In this dissertation I analyze how the postwar German writers Wolfdietrich Schnurre, Günter Eich, and Ilse Aichinger negotiate anthropocentric and speciesist discourses via animal figures by drawing on such posthumanist thinkers as Derrida, Agamben, and Deleuze & Guattari. The literary texts question a world view and discourse organized around the establishment of power that utilizes animal metaphors to turn living beings into objects (and could thus be called “carno-phallogocentric”). They thus react to the strict hierarchy of (gendered) man over animal and respond - in the aftermath of the Second World War – by highlighting instead the similarities between man and animal, such as creaturely existence and shared trauma. The analysis is guided by questions such as: How do the literary texts reflect and subvert the power discourses which surround man and animal? What is the role of language in this context? How does the animal, which is usually assumed to be mute, relate to the categories that are established in language? Does its place outside of language grant it capabilities the human cannot realize? Can the literary encounter between man and animal establish a space of the “Open” in which language can be re-evaluated and, after World War II, be saved? Is there a unique “animal poetology” which correlates to post-anthropocentric conceptions of the human? Because these writers disorient the reader’s perception of reality via figures of the animal, i.e., animals as both metaphors and as subjects, I develop what I would like to call an “animal poetology” that is unique to them. This animal poetology, which redefines Agamben’s concept of the open by giving it a postwar, language-critical dimension, includes a thorough critique of human language with regard to power structures and a speciesist language which, during the early 20th century, was a vehicle for ideology and discrimination. The encounter with the animal leads the human being to reflect on the limits of language and thus enables the establishment of a mode of being in which the encounter with the other – beyond a space of judgement and hierarchies –is once again possible.

“American Impotence” investigates a continuity between literary representations of masculinity and considerations of national identity in the works of five postwar novelists. In particular, I illustrate the manner in which Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man, John Updike’s Couples, Robert Coover’s The Public Burning, Joan Didion’s Democracy and The Last Thing He Wanted, and Bret Easton Ellis’s American Psycho challenge the patterns of daily life through which a single figure is imagined to be the essential agent of American polity: namely, the self-made individualist, characterized by manly virtues like dominance, aggression, ambition, mastery, vitality, and virility. More specifically, this project examines the manner in which the iconicity of men helps sustain a narrative of “imperilled masculinity” that at once privileges an impossible identity, situated in the representative nucleus of postwar democracy, and forecloses other modalities of political life. Observing the full meaning of the word “potency,” I elucidate the interrelationships between narrative forms, masculine norms, and democratic practice. Ellison’s work ties the maturation of African American boys to the impossibility of full participation in civic life, for instance, while in Updike’s Couples the contradictions of virile manhood manifest in the form of a fatalism that threatens to undo the carefully cultivated social boundaries of early sixties bohemianism; in a variety of ways, The Public Burning and American Psycho represent the iconic nature of masculinity as a psychic threat to those men closest to it, while Didion’s female protagonists find themselves flirting with the promises of a secret agency linked to imperial adventures in Southeast Asia and Central America. In the cultural context of the Cold War, these novelists demonstrate how intensified participation in national fantasies of potency and virility is inevitably disempowering; as an alternative, this dissertation seeks to consider impotence as dissensus detached from the mandates of hegemonic masculinity.

This thesis explores the history of European integration in the 1950s and 1960s from a popular cultural perspective anchored to a central figure from the era, Brigitte Bardot, in order to demonstrate that the peoples of Western Europe were engaged in processes of Europeanization that helped legitimize economic and political unions. Yet, official EU policy’s privileging of one (outdated) mode for understanding culture has handicapped alternative interpretations of a common European cultural heritage, failing to embrace a shared popular culture. Bardot is a suitable icon through which to begin an exploration into the diversity and significance of an integrating postwar European popular culture because she was a microcosm of several broad, transnational trends in postwar Europe including the rise of mass mobility, a major shift in European fashions, new gender constructions, and the explicit politicization of popular culture. Her films, career, lifestyle, and representation(s) provide key axes from which one can pivot into interrelated areas of European culture and societies in this era—pop culture; consumer culture; youth culture; mobility culture; media culture; political culture; and gender relations—demonstrating a widely integrating European popular cultural sphere. Within this context, Bardot was representative of broad postwar societal changes, served as a mass diffusion tool in relating these changes to the people of Europe, and functioned as a driving force in creating new transnational popular cultural forms. In addition, Bardot is a figure useful in understanding the relationship between Europe and the United States, while also demonstrating that economics is not separate from culture and popular culture. The Treaty of Rome, ostensibly about economic integration, further enabled the many circulations apparent in Bardot's career—people, goods, information, and ideas—that were already taking place. Furthermore, popular culture was not irrelevant to, or separate from politics and it helps to explain how the escapism and narcissism of European popular consumer culture could generate a rebellious, but sophisticated political consciousness. Western Europe does indeed have a distinct history of shared popular culture, which should be a factor in discussions of ‘Europeanization’ and the legitimacy of the European Union. It is necessary to explore the roots of this shared popular culture so that it does one day form the basis of a longstanding shared popular culture and can become a recognized element supporting the legitimacy of identities in the European Union in more fluid, dynamic ways.

[pt] Este trabalho examina lugares cotidianos para entender como demarcações são efetuadas, empregadas, alteradas e deslocadas na Bósnia-Herzegovina do pós-Dayton. Analisaremos aqui práticas de demarcação que podem ou não envolver delimitações geográficas e que foram reorganizadas pelo Acordo de Paz de Dayton de formas a lhes assegurarem um papel mais proeminente na vida sociopolítica da Bósnia e Herzegovina. Ao promover um esforço para conceituar fronteiras e demarcações, esta tese argumenta que estas são dependentes de práticas, o que lhes confere um status precário e indica que podem ser alteradas. Assim, elas podem ser reempregadas (no sentido de se desviar de um significado e receber um significado diferente); alteradas e deslocadas, mas também muito mais, como será exposto aqui: minimizadas, subvertidas, desdenhadas, mas também reforçadas, reafirmadas e celebradas. É, portanto, olhando para o cotidiano que este trabalho busca entender o(s) sentido(s) atribuído(s) a essas demarcações, sabendo, no entanto, que elas são permeadas de contradições e podem ser empregadas de maneiras diferentes por pessoas diferentes. O cotidiano, que geralmente recebe nossa desatenção diária, será considerado aqui uma categoria analítica relevante através da qual realizaremos essa pesquisa. Na verdade, o cotidiano não pode ser reduzido a práticas sem importância ou ao banal, como o mero resíduo do político. O cotidiano está, na verdade, profundamente relacionado com todas as atividades, e as engloba com todas as suas diferenças e conflito (Lefebvre, 1991:97) e, portanto, possibilita conexões e mediações entre categorias frequentemente apresentadas como dicotomias, como o público e o privado, o excepcional e a rotina (Lefebvre, 2008:16). É, portanto, no e através do cotidiano que essas tensões são negociadas, as disputas têm lugar e apropriações e até transformações são realizadas. Esta pesquisa foi realizada em Sarajevo e Mostar, duas das principais cidades da Bósnia-Herzegovina. Mais especificamente, esta pesquisa analisa lugares cotidianos dentro dessas cidades, como escolas, ruas, praças, cafés, estações de ônibus e shoppings, que muitas vezes atuam como a própria materialização dessas demarcações (etnonacionais, entre o local/internacionais) ou a arena na qual essas demarcações são reconfiguradas e deslocadas. Esta tese, portanto, proporciona um relato alternativo em relação a narrativas mais oficiais sobre divisões etnonacionais, bem como questiona as categorias local e internacional na Bósnia do pós-Dayton. / [en] This work looks at everyday places in order to understand how boundaries are enacted and re-employed, shifted and displaced in post-Dayton Bosnia and Herzegovina. Post-Dayton boundaries correspond to practices of demarcation that may or may not entail geographic delimitations and that have been reorganized by the Dayton Peace Agreement in ways that have assured them a more prominent role in sociopolitical life in BiH. While engaging in an effort to conceptualize borders and boundaries, this thesis argues that boundaries are dependent on practices, which confers upon them a precarious status and indicates that they might be changed. Boundaries may thus be re-employed (in the sense of diverting its original meaning and employing a different one); shifted and displaced, but also much more, as it will be exposed here: crossed, minimized, subverted, dismissed, disdained, but also reinforced, reaffirmed and celebrated. It is thus looking at the everyday that this work makes sense of those boundaries, knowing, however, that they are permeated with contradictions and may be enacted in different ways by different people. The everyday, which usually receives our daily inattention, will be considered here a relevant analytical category through which undertake this research. Indeed, the everyday cannot be reduced to the unimportant or the banal, as mere residual or the remnants of the political. Rather, it is profoundly related to all activities, and encompasses them with all their differences and their conflicts; it is their meeting place, their bond, their common ground (Lefebvre, 1991: 97), and it thus provides for connection and mediation between categories often presented as dichotomies such as public and private, the exceptional and the routine (Lefebvre, 2008: 16). It is in and through the everyday that those tensions are played, the disputes are fought and appropriations and even transformation take place. The research was undertaken in Sarajevo and Mostar, two of the main cities in BiH. More specifically, this research looks at everyday places within these cities, such as schools, streets, squares, cafés, coach station and shopping malls, which might be enacted as the very (ethnonational, local/international) boundaries or the arena in which those boundaries are diverted and displaced. This thesis, therefore, provides for an alternative account to more official narratives about ethnonational divisions, as well as questions clear-cut distinctions between the local and the international in post-Dayton BiH.

Conselho Nacional de Desenvolvimento Científico e Tecnológico / A "reconstrução nacional" de Angola impressiona pela magnitude de seus empreendimentos visíveis. Esta Tese trata de travessias conduzidas por diferentes atores sociais "através" e "apesar" da "reconstrução nacional". A partir de micronarrativas de algumas pessoas que compõem a "Angola" contemporânea e que, em algum momento, foram minhas interlocutoras, sigo por caminhos que operam como chaves interpretativas para traçar os sentidos e os significados do pós-guerra no país. Para transitar "através da reconstrução nacional" é necessário ser re-conhecido, não apenas por políticas repressivas e de gestão de populações, mas também como sujeito de direitos. Aqueles que não obtiveram este re-conhecimento agenciam as brechas existentes em seus campos de possibilidades, "apesar da reconstrução nacional". Entre arranjos circunstanciais e (não) re-conhecimentos alguns ocupam, situacionalmente, a condição de borderlander. E "através" e "apesar" pessoas constroem suas vidas enquanto a nação se reconstrói. / Angola's national reconstruction is impressive because of its visible achievements' magnitude. This Thesis is about the trajectories of different social actors through and in spite of the "national reconstruction. Analyzing the micro narratives from some people belonging to contemporary "Angola" that were, at some point , my interlocutors, I follow the paths which operate as interpretive keys to the meanings of post-war in that country. Transitioning through national reconstruction " is a requirement for people to be known and acknowledged, not only by the repressive policies and the management of populations, but also as subjects of rights. Those who are not recognized have to manage the existing gaps in their fields of possibilities, in spite of the national reconstruction ". Among circumstantial arrangements and (the absence of) acknowledgment, some of them occupy, situationedly, the "borderlander " condition. And "through and in spite of, the people build their lives while the "nation is reconstructed.

Conselho Nacional de Desenvolvimento Científico e Tecnológico / A "reconstrução nacional" de Angola impressiona pela magnitude de seus empreendimentos visíveis. Esta Tese trata de travessias conduzidas por diferentes atores sociais "através" e "apesar" da "reconstrução nacional". A partir de micronarrativas de algumas pessoas que compõem a "Angola" contemporânea e que, em algum momento, foram minhas interlocutoras, sigo por caminhos que operam como chaves interpretativas para traçar os sentidos e os significados do pós-guerra no país. Para transitar "através da reconstrução nacional" é necessário ser re-conhecido, não apenas por políticas repressivas e de gestão de populações, mas também como sujeito de direitos. Aqueles que não obtiveram este re-conhecimento agenciam as brechas existentes em seus campos de possibilidades, "apesar da reconstrução nacional". Entre arranjos circunstanciais e (não) re-conhecimentos alguns ocupam, situacionalmente, a condição de borderlander. E "através" e "apesar" pessoas constroem suas vidas enquanto a nação se reconstrói. / Angola's national reconstruction is impressive because of its visible achievements' magnitude. This Thesis is about the trajectories of different social actors through and in spite of the "national reconstruction. Analyzing the micro narratives from some people belonging to contemporary "Angola" that were, at some point , my interlocutors, I follow the paths which operate as interpretive keys to the meanings of post-war in that country. Transitioning through national reconstruction " is a requirement for people to be known and acknowledged, not only by the repressive policies and the management of populations, but also as subjects of rights. Those who are not recognized have to manage the existing gaps in their fields of possibilities, in spite of the national reconstruction ". Among circumstantial arrangements and (the absence of) acknowledgment, some of them occupy, situationedly, the "borderlander " condition. And "through and in spite of, the people build their lives while the "nation is reconstructed.

A presente pesquisa trabalha principalmente Freyre e o iberismo. Foi possível concluir que o sociólogo saiu em defesa dos valores luso-hispânicos como responsáveis por alçar o país à categoria de modelo de civilização. Com base em documentos produzidos à época, identificamos que o sociólogo pernambucano, de modo muito particular, desenvolve a ideia que sinaliza para o Brasil, principal representante do catolicismo ibérico, como terceira força cultural ou terceira solução, capaz de ombrear culturalmente com as principais potências que marcaram as disputas ideológicas na Guerra Fria. / This research aims at analyzing, primarily, Freyre and Iberianism. It is right to say that Luso-Hispanic values were asserted by the sociologist as responsible to raise Brazil as a way of civilization. Based on historical documents, I have identified that Gilberto Freyre, in a very particular way, formulates an idea for Brazil, main Iberian Catholicism representative, as the third cultural force or the third solution, capable of equalizing itself, from a cultural viewpoint, in relation with the world powers, which marked the ideological disputes throughout the Cold War period.

This thesis explores the history of European integration in the 1950s and 1960s from a popular cultural perspective anchored to a central figure from the era, Brigitte Bardot, in order to demonstrate that the peoples of Western Europe were engaged in processes of Europeanization that helped legitimize economic and political unions. Yet, official EU policy’s privileging of one (outdated) mode for understanding culture has handicapped alternative interpretations of a common European cultural heritage, failing to embrace a shared popular culture. Bardot is a suitable icon through which to begin an exploration into the diversity and significance of an integrating postwar European popular culture because she was a microcosm of several broad, transnational trends in postwar Europe including the rise of mass mobility, a major shift in European fashions, new gender constructions, and the explicit politicization of popular culture. Her films, career, lifestyle, and representation(s) provide key axes from which one can pivot into interrelated areas of European culture and societies in this era—pop culture; consumer culture; youth culture; mobility culture; media culture; political culture; and gender relations—demonstrating a widely integrating European popular cultural sphere. Within this context, Bardot was representative of broad postwar societal changes, served as a mass diffusion tool in relating these changes to the people of Europe, and functioned as a driving force in creating new transnational popular cultural forms. In addition, Bardot is a figure useful in understanding the relationship between Europe and the United States, while also demonstrating that economics is not separate from culture and popular culture. The Treaty of Rome, ostensibly about economic integration, further enabled the many circulations apparent in Bardot's career—people, goods, information, and ideas—that were already taking place. Furthermore, popular culture was not irrelevant to, or separate from politics and it helps to explain how the escapism and narcissism of European popular consumer culture could generate a rebellious, but sophisticated political consciousness. Western Europe does indeed have a distinct history of shared popular culture, which should be a factor in discussions of ‘Europeanization’ and the legitimacy of the European Union. It is necessary to explore the roots of this shared popular culture so that it does one day form the basis of a longstanding shared popular culture and can become a recognized element supporting the legitimacy of identities in the European Union in more fluid, dynamic ways.

The second world war is no doubt one of the most important milestone to the whole history of human being. In the border area of Czechoslovakia was this milestone moreover followed by expulsion of German population and resettlement by Czech inhabitants. This thesis deals with the immediate aftermath of forced displacement of Sudeten Germans after 1945 and resettlement of the border areas of Czechoslovakia. It focuses specifically on area of Jablonec nad Nisou where the entire structure of the population has changed significantly during a short period. Specific events are complemented by testimonies of eyewitnesses. The postwar development of Jablonec nad Nisou district differs from other towns resettled in the border region especially due to prevailing glass and jewelery industry with its specific characteristics. Therefore, the part of the thesis is devoted to analysis of industrial conditions of this area and development of leading local companies.

This dissertation examines the emergence, survival, performance, and national impact of rebel parties following negotiated settlements. Building on a growing literature examining the environmental and organizational factors affecting insurgent-to-party transformations, this dissertation asks why some insurgent organizations thrive as political parties in post-conflict environments and others fail to make such a transformation. I propose that foreign actors play a pivotal role in the formation of what I call “protégé parties,” which are better equipped to make the transformation into political parties than other rebel groups. Further, different kinds of sponsors have varying effects on transformation. Empirical analysis supports these propositions, finding that protégé parties with authoritarian sponsorship are better equipped to develop than those backed by democracies or no one.