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Africa, as both a place and as an idea, looms large in the construction of Black identity in Brazil and plays an increasingly important role in the identity processes of many Afro-American societies. Consequently, this dissertation seeks to explore how the idea of Africa is used and manipulated in the discourse and formulation of Blackness in the northeastern Brazilian state Bahia. Today, Afro-Brazilian elites and academics---particularly anthropologists---privilege the cultures of the Bight of Benin as crucial markers of a new Black identity in Black Bahia's religious spaces, cultural institutions and social movements. This new form of Black identity seeks to reject the dominant ideology of 'racial democracy' in Brazil and replace it with one that articulates an Africanised approach to Blackness. In this model, Yoruba religious practices are emphasised and placed at the centre of an array of cultural forms including carnaval, Afro-Brazilian religion, language instruction, culinary practice and the remnant maroon communities of the Bahian interior. In analysing these movements, the present work eschews the need to define Afro-Brazilian cultural practices in the historical context of a plantation society that contained so-called 'survivals' of African culture. Rather, this work adopts a perspective that simply attempts to understand how ideas such as 'Africa', 'slave', 'roots', 'orixa', 'Yoruba' and other, similar African concepts are deployed in the creation of Bahian, and more generally, Brazilian Blackness. Further, the construction of Africanised Blackness in Bahia needs to be understood in the context of an ongoing live dialogue between the cultures and peoples of Afro-America and different regions of the African continent. This dissertation explores this dialogue and also investigates the extent to which these redefinitions actually resonate and penetrate the diverse Black populations of Bahia, including those that are not actively involved with Bahia's Black movements, such as evangelical Christians and residents of the impoverished Bahian interior---the sertao. / Keywords: Africa, Bahia, Blackness, Brazil, dialogue, elites, ethnography, identity, Yoruba.

While much has been written in recent times on the concept of civil society, the idea that it is part of an Orientalist construct of West and non-West has not been explored. This dissertation addresses this lacuna in the literature by examining Western concepts of civil society and establishing the ways in which these concepts are constructed through the deployment of a mirroring construction of non-Western Others. I examine the work of three theorists (Montesquieu, Ferguson and Hegel) who wrote on civil society during the Enlightenment or in its aftermath. These theorists are emblematic of a discursive formation which differed from prior discursive formations in two related respects: their concept of civil society and their construction of non-Western Others. During the eighteenth century both constructions of the concept of civil society and of non-Western Others were undergoing significant changes leading eventually to a concept of civil society as distinct from the state and to what might be termed a "post-Enlightenment geographical imagination". To demonstrate the disjuncture between discursive formations, the work of two seventeenth-century theorists (Hobbes and Locke) is compared and contrasted with that of these writers. The work of three late twentieth-century social scientists (Shils, Gellner and Fukuyama) is examined and their concept of civil society and use of non-Western Others is contrasted with those of the prior discursive formation. I show how their concept of civil society is informed both by the concept of civil society developed in the Enlightenment and its aftermath and by the mirroring constructions of non-Western Others of the post-Enlightenment geographical imagination. Underscoring the work of all these theorists are methods of comparison and the representational practices they authorize. These are explored through two conceptions of alterity which have operated in Western thought and their connections to questions of comparison. An analysis is made of the relationship of the ideas of comparison and comparative method to questions of translation in Western philosophy and social science. The implications of this discussion of comparison and representation for theories of civil society and their constructions of non-Western Others is analyzed.

This study represents the scandal of current colonial racist ideologizing by focusing on the American Orientalizing project in Singapore. It argues that, in the era of global capitalism and post-colonial theory, the new colonialist epistemologies rely on collaborations between the ruling classes of the 'third world' and 'first world' as well as a rhetoric of 'native' nationalism to contain threatening non-Western economic success and to create 'third world' populations and governments that will not resist the continuation of the Western/American colonizing project. Using a Marxist-Lacanian psychoanalytical theory of hegemony, of a "libidinal politics" which focuses on the role of desire in national culture, this thesis shows that the Singapore government has used American Orientalist ideology to effect disempowering cultural changes in the people. Examining political and literary texts, I argue that the Singapore government quotes American notions of 'Oriental' difference to keep "dangerous Western (liberal) influences" from 'ethnically contaminating' the nation, and that it has hegemonized an 'Asian'/'Confucianist' nationalism by hystericizing and repressing the people's desire, leading Singaporeans to disavow their location in a post-modern world. The Orientalizing of Singapore, where Chinese identity has been produced as a masquerade of Western culture, has also generated a crisis in male identity, involving an inward-looking escapist cultural narcissism that blocks a positive response to historical realities. Paradoxically, the claim to a non-Western modernity has also been used to suppress ethnic difference by producing ethnicity as 'fetish.' The East/West discourse that emerged from the caning of an American teenager, Michael Fay, in Singapore is used to reveal the entrapment of Singapore's 'Oriental' national identity in American colonial desire, and to argue that the perceived East Asian 'cultural confidence' often spoken about today overlooks the fact that such cultural certitude accrues from the East entering into the West's fantasy scenarios and staging itself as the other's object of desire. This thesis suggests that current 'post-colonial' claims to "ethnic, non-Western" modernisms be viewed with some skepticism as possibly involving the ventriloquistic 'passing' of Western colonial ideology as the voice of the 'racial other.'

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Following Nietzsche, Oswald Spengler posed the central problems of the cyclical history of civilization in the twentieth century. Subsequent world historical theorists have attempted to answer Spengler's nihilistic perspective on the destined rise and fall of all cultures by rescuing a progressive movement which transcended the downfall of civilizations. World history since Spengler has been written in pursuit of an answer to the crises of modernism: to the 'Death of God,' the problem of progress, the emergent technological order with its bureaucratic management of society, and the need sensed by the metahistorians for a new 'mythical' grounding to avert the fall of the West. The "Crisis of the West" dominates the perspectives of the world historians. Their goals for the solution of 'modernism,' through the religious transformation of society or political and cultural world unity, are central to their motivation as writers and to the formulation of their paradigms.

The development of the translation movement in Islamic history was a long, intricate movement which encompassed a large number of people over a long period of time. It is the objective of this paper to assess the historical setting which gave rise to this movement as well as to evaluate why it was embraced. Moving onward, the paper will then move to a more detailed examination of six translators, in an effort to evaluate their contribution to the movement. While doing this, an inventory will be conducted of the works which were translated in the three disciplines of astrology, philosophy, and medicine by these translators in an attempt to answer the question of why the selection process was so specific and what perhaps were the criteria for these choices.

But suppose now that technology were no means, how would it stand with the will to master it? Martin Heidegger / Mais supposez maintenant que Ia technologie ne soit pas en moyen,comment ~a se comparerait avec Ie desir de la connaitre au fond? Martin Heidegger

This thesis examines the use of archaeology in the development of national identity in Iraq from the period before the establishment of the Hashimite monarchy in 1921 to the present Ba'th regime and S&dotbelow;addam H&dotbelow;usayn. During King Faysal I's period (1921--1933), archaeology was used to highlight the 'Arabness' of the ancient Mesopotamians so as to keep the nation on a pan-Arabist course and steer away from developing a regional identity. Iraq's pre-Islamic heritage was approached with much reserve since the government feared alienating the majority Muslim population by glorifying the country's achievements before the advent of Islam. In contrast, 'Abd al-Karim Qasim's regime (1958--1963) focused unbridled attention to the Mesopotamian heritage in an effort to distance the newly established republic from the pan-Arabists' call to join with the United Arab Republic. Between the two poles of identifying the national identity with either the Arab or Mesopotamian character, the Ba'th regime embarked on a cultural campaign that used both identities in defining the modern Iraqi man and woman. While the campaign was relegated strictly to the cultural sphere of the nation, the intent was political in that the regime shifted to stressing the Muslim-Arab identity of Iraq when appealing to support from other Arab nations; and to the pre-Islamic Mesopotamian identity when dealing with the religious and ethnic cleavages in Iraqi society.

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