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This dissertation investigates the nexus between theatre and colonialism in the German empire between 1884 and 1914. It introduces the concept of colonial theatricality, through which it explores to what extent theatre and colonialism have been productive of each other’s orders, knowledge formations, and truth claims. This dissertation thus looks at the empire through its cultural manifestations and its ‘representational machinery’, specifically the theatre. It provides an understanding of the German colonial empire that goes beyond its territorial, administrative and military strategies. In order to do so, the dissertation discusses a broad set of performances that the German empire brought forth at the turn of the century: popular theatre performances that mediated the colonial project to a domestic audience, amateur theatre societies that staged ‘German culture’ in the colonies, colonial ceremonies that included repertoires of the settler as well as of the indigenous population, court-hearings of African individuals residing in Germany claiming their rights, and a petition from the former German colony Kamerun charging the German government with crimes against humanity. Beyond the appearance of the colonial project as a topical issue on stage, this dissertation argues for a deeper-seated interdependence between theatre and colonialism, one that can be detected in the dynamics of ‘seeing’ and ‘showing’. Through the concept of colonial theatricality as a particular mode of perception and representation akin to both the theatre and the colonial enterprise, this dissertation suggests a new framework for looking at the entangled histories of metropole and colony in focusing on the empire’s ordering truth, its formations, effects, and ambivalences.

This thesis explores the notion that the emergent language of theatre, and more generally of modern culture, has links to much earlier forms of storytelling and an ancient worldview, and raises questions as to how theatre practitioners might best understand and utilise early modes of entertainment and ideologies in the creation of performance work today. It examines the emergence and history of theatrical performance in Britain, with particular focus on how medieval ideologies and theatrical forms were absorbed into the practices of the first professional theatres in the early modern age, using Shakespeare’s work as a core example. Further, it uncovers and interrogates, through practice, links between performance approaches today and the ritual roots of native theatrical tradition: links which have been largely lost in Britain and much of the Western world, but which still exist in certain other cultures. The thesis includes analysis of how Shakespeare’s medieval inheritance shaped the drama he created, and demonstrates (through practice-based research) how a practical, psychosomatic understanding of residual as well as emergent modes in the plays can not only benefit practitioners seeking to stage Shakespeare’s work for today’s audiences, but also provide inspiration for the creation of new work. This research has practice as its core: drawing directly on my own theatre work, and exploring an alternative kind of ‘knowing’ through the body. It relates current trends in modern theatre practice (the immersive, the psychosomatic, the multisensory, the site-specific and so on) to the ritual, amalgamative, communal and visceral modes of early performance, interrogating particular elements such as mankind’s position in the universe, time and space, language and the body, universality versus specificity, and ritual behaviour in performance. The work concludes that the ritual, embodied, hierophanic and communal mode of medieval performance is not only what practitioners today are searching for in their experimental practice and in the intercultural engagement with other (ritualised) cultures, but also presents a way of understanding and dealing with the traumas and anxieties of society that is efficacious and malleable to any period in human history, and is especially relevant to times of great change and upheaval, such as both the early modern age of Shakespeare and our own time.

This thesis analyses the development of amateur theatre in Britain in the long nineteenth century and has five main emphases. Firstly, it considers the multiple functions of private theatricals in the regions and the varied reactions to their increasing popularity. It argues that they were used as a form of soft power; that they disrupted the Victorian ideology of the separate spheres; and that they developed amateur and professional theatre in the regions. Secondly, the thesis will offer new perspectives on the West End by exposing its lost histories of amateur theatre. It will break down the binary of ‘London theatre’ as ‘West End theatre’ by uncovering amateur theatrical venues and communities beyond this district. The thesis then examines the birth of amateur dramatic clubs and societies and exposes a complex network of amateur theatrical activities taking place across Britain. It reveals the symbiosis of amateur dramatic enthusiasts with members of the theatre profession and foregrounds the existence of ‘professional amateurs’ – performers who were celebrated nationally for their theatrical abilities, but chose not to adopt a stage career. The focus of this thesis then turns to the repertoire of amateur theatre and argues that existing studies of the nineteenth century theatrical repertoire have been constructed based on data from professional performances alone. It makes the case for a distinct amateur repertoire and a reimaging of the theatrical canon through use of data from amateur theatrical events in the period. Finally, the thesis considers the ‘value’ of amateur theatricals. It highlights the significance of the amateur sector to the financial success of the theatre industry. It then considers the economic, social and cultural value of the relationship between amateur theatricals and local, national and dramatic charitable causes. It concludes by emphasising the role that amateur theatre had in building strong communities and constructing identities.

In this thesis, we study geometric intersection representations of graphs. For a fixed class, the well-known recognition problem asks whether a given graph belongs to this class. We study a generalization of this problem called partial representation extension. Its input consists of a graph with a partial representation, so a part of the graph is pre-drawn. The problems asks whether this partial representation can be extended to a representation of the entire graph. We study this problem for classes of interval graphs, proper interval graphs, unit interval graphs and chordal graphs (in the setting of subtrees-in-tree representations). We give linear-time algorithms for the first two classes and an almost quadratic-time algorithm for unit interval graphs. For chordal graphs, we consider different versions of the problem and show that almost all cases are NP-complete. Even though the classes of proper and unit interval graphs are known to be equal, the partial representation extension problem distinguishes them. For unit interval graphs, it poses additional restrictions concerning precise positions of intervals, and we describe a new structure of unit interval representations to deal with this. 1

This thesis forms the complementary writing for my practice-as-research project “Affective Intentionalities: Practising Performance with Roland Barthes’s Camera Lucida”. Working with Barthes’s 1980 book about photography, the project goes beyond an application of Barthes’s ideas to creatively respond to Camera Lucida through performance. The project approaches this through the following research questions: What strategies might be useful for responding to Camera Lucida through performance? What new insights does this contribute to theatre and performance studies? What methodological contributions does this project make to the ways that writing and performance can be thought together in a practice-as-research context? This thesis, provides a critical context for the project by reviewing writing on Barthes from media theory, comparative literature, art history and theatre studies; it critically reflects on three performances made over the course of the PhD project: Involuntary Memory (2015), Kairos (2016), and After Camera Lucida (2017); and it re-presents photographic documentation and audience comments in a way that self-reflexively stages them in relation to the practical work. This complementary writing gestures towards the ways that the performances explored different inflections of performance time, the ways that the live body captured a tension between semiotic meaning and materiality and the relationships between the form of the performances and their ability to produce affect. These findings contribute to the overarching argument that a process of iterative creative response to Camera Lucida has allowed an exploration of dramaturgies of the body, time, affect and theatricality that open up the possibility of critically affective and radically compassionate relations between performance works and their audiences. As such, this project will be of interest to theatre and performance researchers, scholars of Barthes, and performance practitioners who are interested in the relationships between affect and meaning, temporality, performance and photography, practice and theory.

This thesis presents the results of an investigation into the representation theory of the alternating and dihedral groups and explores how their irreducible representations can be distinguished with the use of class sums.

Developments in the theorising of representation and the constitutive nature of language have encouraged an increased scholarly interest in the discursive construction of social identities, relations, and realities. This includes a growing body of literature internationally that focuses on the construction of social groups positioned as Others. However, critical research in this area is more limited in the domestic setting. In Aotearoa/New Zealand, the contemporary construction of social identities is embedded within a specific socio-political and historical context, including a particular colonial context. This context is fundamental to the ways in which social relations between the white settler Self and various Other groups have been, and continue to be, constituted. In this thesis, I have explored the discursive representation of Asian identity in dominant institutional discourses in Aotearoa/New Zealand, with a particular focus on the construction of the Asian as Other. Using critical discourse analysis, contemporary newspaper and parliamentary texts were examined to identify content areas, discursive strategies, and lexical choices involved in the representation of the Asian Other by elite institutions in Aotearoa/New Zealand. Through this process, several recurring manifestations of Asian Otherness were recognised, namely those of Asians as threat, Asian as impermanent, Asian as commodity, and Asian as victim. These representations of the Asian Other embody continuities and contradictions. They function to contribute to contemporary understandings and positionings of Asian individuals and collectives, to the ongoing construction of the Self in Aotearoa/New Zealand, and to the broader national narrative.

[Truncated abstract] Remote biodiverse sites present unique problems to architects who seek to create greater connectivity between people and landscape. Such sites, particularly those along Australia's temperate coastlines, are rapidly being developed for housing yet in many cases these landscapes have no prior history of sedentary habitation. Not only do these sites lack relevant architectural precedents, they are yet to be measured and represented; the very acts that define the specifics of site and identity of place. These landscapes are as unrecorded as they are uninhabited and consequently there is little to resist the imposition of foreign architectural typologies - buildings which are inherently ecologically unsustainable and non site-specific. This thesis addressed these problems by testing an architectural design methodology which placed considerable emphasis on site measure and mapping. The key hypothesis that underpinned the research was that site-specific architecture cannot be realised independently of site-specific mapping. The research was conducted from the standpoint that maps are not simply abstracted 'grounds' upon which architectural designs are formulated, they are landscape representations and as such they engage with a broader cultural context by articulating our fundamental concepts of 'landscape'. The thesis is part theoretical discourse and part creative research. The research method involved first selecting a number of study sites in a new housing subdivision located within one of the world's most biodiverse regions. ... Several opportunities arose as a direct result of this publicly engaged process, most notably two professional commissions: the first as guest artist for a two-year state-wide exhibition; the second for a built work of architecture in the study area. Both projects provided a 'proof of concept' test of the applicability of the research method to architectural praxis. While the research primarily addresses the discipline of architectural design, it draws upon methods and approaches from landscape architecture, surveying, botany, photography, and art practice. These disciplines all face the same challenge as architecture in remote biodiverse sites: conventional forms of measure, representation and making must be reconceptualised in order to develop responses which are commensurate with the unique biophysical and cultural conditions which characterise these sites. Because biodiverse sites continuously change, as does our understanding of them, a direct causal link between site-specific mapping and site-specific architecture cannot be established. However, the research has shown that collectively such works provide a 'landscape of resistance': through a highly site-attuned multidisciplinary approach, greater connectivity is achieved between people and landscape and the manifestations of this connectivity - the sitespecific maps and buildings - help to form specifically local understandings of landscape. Building in remote biodiverse landscapes is a technical problem, a creative problem, a cultural problem and an ethical problem. The research presents a means of reconciling these problems in the midst of the present milieu, one which is characterised by extreme technical capacity and environmental anxiety.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--State University of New York at Binghamton, Dept. of Philosophy, Interpretation, and Culture, 2006. / Includes bibliographical references.