Battlestar Galactica (2003) is a textually rich cultural product with much to say about the ever-changing global dynamics and social relations of Earthly inhabitants. Through the familiar science fiction tropes of catastrophe, space travel, and cyborgs, this study aims to reveal the discursive frameworks that inform identity politics and knowledge production as they relate to self/Other. Postcolonial theory guides the structure of this study through the influential insights of Homi Bhabha, James Clifford, and Robert J.C. Young. The first chapter investigates the ways in which colonial discourse exercises power and sanctions difference through the stereotype. Chapter two explores the justifications for and ramifications of physical colonization of subjugated peoples, while chapter three reads several characters in BSG as occupying a third space whereby binary notions of subjectivity are problematized in favor of hybridity. Overall, this study argues that through the allegorical interplay between a recognizable self and alien other, viewers can come to better understand the discursive conditions of their existence and, perhaps, locate sites of resistance inside the ideological prison within which we are all prisoners. / text

This essay argues that Jamaica Kincaid’s The Autobiography of My Mother depicts how the indigenous colonized in Dominica are living ‘unhomely lives’ and that their experience is one of the double consciousness. i.e. when a person see the world through different "lenses." The person does not only have a dual personality but also feels the notion of having different roles in society, such as having a black identity and at the same time conforming to the stereotypical norms of the white society for a black person. Therefore, the person sees the world, and oneself, through one’s own “black” lens and the “white” lens at the same time. Subsequently, with a setting full of diversities, the novel depicts a colonial background where the characters have been ascribed certain features to their persona. Furthermore, the novel uses metaphors to show a futile endeavor of finding identity of the main characters in an ineluctable power structure. By utilizing the postcolonial theoretical framework; mainly Du Bois’s notion on ‘double consciousness’ and Bhabha’s term ‘unhomely lives’ which means to grow up between two cultures, to live on borders and in margins and not feel at ease in either sides, expands the readers understanding of the text. A central aspect of the novel is the alienation of an individual’s personal identity in the context of a postcolonial society. Therefore, the psychology of the novel’s characters will be a major theme of this essay. Nevertheless, the novel shows that it is hard for the characters Alfred and Xuela to break free from the bonds of society.

<p>This paper is an analysis of the novel Season of Migration to The North by Tayeb Salih. Season of Migration to The North was first published in 1967 and it is the most accomplished among several works in modern Arabic literature.</p><p>I shall focus on one of the two major characters, Mustafa Said, a young Sudanese student whose brilliant career at school in Sudan and Cairo eventually brings him to England; he has a successful academic career in England as a lecturer at the University of London.</p><p>One of the major themes of the novel is the confrontation between Mustafa Said and England, which in other terms is described as the confrontation between East and West. The conflict is rooted in colonialism. Mustafa Said’s native country, Sudan, was a British colony when the story takes place. It is a period marked by war, oppression and colonial violence. Hence Mustafa Said comes to England as a conqueror and invader. The confrontation is mainly depicted through Mustafa’s relationships with a number of English women. These relationships are nothing less than complex and they symbolize the clash of two cultures within a Western context.</p><p>My main purpose is to more closely examine the relationship between Mustafa Said and the English women. In these relationships an important part is played by the stereotypes; the women see Mustafa as an object of their “oriental desire”. This is something he is well aware of but chooses to use the stereotype of himself as the typical Arab-African male, (so as) to seduce and “conquer” the women. In this context the term “orient/oriental” references Edward Said’s theoretical definition as described in his book Orientalism. Questions that will be raised in this paper are: what (is the composition of) the relationships between Mustafa Said and the English women. How does Mustafa Said construct an “oriental identity”, what role does the female body play in the relationships? These questions will all be discussed through a postcolonial perspective. One of the central features of postcolonial theory is an examination of the impact and continuing legacy of the European conquest, colonization and domination of non-European lands, peoples and cultures. What is also central to this critical examination is an analysis of the ideas of European superiority over non-European peoples and cultures that such imperial colonization implies.</p><p>I will be referencing the postcolonial theories of Edward Said in Orientalism but my main focus will be on Black Skin, White Mask by Frantz Fanon, which is a psychological analysis of colonialism.</p>

This paper is an analysis of the novel Season of Migration to The North by Tayeb Salih. Season of Migration to The North was first published in 1967 and it is the most accomplished among several works in modern Arabic literature. I shall focus on one of the two major characters, Mustafa Said, a young Sudanese student whose brilliant career at school in Sudan and Cairo eventually brings him to England; he has a successful academic career in England as a lecturer at the University of London. One of the major themes of the novel is the confrontation between Mustafa Said and England, which in other terms is described as the confrontation between East and West. The conflict is rooted in colonialism. Mustafa Said’s native country, Sudan, was a British colony when the story takes place. It is a period marked by war, oppression and colonial violence. Hence Mustafa Said comes to England as a conqueror and invader. The confrontation is mainly depicted through Mustafa’s relationships with a number of English women. These relationships are nothing less than complex and they symbolize the clash of two cultures within a Western context. My main purpose is to more closely examine the relationship between Mustafa Said and the English women. In these relationships an important part is played by the stereotypes; the women see Mustafa as an object of their “oriental desire”. This is something he is well aware of but chooses to use the stereotype of himself as the typical Arab-African male, (so as) to seduce and “conquer” the women. In this context the term “orient/oriental” references Edward Said’s theoretical definition as described in his book Orientalism. Questions that will be raised in this paper are: what (is the composition of) the relationships between Mustafa Said and the English women. How does Mustafa Said construct an “oriental identity”, what role does the female body play in the relationships? These questions will all be discussed through a postcolonial perspective. One of the central features of postcolonial theory is an examination of the impact and continuing legacy of the European conquest, colonization and domination of non-European lands, peoples and cultures. What is also central to this critical examination is an analysis of the ideas of European superiority over non-European peoples and cultures that such imperial colonization implies. I will be referencing the postcolonial theories of Edward Said in Orientalism but my main focus will be on Black Skin, White Mask by Frantz Fanon, which is a psychological analysis of colonialism.

ABSTRACT This study examined global media discourses regarding the coverage of an anti-poverty campaign for Africa by celebrities in Europe by comparing media coverage of this event in the UK, US, and African press. The Make Poverty History campaign was organized in 2005 to pressure G8 leaders meeting in Glen eagles Scotland to cancel African aid, increase aid, and make trading conditions fairer. Former rock star, and humanitarian Sir Bob Geldof, rocker Bono, and filmmaker Richard Curtis, were the central figures in organizing this campaign on the global justice movement side of things. On the political arena, former British premier, Tony Blair, also had an agenda that put Africa and climate change at the top of the G8 agenda in 2005. Given Africa's historical negative coverage in the media, this study sought to investigate how a celebrity campaign which sought to change the perception of Africa as a pitiable place in need of charity, to one of a wronged continent in need of justice, would alter, if at all, the traditional coverage of Africa. The study sought to address three questions in particular: what were global media discourses regarding the Make Poverty History campaign; how were the major players in this campaign portrayed by the press in the United Kingdom, the center of the campaign, the United States, the key player in the G8, and in Africa, the continent in which all this attention was being directed to; and lastly to establish to what degree differences existed between media coverage of this campaign, and colonial/postcolonial discourses on the continent. The findings from the Western press showed both continuities and discontinuities of colonial rhetorical modes. These discursive continuities are classification, affirmation, debasement, idealization, and negation. These discourses are not static but have variations and shifts but some clear outlines of a continuation of colonial discourses were apparent. Classification refers to arranging nations according to a single standard of political and economic development. The Western press constantly held up industrialized countries as the ideal for Africa to follow. Affirmation has to do with confirming the moral superiority of the rich nations' publics. The Western media esteem the ability of the Western public, for example, to serve as the conscience of big business to restrain them from exploiting Third World countries. The leaders of the campaign also painted outstanding leaders on a mission to save the world, while the beneficiaries of the campaign were not involved. Debasement has to do depicting the "Other" in a degrading manner. This recurred in the coverage except the trope of debasement and idealization operated together with African leaders acting as the "villains" and the ordinary people as "noble" and "unspoilt" continuing the ambivalence of colonial discourse. Negation had to do with the media being ahistorical and denying historical links between Africa's deprivation in the past and its present reality. Even the campaign itself was in denial of Africa's past by adopting its slogan as Make Poverty History. Nonetheless, accommodation is a new discourse that came out of the reading and signified diverse perspectives within Western media coverage. Some perspectives from the activist public considered left-wing have entered the mainstream, for example, acknowledgment that subsidies given to farmers in wealthy countries make African countries less competitive contributing to poverty levels. African media texts had different perspectives. These can be classified as: self-affirmation (quest for global inclusion and /raising Africa's global profile); sovereignty (quest for economic independence); and self-reliance. African publications sought to reaffirm the place of Africa within the community of nations. They also sought resist what they considered undue interference by outsiders in the inside affairs of the continent. But there was some ambivalence because they still expressed concern over being forgotten by the rest of the world. Lastly, African media texts called for Africans to fashion their own solutions to the problems they encounter instead of waiting for outside help. These discursive strategies could be seen as defensive and in direct response to Africa's portrayal in the international media. Nevertheless, the African media provided perspective and continually drew the link between Africa's current problems and its historical development and place in global relations. While the Western press focused on Africa's present dilemma, the African press provided an alternative reading of the situation by illustrating global connections in Africa's plight.

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Migration and its consequences are often discussed in contemporary postcolonial discussions. This topic of migration is central in Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s Americanah. Adichie’s portrayal of the migrating subject has placed her in the center of the Afropolitan discussion about transnational Africans and their right to represent. This essay aims to bring this discussion to light. Furthermore, with the use of Benedict Anderson’s ideas of nations as imagined communities, Edward Said’s definition of Orientalism, and Homi K. Bhabha’s concept of mimicry, this essay intends to illuminate the colonial discourse of Americanah’s America. I argue that the novel’s protagonist Ifemelu’s migration to the land of the free is bordered by remnants of colonial discourse, placing her within a western array of marginalization. As Ifemelu struggles with issues connected to her migration into a culture that marginalizes and discriminates under the proud flag of “the American Dream,” she is forced to resort to mimicry of western traits, to get access to western privilege. I contend that the mimicry of western traits consequently reduces her presence in America to partial.

Presentations of Oriental people as subordinated the West and their ideals was one way for Europeans to expand and keep control over their colonies in Africa during the nineteenth- and twentieth centuries. France and Great Britain controlled their colonies in different ways which has led to diverse legacies. Today, tourism is a source of revenue for former colonies, such as Tunisia and Kenya, and tourism also helps to spread knowledge and images of distant countries. A guidebook is one way that knowledge of other countries and people are spread to travelers. During history, images of distant people were based on a colonial discourse in which the west was seen as superior; but is that still the case? The purpose of this paper was to analyze how Tunisia and Kenya are presented in the Lonely Planet guide to Tunisia and the Lonely Planet guide to Kenya to investigate if they are constructed through a colonial discourse, and to see if there are any dissimilarities on how they are presented. With a postcolonial theory and critical discourse analysis and with a colonial discourse as framework, the guidebooks were examined to see how people and culture were presented. The research showed that Lonely Planet guidebooks use a colonial discourse in the presentation of Tunisia and Kenya where distinctions are made between the inhabitants and the western world. The Orient was subordinated the superior Occident which reinforces the notion of others as being different and less than the west. Diversities between how Tunisia and Kenya were drawn in the guidebooks were found. The colonial heritage was more present in Tunisia than in Kenya, while in Kenya the people were presented as more brutal than in Tunisia. Reasons for that could be many, but the critical issue is why the western world still constructs other people as subordinate and different.

Spanish travel writings on China at the end of the 19th century have been largely ignored in the history of literature. Nevertheless, this topic deserves a thorough examination since these texts constitute a particular and important vision of an "Orientalized" country about an Oriental nation during a critical and complicated historical moment. On one hand, Spain was characterized by an irreversible decadence. Thus, in contrast to British and French imperial discourse, which reflects colonial experiences, Spanish travel writings provide a unique perspective from a Western empire that shared a similar fate with the Other: both being traditional and decadent nations. Furthermore, although China was a goal of imperial ambition, it was far less colonized than other regions. As a result, the commanding imperial gaze and fearless exploration were less likely to be cast on China. In addition, despite its general decline, China remained the home of an ancient and highly advanced civilization that still deserved Western respect and offered the West much to learn. Considering these facts, this dissertation consists of a general analysis of Spanish travel literature on China from 1870 to 1910. The primary purposes of the dissertation are to portray the bibliographic genealogy of references on Spanish travelers and their writings on China during this period; to depict their particular vision in which the construct of colonial discourse is transformed into a pretension to recover the lost imperial prestige and an interiorized reflection on Spain's own problems and possible solutions; and to present a fundamental ambivalence or even difficult conciliation between the colonial discourse and its resistance, ideology and utopia, as well as imperialist ambition and national crisis. Spanish travel writings on China consequently become an allegory of imperial nostalgia: a yearning for the imperial power that had vanished, without hope of restoration. / text

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.