Terror in the African Anglophone novels of Chinua Achebe, Doris Lessing, J.M. Coetzee and Laila Lalami originated as a consequence of a breakdown in the family structure. Traditionally, conventional patriarchy, in addition to securing the psychological and material needs of the family, has served as one of the building blocks of tribes and nations. Since the father figure within narrative is allegorized as a metonym of the state, the absence of patriarchal authority represents the disintegration of the link between individuals and national institutions. Consequently, characters may also turn to committing acts of terror as a rejection of the dominant national ideology. This dissertation aims to demonstrate how the breakdown of the family and the conventional gendering of roles may give rise to terrorist violence in the African setting. To recontextualize the persistence of the Conradian definition of terror as an Anglo-European phenomenon brought to Africa, I contrast the ways in which the breakdown of the family affects both indigenous and Anglo-European households in Africa across generations. I suggest that, under the reinvention of older gender norms, the unfulfilling Anglo-European patriarchy exposes Anglo-European women to indigenous violence. Moreover, I theorize that the absence of patriarchal authority leads indigenous families to seek substitutions in the form of alternative family institutions, such as religious and political organizations, that conflict with the national ideology. Furthermore, against the backdrop of globalized capitalism, commodity fetishism emerges as a substitute to compensate for the absent father figure. Therefore, this project demonstrates the indisputable relationship between the breakdown of the family structure and individual acts of terror that aim at the fulfillment of capitalist fetish or individual desire, and at the expense of national security. Finally, the rhetorical dimension of terror against family and women in Africa will be proven to be the allegorized norm of globalized terror in the twenty-first century.

This dissertation offers readings of novels by Pierre Guyotat, Georges Perec, Patrick Modiano and other lesser-known French authors of the twentieth and twenty-first century, analyzing the representation of the “appelés d’Algérie,” the last citizens of France to be mobilized in a wartime draft. Dating back to the Third Republic, military service played a key role in turning both metropolitan and colonial populations into Frenchmen, though clearly not under the same conditions or in the same way. A historically informed account of military service’s role in citizenship formation can provide a useful analytic frame for clarifying literary engagements with contemporary French “identity-talk,” i.e. political and discursive deployments of identity and identity politics, as well as debates around laïcité, universalist assimilationism, and “communautarisme.” In early literary responses to the Algerian War, the character of the conscript serves to criticize the rising tide of consumerism and Americanization in postwar France. In novels by Daniel Anselme and René-Nicolas Ehni, draftees participate in a homosocial republicanism in which “fraternité” trumps both atomized individualism and the normative heterosexual couple, a locus of consumption. In novels by Perec and Modiano, resistance to conscription enables a critique of universalist citizenship, as the figure of the insubordinate or ambivalent conscript provides an opportunity to reckon with Jewish identity and French anti-Semitism. My analysis addresses the unequal and uneven distribution of political rights based on “identity” factors as well as the asymmetrical deployment of the term “communautarisme.” Certain of Guyotat’s texts are perceived to respond politically and aesthetically to the Algerian War, even though they refuse the conventions of realism, verisimilitude, and even representation. Using Foucault to read Guyotat, my analysis of his work provides an opportunity to address twentieth-century French debates concerning engaged and autonomous art, as well as the relationship of radical politics to radical form. I turn in my last chapter to recent novels by the prize-wining French novelists Alexis Jenni, Laurent Mauvignier, Jérôme Ferrari, and Alice Ferney. Set in part during the Algerian War, these novels draw explicit parallels between colonial violence and race-based violence in France today. These rhetorical parallels can obscure historical contingency and complexity, such as the evolving construction of the concept of “race.” Likewise, these novels contrast a virile, homogenous military and an effeminate, fractured republic and can be read as parables for the rise of the Front National in contemporary France. My analysis shows how these works can both participate in and critique particular racialized and gendered views of the French republic.

It is a difficult task to interpret historical silences, to investigate subjects that are largely missing in the archives. However, the writing of history must not stop because of that, but with the help of the small amount of material that exists, research must move forward and create more knowledge. One purpose of the essay is precisely this, to contribute with inspiration and knowledge about working with limited materials from marginalized groups. This particular essay is about lesbian living conditions during the 1940s in Stockholm and this is examined using documents from a police investigation during the time, that convicted five women by the swedish law against homosexuality, "fornication that is against nature". This court case is unique as it is the first case in swedish legal history where women have been convicted of homosexual acts. The source material is examined using text analysis, queer theory, queer phenomenology and gender theory. Through this method and theory formation, lesbian living conditions are studied based on factors such as identity, community, norms and attitudes. The main results show that the prevailing heteronormativity and gender order were both limiting and liberating for gay women in different situations and that there were different attitudes towards female homosexuality. The various investigated categories are also woven together in the final discussion and their connections and influence on each other are made visible. With this essay, the goal is to contribute to the research of historical lesbian living conditions as well as to contribute with historical role models for lesbians today.

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This thesis focuses on publishing projects developed by Guillermo Deisler, Felipe Ehrenberg, Ulises Carrión, and Mirtha Dermisache between the 1960s and 1980s in Latin America and Europe, a period marked by the expansion of new mass media and an expectation of political radicalism in Latin America and Europe. By taking charge of the entire publication process, these authors established circulation networks that sought to circumvent institutional frameworks, redefining fundamental concepts for the modern aesthetic code such as author, reception, and work. This thesis argues, however, that this redefinition was not exempt from concessions and negotiations with the cultural, commercial, or political institutions to which, in principle, they opposed. Through an analysis focused on the material aspects of the various publications, my research conceives the technologies used and hinted in the production of these works – the manual platen press, the mimeograph, the typewriter, handwriting – as the place where a series of contradictions linked to the relationship between culture, institutions, and technology materialize. Against the common interpretation of using these devices and techniques as an anti-institutional gesture, the three chapters of this manuscript examine the office origin of these technologies to compare these projects with writing and printing practices that remained excluded from the literary, artistic and publishing market spheres. I conceive these technologies as transaction vehicles, where the limits between what enters and what is excluded from culture are constantly reimagined, and, at the same time, as bureaucratic phantasms, that is, as the imaginary scripts that the authors elaborate to “work out” the anxieties generated by modernizing processes at different levels of culture. In these projects, the office thus evokes bureaucratic values such as productivity, individualism, and commodification, which permeate them both as object of rejection and desire, of aversion and fascination, without a sharp cut between one approximation and the other.

En la presente investigación, analizo las construcciones ficcionales que en Poderes secretos (2009) de Miguel Gutiérrez se realizan de figuras y eventos de gran centralidad que pertenecen o tratan sobre el contexto temprano de la conquista y colonización de los Andes. Sostengo que el narrador de la trama, escritor de una novela en proceso de creación, construye una ficción de las denominadas “polémicas sobre la posesión de las Indias” a partir de la polémica en torno a la biografía del Inca Garcilaso de la Vega y la autoría de sus Comentarios reales, para demostrar la actualidad del ejercicio textual de la violencia colonial. La cuestión del mestizaje, tema central de la discusión contemporánea sobre la identidad nacional peruana, es concebida por la voz narradora como la continuación del problema del indio originado en el contexto de la colonización americana, cuyo tratamiento se caracterizó por ser polémico y textual. Mediante la construcción o, como concretamente entiendo, la novelización de este fenómeno discursivo colonial, la novela, en tanto género literario, es propuesta en la obra como el único espacio discursivo capaz de hacer resistencia a la violencia de la Historia oficial, esto es, como un discurso textual constitutivamente político.