data, obtained via field research, to analyse the characteristics of Xing-ju performances. Finally, while addressing my research questions through theoretical analysis, I also examine them through the lens of practical work. Inspired by critical syncretism, I experiment with an alternative way to explore the nature of Taiwanese culture and theatre form. With its hybrid cultural characteristics including Japanese Shinpa-geki, Chinese Peking Opera, Ge-zai Xi and Western theatre styles, I discuss how a definition of ‘Taiwaneseness’ emerges through Xing-ju.

While there have been many studies of Henry James's ghost stories, there has been surprisingly little scholarship written on postcolonial tensions in these works. In American literature, the figure of the Native American ghost is a common expression of Western settler guilt over native erasure and land seizure. In both his American and British ghost stories, though, James focuses more on the horror within the colonizer than the terrifying, ghostly other from the edge of the empire. As such, these ghost stories serve as a more significant critique of colonialism and imperialism than Gothic texts that merely demonstrate the colonizer’s fear of the racial and ethnic other at the edges of the empire. James’s earliest ghost stories address to the legacy of American colonialism, staging narratives of indigenous erasure and land seizure by centering hauntings around property disputes. The later ghost stories—written after James had emigrated to Britain— engage in a critique of the imperial British military and colonial power structures that systematically oppress indigenous groups in the name of the empire. These ghost stories all focus on the figure of the Western settler-colonizer and his guilt in creating hauntings; James’s living characters often realize they have been complicit in the wrongdoings that result in revenge-seeking ghosts, and this realization is more terrifying than the ghosts themselves. In this way, James's ghost stories present a means of questioning the validityof colonizer identity, and thus a means of deconstructing the binary of the Western “self” and the indigenous “other.”

Utilizing alchemy as an allegory for the political, social, cultural history and present of the Caribbean, I discuss critical themes, approaches, methodologies their development, application and evidence in my thinking and art practice.

The central theme of my work is systematic violence on the micro-level of everyday life, our understanding and relation to “evil”, and the conditions behind it. I wish to address the relation between these micro-levels of experience and individual action with larger questions regarding the history of modernity – the power structure and social order of the modern state and its regime of identity and identification, set against the backdrop of a haunting colonial past and post-colonial present-day reality.   I understand film – the moving image – as a medium of sensory experience that appeals in a direct way to the human mind. It enables us to experience well-known or completely strange states of mind and reflect on them, thus creating new awareness of our own position and behaviours, which enable new forms of self-knowledge. Film speaks to all that is ‘unconscious’, and it makes it possible to observe human behaviour in new ways, to understand the driving forces behind individual action and the self. Fiction is for me a way to enter into these realms of reality, to bring to the foreground those aspects that are normally inaccessible, or consciously or unconsciously hidden or repressed in the name of social order or common sense – in order to then return in the form of structural violence.

Nos últimos anos, o Brasil tem testemunhado o surgimento de uma produção literária com características muito próprias do nosso tempo: seus autores são periféricos (favelados), sua forma e conteúdo derivam do momento de extrema violência que assola grande parte da população. Exemplar desta produção, o livro de Ferréz, Capão Pecado é primeiramente publicado em 2000. O objetivo desta dissertação é analisar o romance, compreendendo-o dentro de um escopo maior, que abarca outros setores, da arte e da política. Para isso, a teoria pós-colonial, assim como um estreito diálogo com uma parte da tradição crítico-literária brasileira são utilizadas. / In the last few years, Brazil has witnessed the appearance of one type of literary production whose characteristics are typical or our times: its authors are from the suburbs (the slums), its form and content derive from the extreme violence imposed to a great part of the population. An example of this literary production, Ferrézs book, Capão Pecado is first published in 2000. This dissertation aims at analyzing the novel, understanding that it belongs to a greater scope, that comprehends other spheres of the arts and politics. In order to do so, the post-colonial theory will be used, as well as a great deal of the Brazilian literary theory tradition.

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Philosophiae Doctor - PhD (Education) / Globally, women face a number of challenges as they pursue career paths to become academic leaders. This study aims to comprehend the rarity of black women vice-chancellors inside South African public universities by exploring their lived experiences as academic leaders. The study examines family backgrounds, educational experiences, previous career paths, and patriarchal obstacles as factors that affected them. The study explores how these women navigated both, their way into leadership positions and the practices inside universities. The study further probes how such women in academia have embraced the intersection of identity in relation to race, gender, age, and to a lesser extent, class. Since these women have experienced inequalities in a political context, this study used feminist theories to explore the post-colonial feminism framework, which supported the study's purpose. These female pathfinders are powerful role models, and role-modelling is a form of education that is available to all people across all walks of life. The research design followed the epistemological position assumed in the biographical approach. Semi-structured interviews and documents were used as research tools for data collection. The thematic results revealed that the participants' shared trait of middle class, professional backgrounds played a major role in their professional ascension. Furthermore, these participants formed a cohort of black women vice-chancellors that broke the proverbial glass ceiling, ending over 300 years of white, male-dominated academic leadership and practice. The common thread in these rare stories is achievement against all odds, which inspires the next generation of women leaders.

My thesis problematizes the simplistically and widely accepted idea of a Victorian ‘crisis of faith’ or religious ‘decline.’ Most historical and critical narratives of nineteenth-century Britain portray the Victorian Age as a period marked by a crisis of faith and a gradual secularization through (Darwinian) scientific developments. My work questions this by examining the late-Victorian novels of colonial India and the British New Woman novels. My first chapter deals with Victorian popular fiction that presents the invasion of Victorian London by colonial idols. The idols, overdetermined as both Hindu and Theosophist in inspiration, force the British legal system to recognize the limits of its own materialist perceptions of reality, so that it finally arrives at a deeper understanding of spirituality. My second chapter deals with Victorian New Woman novels where I study how the British New Woman as a literary figure, despite apparent unbelief and disempowerment, embodies a deep-seated religious power that can be assumed only by a woman and that helps challenge the assumption of declining faith. My final chapter examines the shift of scene to India, where once again the English men and women inadvertently express their fears of British secularization in the context of their encounter with Oriental faiths, but ultimately arrive at a richer appreciation of the religious ‘impossible’ through this encounter with colonial ‘otherness.’

This thesis examined bodied activism in Chicago's Slutwalk 2012 march, a contemporary movement initiated in Toronto, Canada that publicly challenged the mainstream sentiment that women are responsible for their own rape and victimization. Adopting an intersectional approach, I used textual analysis to discuss photographs posted on the official Chicago Slutwalk website to explore the ways this form of public bodied protest discursively engages women's empowerment from movement feminism as well as third wave and postfeminisms. I additionally analyzed the overall website and its promotional materials for the Slutwalk marches as well as how Chicago's photographic representations privilege the white female body as victim, demonstrating how the reclamation "slut" privileges whiteness. The website depictions normalize how one should react to a system of violence which provides negative implications for women and men who are situated in a postfeminist rape culture. Positioning my analysis within Communication/Cultural Studies and Women's and Gender studies, I contributed to the literature about rape culture and postfeminist activism through my analysis of Slutwalk. By employing intersectionality from feminist theory and textual analysis, I demonstrated how Slutwalk's promotion of bodied activism naturalized postfeminism and excludes Black women from participating.

Abstract This thesis analyzes lynching and segregation in the American South between the years 1877 and 1951. It argues that these crimes of physical and social violence constitute genocide against black Americans, according to the definitions of genocide proposed by Raphael Lemkin and then the later legal definition adopted by the United Nations. American law and prevailing white American social beliefs sanctioned these crimes. Lynching and segregation were used as tools of persecution intended to keep black people in their designated places in a racial hierarchy in the United States at this time period. These crimes were two of many coordinated actions designed to physically and mentally harm a group of people defined and targeted on grounds of race. These actions of mentally and physically harming members of the group do constitute genocide under both Lemkin's original concept of genocide and the United Nations' legal genocide definition. Studies of the black experience, although starting to gain some research popularity, are virtually absent from genocide historiography. This thesis aims to fill part of that void and contribute to the emerging studies of one of America's "hidden genocides."* * "Hidden genocides" is a term that Alexander Laban Hinton, Thomas La Pointe, and Douglas Irvin-Erickson have used to describe intentional destruction of groups in human history (genocide) that are often denied, dismissed or neglected in popular and scholarly discussions about genocide. [Alexander Laban Hinton, Thomas La Pointe, and Douglas Irvin-Erickson. Hidden Genocides: Power, Knowledge, Memory. New Brunswick, NJ.: Rutgers University Press, 2014).