From 1839 to 1873 New Zealand was characterised by ideological, religious, economic cultural and social contest. This struggle to order a new society, in which colonists and indigenes were required to co-exist, is captured in the newspapers of the day. These document and attest to a contest over power; power to appropriate and control resources, power to administer, control and institutionalize the colony, and power to ascribe identities. Newspapers published during the initial period of colonization in New Zealand are saturated with instances of ideological work where discourses were deployed that supported the colonial endeavour. In this study therefore I have sought to understand and articulate those racial ideologies, racial formations, and discourses, which emerged from New Zealand’s colonial press archives. How did New Zealand’s colonial press constitute the privileges, entitlements and struggles of the white British colonist in relation to the native? What white British colonial ideologies, discursive formations and discourses can be identified in the colonial press in relation to the native? Are there any patterns or relationships between these discourses? What did these discourses look like over time? A critical discourse analytical approach has been applied to a body of texts extracted from newspapers published in New Zealand between 1839 and 1873. From this analysis three broad discursive formations have been apprehended; the discourses of sovereignty, discipline and paternalism respectively. These discourses were not independent of one another but worked to construct an interlocking network of discourse that provided sound ideological coverage. The discourse of sovereignty provided a broad platform for working out the colony’s ideological and institutional plan; discourses of discipline discursively managed native disruptions to the plan, while discourses of paternalism invested the colonial project with affectations of concern and interest in the progress of the native. Weaving through these discourses are patterns of meaning which worked to constitute white British colonial authority in economic, political, judicial, social, martial and moral affairs. These constitutive repertoires were malleable and adaptable and attached and detached themselves, according to the context, to and from the discourses of sovereignty, discipline and paternalism. Over time it appears that these discourses and the associated patterns of meaning worked responsively and flexibly, bleeding into each other, reconstituting authority and identity across different contexts. Furthermore, these discourses and patterns attest to a complex encounter with a vociferous non-white challenge, which necessitated a flexible reservoir of rhetoric to situate and position the white British colonial incursion favourably in the white settler public arena.

This thesis is premised on the notion, drawn mainly from a postcolonial perspective (which is subsumed under the poststructuralist as well as the postmodern), that Conrad's early writing reflects his abiding concern with how people construct their identities vis-a-vis the other/Other in contact zones on the periphery of empire far from the reach of social, racial and national identities that sustain them at home. It sets out to explore the problematic of race, culture, gender and identity in a selection of the writer's early works set mainly, but not exclusively, in the East, using the theoretical perspective of postcoloniality as a point of entry, nuanced by the configurations of spatiality which are factored into discourses about the other/Other. Predicated mainly on the theoretical constructs about culture and identity espoused by Homi Bhabha, Edward Said and Stuart Hall, this study proposes the idea of an in between "third space" for the interrogation of identity in Conrad's work. This postcolonial space, the central contribution of this thesis, frees his writings from the stranglehold of the Manichean paradigm in terms of which alterity or otherness is perceived. Based on the hypothesis that identities are never fixed but constantly in a state of performance, this project underwrites postcoloniality as a viable theoretical mode of intervention in Conrad's early works. The writer's early oeuvre yields richly to the contingency of our times in the early twenty-first century as issues of race, gender and identity remain contested terrain. This study adopts the position that Conrad stood both inside and outside Victorian cultural and ethical space, developing an ambivalent mode of representation which recuperated and simultaneously subverted the entrenched prejudices of his age. Conceived proleptically, the characters of Conrad's early phase, traditionally dismissed as those of an apprentice writer, pose a constant challenge to how we view alterity in our everyday lives. / Thesis (Ph.D. (English))--North-West University, Potchefstroom Campus, 2004.

The aim of this essay is to examine the tension at the heart of the British colonial discourse as it affects the relationship of Travis and Joyce in the chapter "Somewhere in England", in Caryl Phillips's 1993 novel, Crossing the River. The thesis of the essay is that the colonial discourse of the British insists on a racial signifier in the imagined community of the British, and thus resists the idea that a person can be both black and British. The postcolonial analysis shows that it is Joyce's rejection of the national discourse along with the displacement of Travis from a segregated America into a superficially kinder environment that allows their relationship to develop. Yet, along with Travis's death, the contradictions and hypocrisy of the colonial discourse serve to undermine Joyce's lack of racial prejudice and contribute to her giving up her baby at the end of the war.

This thesis analyses a dialogue between the US ambassador to Zambia and two Zambian officials, regarding LGBT+ rights, following the sentencing of a same-sex couple by the Zambian high court. The theoretical framework utilizes postcolonial theory and a few of its concepts, namely cultural imperialism, and colonial discourses. To analyse the material, critical discourse analysis was conducted to examine if colonial discourse is present in the dialogue, and if so, how the discourses are used to reproduce or challenge the uneven power relationship between the West and Zambia. The thesis could conclude that discourses of cultural imperialism as well as colonial discourses were indeed present in the dialogue. The US ambassador reproduced the uneven power structure and the Zambian officials both reproduced as well as challenged it. The findings aim to contribute to the field of global LGBT+ advocacy, especially when conducted in a postcolonial context.

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Because infants are the most vulnerable members of a community, their deaths – and the resulting infant mortality rate (IMR) – are said to signal more fundamental problems that are likely to affect the general health of a community. However, a focus on proximate- and intermediate-level risk factors in epidemiological analyses presents a decontextualized picture and ignores the role of larger forces on health, disease, and illness. In response to this trend, this project will contribute to a revitalization of the use of infant mortality as an index of larger social problems by tempering statistical analyses with critical reflection regarding the effects of the liminal position of Malta within the British imperial system, prior to the Second World War. In addition, by bringing together several analytic approaches which often proceed in parallel, rather than in dialogue – historical epidemiology, social history, and the analysis of colonial discourse – this dissertation highlights the problematics of knowledge production at both the theoretical and methodological level. As a result, my work is not just about Malta, one moment in history, the calculation of infant mortality rates, or the disentanglement of various determinants of infant mortality in this context; it is about the dynamics and repercussions of power differentials and of social, economic, and political inequalities, as they define and structure health outcomes and experiences. Specifically, I will show that fluctuations in international tensions affected Malta’s population on a number of levels because of the island’s importance as a British military and naval base and its location in the middle of the Mediterranean. I will demonstrate how Malta’s “strategic position” restricted political and economic development in the island and articulated with colonial perceptions of the Maltese as “Other” and Malta as “overpopulated.” Finally, I will argue that international tensions, Malta’s location within Empire, and perceptions of the island and its inhabitants in the early twentieth century affected the ways in which infant deaths were explained and understood and the strategies of intervention initiated in the island to curtail infant mortality – all of which had a tremendous impact on the rates at which infants in Malta died.

Because infants are the most vulnerable members of a community, their deaths – and the resulting infant mortality rate (IMR) – are said to signal more fundamental problems that are likely to affect the general health of a community. However, a focus on proximate- and intermediate-level risk factors in epidemiological analyses presents a decontextualized picture and ignores the role of larger forces on health, disease, and illness. In response to this trend, this project will contribute to a revitalization of the use of infant mortality as an index of larger social problems by tempering statistical analyses with critical reflection regarding the effects of the liminal position of Malta within the British imperial system, prior to the Second World War. In addition, by bringing together several analytic approaches which often proceed in parallel, rather than in dialogue – historical epidemiology, social history, and the analysis of colonial discourse – this dissertation highlights the problematics of knowledge production at both the theoretical and methodological level. As a result, my work is not just about Malta, one moment in history, the calculation of infant mortality rates, or the disentanglement of various determinants of infant mortality in this context; it is about the dynamics and repercussions of power differentials and of social, economic, and political inequalities, as they define and structure health outcomes and experiences. Specifically, I will show that fluctuations in international tensions affected Malta’s population on a number of levels because of the island’s importance as a British military and naval base and its location in the middle of the Mediterranean. I will demonstrate how Malta’s “strategic position” restricted political and economic development in the island and articulated with colonial perceptions of the Maltese as “Other” and Malta as “overpopulated.” Finally, I will argue that international tensions, Malta’s location within Empire, and perceptions of the island and its inhabitants in the early twentieth century affected the ways in which infant deaths were explained and understood and the strategies of intervention initiated in the island to curtail infant mortality – all of which had a tremendous impact on the rates at which infants in Malta died.

Caryl Phillis’s novel Crossing the River tells a story of the African diaspora caused by the slave trade. The novel not only depicts the physical aspect of diasporic life, but also sheds light on the cognitive aspects. It is visible separately in the four chapters, but also in the prologue and epilogue through Phillips’s use of the mystical voice of the disembodied father who addresses all his children of the African diaspora. This essay argues that Crossing the River is an example of black politics of resistance from two different perspectives. Firstly, Phillips uses the African diaspora to exemplify the hybrid identity, and to reject a binary colonial discourse and racism that have caused tremendous suffering for the African diaspora. Secondly, by not only rejecting the binary colonial discourse but also contesting and taking part in shaping a discourse that synthesizes different worlds, Crossing the River takes part in creating a more diverse and equal sense of the world.

This thesis deploys Homi Bhabha's perspective of postcolonial literary theory as a critical procedure to examine particular instances of fiction, as well as reportage on Botswana. Its unifying interest is to pinpoint the shifting nature or reality of Botswana and, by extension, of African identities. To that end, I use Bhabha's concept of liminality to inform the work of writers such as Unity Dow, Alexander McCall Smith, and instances of reportage (by Rupert Isaacson and Caitlin Davies), from the 1990s to date. The aims of the thesis are, among other things, to establish the extent to which Homi Bhabha's appropriation of the term liminality (which derives from Victor Turner's notion of limen for inbetweenness), and its application in the postcolonial context inflects the reading of the above works whose main motifs include the following: a contestation of any views which privilege one culture above another, challenging a jingoistic rootedness in one culture, and promoting an awareness of the existence of several, interlocking or even clashing realities which finally produce multiple meanings, values and identities. In short, it is proposed that identity is not a given but rather a product of a lived reality and therefore a social construct, something always in process. The thesis begins by theorizing liminality in Chapter 1 within the context of Homi Bhabha's understanding and interrogation of the colonial discourse. This is followed by the contextualization of liminality through the reading of, firstly, the fiction of Unity Dow in Chapters 2 and 3, and then the "detective" fiction of Alexander McCall Smith in Chapters 4 and 5. In the discussion of these works, I also touch on instances of reportage which relate to the lives of the authors. In the case of Smith's "detective" fiction, for example, reportage refers to his incorporation of actual historical events and personages whose impact, I argue, suggests the liminality of culture. In Chapter 6, the idea of reportage varies slightly to denote works of fiction in which there is a great deal of historical fact. Thus Rupert Isaacson's The Healing Land: A Kalahari Journey and Caitlin Davies' Place of Reeds are treated as works of reportage in line with Truman Capote's application of that term. What comes out most evidently in this study is the shifting idea of (Botswana/African) identity. It should be noted that rather than present an all-embracing account of the fiction on Botswana, the study only looks at the selected examples of writing and reportage. / University of South Africa National Research Foundation / English Studies / D. Litt. et Phil. (English)

This dissertation examines the way in which South African colonial texts may be read for the historical signs they inadvertently reveal. The history of land acquisition in South Africa may be read through the representation of burial and illegitimate pregnancy in South African farm novels. Both burial and illegitimate pregnancy are read as signifiers of illegitimacy in the texts, surfacing, by indirection, the question of the illegitimacy of land acquisition in South Africa. The South African farm novel offers a representational form which seeks (or fails) to mediate the question of land ownership and the relationship between colon and indigene. In the four texts under discussion, Olive Schreiner's The Story of an African Farm, Florence Ethel Mills Young's The Bywonner[sic], Pauline Smith's The Beadle and Daphne Rooke's Mittee, the representation of burial and illegitimate pregnancy is problematic and marked by narrative displacements and discursive breakdowns. KEY TERMS burial, colonial discourse, farm novel, illegitimacy, illegitimate pregnancy, land, postcolonial theory, representation / English / M.A. (English)