The purpose of this study of Anglo-Egyptian writer Ahdaf Soueif’s two novels, In the Eye of the Sun (1999), first published in 1992, and The Map of Love (2000), first published in 1999, is to examine how they are arenas for hybrid politics in the post-colonial Egyptian context and the Arab diasporic context. This thesis examines how Soueif deals with residual colonial logics by using Post-colonial theories of transculturation. These theories reveal, through an analysis of Soueif’s use of Pharaonicism and her depiction of social and religious divides, that Soueif sometimes legitimizes and sometimes contests the results of transculturation by using products of this very process of transculturation. In the diasporic context, Soueif’s work deterritorializes these hybrid politics of legitimation and contestation by collapsing disparate temporalities and emphasizing continuity between them. To do this she deterritorializes and reterritorializes Pharaonicism, as well as Western literary tradition, the English language and political activism, to emphasize the cultural affinities between Egyptians/Arabs and Western culture. In this manner, she composes an integration strategy designed to facilitate her incorporation into her Western society of settlement, Great-Britain. This allows her to build a political platform from which she can contest and influence politics in her homeland, her society of settlement and the shape of Western cultural and political hegemony on a global scale. She is consequently able to transcend residual colonial logics through the very hybrid politics that they have created. Moreover, in the process, through the political agency that she exercises in her writing and activism, she builds a deterritorialized diasporic identity based on integration into many spheres of belonging that problematizes the victim model of diaspora in Diaspora studies.

My dissertation is a critical ethnography of grassroots feminist agencies and immigrant organizations involved in the governance of gender violence in Toronto, Ontario. Along with examining the agencies operating on the outskirts of the law, I also observe the organizations that contract directly with the provincial government to counsel abusers prosecuted through the city’s specialized domestic violence courts. Drawing on the methodological and theoretical insights of socio-legal studies, postcolonial feminism, and governmentality scholarship, my research explores the governance of domestic violence through the community. Specifically, I examine how the voluntary sector performs the state’s work of prosecuting domestic violence, punishing offenders and building citizens. My research reveals the significant influence that community organizations exert on the prosecution of gender violence and in defining the conditions of punishment for offenders. Through court observation of Toronto’s domestic violence plea court, I show how grassroots administrative workers transform into hybrids of the prosecutor and defense within governance networks. In addition, based on interviews with service providers delivering counseling to offenders, I document how non-profit organizational habits add distinctive flavors to the administration of punishment, materializing in governing regimes that emphasize care in some contexts and discipline in others. Finally, I also explore the dual constructions of immigrant counselors as both the experts and the “others” to the nation with regards to gender violence. In contrast to assumptions of ignorance amongst the immigrant “other” in the liberal imaginary, my findings indicate that the notion of women’s empowerment is nothing new or unfamiliar within Toronto’s diasporic communities; several of the immigrant anti-violence experts involved in this research credit their politicization and training “back home” as foundational to their involvement in feminist and the anti-violence movement. These findings challenge liberal assumptions of the East as a space devoid of the cultural material of women’s empowerment, which form the backbone of Western performances of modernity.

This thesis studies Joseph Conrad&rsquo / s Almayer&rsquo / s Folly in terms of two theoretical concepts / othering and hybridity. The first theoretical concept, othering, is analysed from various perspectives for three main reasons: 1) The question of &ldquo / Who is other to whom?&rdquo / cannot be answered thoroughly because there is a continuous power struggle between the European and the non-European characters. 2) The theme of othering in the novel is based on a view of humanity and its conflicts that is radically ambivalent, and thus cannot be analyzed from one perspective only. 3) Conrad&rsquo / s world view which is reflected in the novel is not limited to one group of people, but tends to be universal. The second theoretical concept, hybridity, is analyzed under three subtitles: ambivalence, mimicry and hybridity.

The purpose of this study of Anglo-Egyptian writer Ahdaf Soueif’s two novels, In the Eye of the Sun (1999), first published in 1992, and The Map of Love (2000), first published in 1999, is to examine how they are arenas for hybrid politics in the post-colonial Egyptian context and the Arab diasporic context. This thesis examines how Soueif deals with residual colonial logics by using Post-colonial theories of transculturation. These theories reveal, through an analysis of Soueif’s use of Pharaonicism and her depiction of social and religious divides, that Soueif sometimes legitimizes and sometimes contests the results of transculturation by using products of this very process of transculturation. In the diasporic context, Soueif’s work deterritorializes these hybrid politics of legitimation and contestation by collapsing disparate temporalities and emphasizing continuity between them. To do this she deterritorializes and reterritorializes Pharaonicism, as well as Western literary tradition, the English language and political activism, to emphasize the cultural affinities between Egyptians/Arabs and Western culture. In this manner, she composes an integration strategy designed to facilitate her incorporation into her Western society of settlement, Great-Britain. This allows her to build a political platform from which she can contest and influence politics in her homeland, her society of settlement and the shape of Western cultural and political hegemony on a global scale. She is consequently able to transcend residual colonial logics through the very hybrid politics that they have created. Moreover, in the process, through the political agency that she exercises in her writing and activism, she builds a deterritorialized diasporic identity based on integration into many spheres of belonging that problematizes the victim model of diaspora in Diaspora studies.

This essay explores the living conditions of the main characters Kambili in Purple Hibiscus by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie and Tambudzai in Nervous Conditions by Tsitsi Dangarembga and their struggle to achieve personal freedom. It aims to show that colonial stereotypes are challenged through the girl´s struggles. It starts with a short exposé over post-colonial theory, here a methodological viewpoint, which is important to consider Kambili and Tambudzai from. It furthermore considers how their extensive family circumstances have impact on these two young protagonists, and finally examines how they employ formal and informal education as a tool to make changes in their lives and become inspirational young African women.

This project explores visually experimental poetry as a particular trend in Caribbean poetry since the 1970's. Although visual experimentation in Caribbean poetry is immediately recognizable – for example, its play with font styles and sizes, its jagged margins, its division of the page into multiple discourse spaces, its use of images – little critical attention has been paid to the visual qualities of Caribbean poetry. Instead, definitions of Caribbean poetry have remained focussed upon oral/aural aesthetics, excluding its use of and contribution to late 20th century experimental poetic practice. By focussing on the poetry of Shake Keane, Claire Harris, Marlene Nourbese Philip, Kamau Brathwaite, and LeRoy Clarke, I bring post-colonial literary criticism into discussion with contemporary debates regarding visual poetic practice in North America. In so doing, this project values Caribbean visual poetry both for its expression of Caribbean cultural experience and for its contributions to broader experimental poetry movements. I argue that visual experimentation functions to disrupt traditional linear reading processes, which thereby allows poets to perform the flux of time and space in post-colonial contexts. Furthermore, such disruption of linear reading practices, often manifested by the positioning of multiple discourses on one page, serves to create a polyvocal discourse that resists patriarchal and colonialist power structures. Valuing the visual qualities of Caribbean poetry as signifying elements, this dissertation explores the aesthetic and social implications of inscription and visual design in Caribbean poetry.

This dissertation analyzes the cultural significance of land relations and caste/religious identity to understand political subjectivity in Punjab, Pakistan. The ethnography details the vicissitudes of a peasant land rights movement, Anjuman-e Mazarin Punjab (Punjab Tenants Association) that is struggling to retain land rights on vast agricultural farms controlled by the Pakistan army. The dissertation argues that land struggles should not only be understood in tropes of locality, but also as interconnected processes that attend to global and local changes in governance. To emphasize these connections, the dissertation gives a relational understanding of 'politics of place' that attends to a range of practices from the history of colonial infrastructure projects (the building of canals, roads and model villages) that transformed this agricultural frontier into the heart of British colonial administration. Similarly, the ethnographic chapters relate the history of 'place making' to the present day uncertainty for small tenant sharecroppers who defied the Pakistan Army's attempts to change land relations in the military farms. Within these parameters, this ethnographic study offers a "thick description" of Punjab Tenants Association to analyze the internal shifts in loyalties and alignments during the course of the protest movement by looking at how caste, religious and/or class relations gain or lose significance in the process. My research seeks to counter the predominant understanding of Muslim political subjectivity, which privileges religious beliefs over social practices and regional identity. Another aspect of my work elucidates the symbolic exchange between the infrastructural project of irrigation, railway construction and regional modernity in central Punjab. The network of canals, roads and railways transformed the semi-arid region of Indus Plains and created a unique relationship between the state and rural society in central Punjab. However, this close relationship between rural Punjab and state administration is not void of conflict but rather it indicates a complex sense of attachment and alienation, inclusion and exclusion from the state. / text

This dissertation is a historical- anthropological account of political cartooning in colonial and postcolonial India. Through a focus on representational politics and biography I have situated the history and practice of cartooning in India to unfold the link between politics, the making of a moral aesthetic and modernity. I am attentive to the shifts in this link by tracing the movement in three historical phases: colonial, nationalist, and postcolonial. These three interconnected parts of my dissertation span a period from the 1870s when vernacular versions of the British Punch began to be produced in colonial India and contemporary neo- liberal India that is seeing a profusion of pocket cartoons in local newspaper editions. In organizing the narrative in three political frameworks - the colonial, nationalist, and postcolonial I discuss the circuits of global interconnectedness through which a shifting moral aesthetic of the cartoon came to be formulated at different times and places in Indian politics. As an everyday cultural production, a focus on the cartoon in terms of "what the cultural consumer makes" as "a production of poiesis - but a hidden one" (de Certeau 1984) illuminates the liminal (Turner) dimension of the cartoon. Additionally, by situating the cartoon as a discursive site (Terdiman 1985) I want to draw attention to new analytical spaces it generates for the discussion and construction of democracy, secularism, minority rights and the modern state. In order to grasp the generative and interpretive dimension of the cartoon I point to three concepts: liminal form, moral aesthetic, and tactical modernity. These concepts open a space to think through the hegemonic processes that come into play at the cultural site of the cartoon and enable and analysis of the cartoon as a site generative of hegemonic processes. This attention to the cartoon as a discursive site in the public sphere highlights the transformative circuit from laughter to debate, from visual to written, and a moral aesthetic that gets switched on through the interpretive dilemmas and representational practices of the cartoon. / text

"Traditional Navajo Culture is a Protective Factor" is intended for those who have a stake in Indigenous spiritual, mental, physical, and emotional health. Native Americans, Alaska Natives, and Native Hawaiians are Indigenous minorities in the USA that tend to consistently top the charts in deficient measures like depression, diabetes, heart disease, obesity, domestic violence, substance use/abuse, and suicide. The West does not offer any explanation as to the cause but is trying to fight these diseases and disorders by allocating federal funds for tribes, urban Indians, and Native groups to devise ways to minimize negative health effects by employing prevention practices that respect and are informed by the local Native cultures. This thesis examines these public health issues from a modern Indigenous perspective that use Navajo specific examples that combine both Western and Indigenous philosophies and paradigms to propose a solution that is strength-based, culturally-informed, and locally-driven.

This research examines the process of memorialisation around the Indian Residential School System in Canada to draw connections between the fields of transitional justice and professional urban planning. For over a century, government and churches in Canada operated a system of residential schools that removed Indigenous children from their families and communities. Today, many Indigenous communities struggle with the intergenerational impacts of this system, and as a society we are attempting to heal the damaged relationships that have resulted. This research presents a comparative case study of two processes of memorialisation surrounding the residential school system. Through site observations, interviews, and analyses of documents, this research examines the transformation and memorialisation of the Mohawk Institute, a former residential school, into the Woodland Cultural Centre, a First Nations-run centre located in Brantford, Ontario. I compare this example with the national Commemoration Fund, set out in the Indian Residential School Settlement Agreement (2006), which settled lawsuits filed by residential school survivors against the federal government of Canada and several church organisations. This research underlines some tensions inherent in memorialising the human rights abuses experienced in the residential schools. A significant difficulty is establishing balance between leaving ownership of stories of the residential school experiences with survivors, while acknowledging the responsibilities that the whole of society must carry if reconciliation is to be achieved. I conclude that the process established through the Commemoration Fund does not adequately reflect this balance, leaving a heavy burden on survivors and their communities without providing adequate support. I further argue that the timelines established through this fund do not allow for the longer-term evolution that may characterize effective memorialisation projects. These themes link to theories around collaborative planning, and considerations of social justice and procedural fairness. In recent decades, collaborative planning has been seen as a way to make planning practices more inclusive. However, in the context of planning with Indigenous Peoples, collaborative processes may not be a sufficient response to rights claims. This has important implications for professional planners, as we work towards decolonization, reconciliation, and establishing just-relations between Indigenous and non-Indigenous populations in Canada. / Thesis (Master, Urban & Regional Planning) -- Queen's University, 2012-09-08 13:19:55.027