This study seeks to understand how the migrant rights group No One Is Illegal’s advocacy works to rearticulate migrant subjectivity while furthering our understanding of what it means to communicate critically and ethically as global citizens in the context of postcolonial globality. Informed by critical and postcolonial iterations of cosmopolitan thought and guided by Sobré-Denton and Bardhan’s (2013) notion of cosmopolitan communication and peoplehood, this study offers a rhetorical criticism of No One Is Illegal’s Deportation Is Not Entertainment and Access Without Fear campaigns. With an eye toward identifying how No One Is Illegal works to rearticulate migrant subjectivity in ways not undergirded by the logics of the neoliberal nation-state, I identify rhetorical features within No One Is Illegal’s discourse that reflect an ethical and ecological view of culture and communication and hold the potential for progressive social change. In Deportation Is Not Entertainment, a campaign against the reality television show Border Security: Canada’s Front Line¸I argue that No One Is Illegal advances a rhetoric of emotional and material victimization of undocumented migrants at the hands of Border Security and the Harper government. I further argue that No One Is Illegal positions undocumented migrants as the victims of epistemic violence (Spivak, 1998) through the narrative framing of the television show and the Harper government’s public discourse. In Access Without Fear¸ I argue that No One Is Illegal’s discourse works in three important ways to further the goals of this study. First, I argue No One Is Illegal offers a vernacular articulation of coloniality that challenges normative understandings of Toronto and Canada while articulating an understanding of undocumented migrants as agentive subjects navigating a postcolonial world. Second, I argue No One Is Illegal’s rhetoric asks us to understand belonging in three different ways: belonging as rightful presence (Squire & Darling, 2013), belonging as multiple, and belonging as constituted in relationships as opposed to preexisting cultural categories or legal designations. Third, I argue No One Is Illegal offers a decolonial imaginary where migrant rights are pulled into relation with indigenous rights, environmental degradation, and the workings of global capitalism. This decolonial imaginary asks us to think of self-Other relations in new ways while being projective and outward. In the process, I identify rhetorical features in No One Is Illegal’s advocacy that reflect communication that is world- and Other- oriented, attentive to power, establishes mutuality, and reflects non-oppositional views of difference. This rhetoric, I argue, works to promote social change through fostering an enlarged and transformed imaginary, intercultural empathy, an Other-oriented sense of belonging and a type of coalitional agency, which work to cultivate a sense of cosmopolitan peoplehood in the service of social and global justice.

Yes / This is paper represents a long process of self-reflection and critique of prior work I have presented on decolonising zooarchaeology. Engaging with current discourse on the misuse and appropriation of decolonial theory, I instead propose a framework which promotes movement towards decolonisation without co-opting the terminology. Through this, I also propose some alterations and considerations to my original proposal from 2019.

Feminist rhetorics need to move us from inclusion to transformation: instead of "including" more and more marginalized groups into the scholarly status quo, or "including" comics into methods of analysis that we already use, we need to transform our practices themselves. Seeing comics research as an expedition into comics doesn't work. The spatial metaphor is failing because it's analogous to a takeover in the colonial sense. I center the both/and experience of being a producer of comics and analyst of them. Drawing from a critical reading of my own comic, I describe "the disobedient how," a way of learning from transgressive models. I argue that instead of "collecting" comics, decolonial feminist methodology asks that we "attend" comics through listening, experiencing, and having a relationship with them and their creators. As Shawn Wilson's work suggests, knowledge lies in relationships. I use this concept to guide an analysis of Lynda Barry's recent comics work as well as her comments during a panel at the Comics: Philosophy and Practice conference. In order for academics to have true knowledge about Barry's work, we must have a right relationship to her and to it, which requires decolonizing our relationship to texts and taking Barry's comics seriously as sources of theory. Next, I argue for scholars to pay closer attention to Alison Bechdel's comics beyond their engagement with her memoir, Fun Home. I describe her participation in queer rhetoric through a close reading of her comic strip Dykes To Watch Out For and her public discussion of her composing practices. Finally, I perform a retrospective of the history of my own comic book, Oh Shit, I'm in Grad School, drawing on (and developing documentation for) personal archives. / Ph. D.

Chicana decolonial feminism asks us to re envision a world that allows for various forms of beings, creating identities based on political coalitions, having an active compassion that translates into direct action that seeks to dismantle binaries that reinscribe colonialism. Chicana decolonial feminist thought actively seeks to dismantle sexism, to dismantle racism, to focus on personal experience as theory, to focus on the body as knowledge, reconceptualize knowledge, envision new ways of being, and writing that is accessible to all. I use two concepts active compassion and interconnectedness of being that are central to chicana decolonial feminism. Chicana feminist texts and newspaper articles from the 1970s are analyzed to demonstrate how chicana decolonial feminism is seen in these texts.

Decolonizing Revelation: A Spatial Reading of the Blues demonstrates that the cultural phenomenon of the blues is an indigenous way of knowing that offsets the hidden logic of racialized dominance within modern Christian understandings of revelation. In distinction from the Christian, Religious, and racialized understandings of the blues, this dissertation focuses on the space in which the blues emerges, the Delta Region of the United States. By attending to space, this dissertation shows how critical consideration of geography and region can reveal nuances that are often veiled behind racialized and theologized ways of understanding the people of the Delta Region. Reading the blues in space discloses the ways in which the blues dislocates the confines of interpreters that label it a racialized phenomenon on one hand, and “the devil's music” on the other. By wresting the blues from colonialist and racist logics, this dissertation contends that the space that produces the blues can be recovered as a viable resource for reimagining a theology of revelation. / McAnulty College and Graduate School of Liberal Arts; / Theology / PhD; / Dissertation;

Magíster en artes con mención en composición musical / El presente estudio se propone evidenciar algunas de las implicancias del fenómeno conocido como colonialidad sobre la actividad musical en Chile, e instalar dicha problemática en el contexto académico (sea musical o no) y en el contexto social general. En concordancia con tales objetivos y con la ayuda de una herramienta de análisis estadístico, este trabajo repasó la actividad musical académica de la última década en Chile, y determinó que ésta se encuentra regida por un canon de carácter hermético y eurocéntrico. Entendido como un mecanismo regulador de la sensibilidad, dicho canon tiene la particularidad de estar disociado tanto de su contexto social de origen (Europa; dado que es eurocéntrico) como de su contexto social de aplicación (Chile; dado que es hermético), lo cual sugiere que los saberes que este canon resguarda y promueve no son, en última instancia, de un orden estético. A fin de conocer su naturaleza determinante y solapada, el canon de la academia musical chilena fue examinado a la luz del marco teórico que ofrece el pensamiento decolonial, cuyas herramientas críticas permitieron tomar en cuenta las exclusiones u omisiones que el canon genera en cuanto ente normativo, y no solamente los valores que éste profesa. A partir de lo anterior, y como una conclusión en sí misma, la obra musical Temple y su correspondiente propuesta teórica abogarán por la pertinencia de sistemas no canónicos de creación y análisis como herramientas válidas para una aproximación decolonial al fenómeno musical. La obra Temple se encuentra disponible en el disco Nuevas Músicas Latinoamericanas, del Centro de Estudios Musicales Latinoamericanos (CEMLA), como también en el siguiente enlace: https://soundcloud.com/fabiancontreras- 490700885/temple-fabian-contreras

La corriente «decolonial» —en pleno desarrollo en América Latina— plantea poner en el centro del análisis y del debate académico aquella parte de la Modernidad que sobre la base del racismo y el sexismo trazó el concepto de Estado Moderno así como propició la elaboración de las categorías que hoy sustentan al constitucionalismo. Un constitucionalismo que nace en Occidente y se exporta a otros lugares a pesar de sus particulares dimensiones espaciales-temporales, dejando de lado otras perspectivas no occidentales, las cuales son inferiorizadas y marginadas del canon de pensamiento hegemónico. El presente estudio incluye algunas reflexiones acerca de las posibilidades de aplicación del pensamiento «decolonial» en la enseñanza del derecho constitucional. Su finalidad es superar el conocimiento sesgado, especialmente, en el tema relativo al constitucionalismo y su historia.

This enquiry investigates the entanglement of the Natural History and Ethnographic museums in the construction of racist ideologies, the perpetuation of colonial reasoning and its continuities in South Africa today. It draws our attention to the fact that the museological institution was complicit and colluded in the perpetuation of colonial "crimes against humanity", thereby rendering its own institutionality a colonial "crime scene" that requires rigorous "de-colonial" investigation in the "post-colonial" era. In the attempt to shed more light into the miasma caused by colonial and apartheid rule, I turn to the practices of 'scientific enquiry' and public exhibitions to advance an argument that these museum exhibits were a precursor to genocide. The study further argues that, these public exhibits of Africans were instrumental in popularizing theories of racial ideology and white 'supremacy', dehumanizing Africans and thereby creating public justification for colonial dispossession of Africans. To support my argument I discuss the underpining politics that informed the making and dismantling of the South African Museum's "Bushman" diorama. Further to the discussion about dioramas, human zoos and other forms of racializing spectacles, I make reference to the haunting narratives of the African Diasporas to provide context and perspective. These African individuals are: Sarah Baartman ('The Hottentot Venus') and El Negro 'object 1004' and then Ota Benga, the "Congolese Pygmy", who was displayed with an orangutan at the Bronx Zoo in America in 1906, and labelled "the Missing Link". Part of my attempt to understand the story of Benga, I set on a journey to track him to the United States (US). To point out and expose these human wrongs I incorporate and discuss images of decapitated heads, prepared skulls and images of emaciated Africans, not to reproduce colonial traumas, but to unveil the gravity of the violence that was emitted against those who were deemed 'lesser' beings, namely the black Africans and KhoiSan in particular. The colonial museum collected these human remains for race 'science' under politically motivated circumstances to feed to the idea that black 'inferiority' and white 'superiority' as a new global socio-political order. The evidence of diverse materials (photographs, manuscript letters etc) that I have used here point to the toxic collusion between the colonial administration and the museological institution in the perpetuation of racial violence in South Africa. The contribution among many other contributions of this study is the interrogation of these colonial traces in the museological institution and the proposal of a decolonial project framed in the form of a Museum Truth, Repatriation and Restitution Commission (#MuseumTRRC). The MuseumTRRC as both a socio-political and museological tool sharply invokes the interplay between the construction of race and the establishment of the colonial museum in a way that helps us understand how the museological institution influenced laws of racial separation that South Africa's apartheid past was built on. The MuseumTRRC is presented as the sine qua non in the framing of the 'new museum' of the future. In a nutshell, the study presents to us new ways of seeing museums and their sociological impact of their collections on people's lives today. It presents what I term in this thesis as 'museumorphosis', a process of radical epistemological shift that should take place in the museum in order for the museological institution to effectively respond to the sensibilities of the 21st Century and beyond.

Thesis advisor: Andrew L. Prevot / Although underemphasized by contemporary theologians, demonology haunts some of the most important theological and social questions of our time. Specifically, demonology is a necessary site of Christian reflection in light of the contemporary social and theological problems of colonialism and anti-Black racism. This dissertation charts pathways for a contextual, prophetic, and decolonial Christian demonology for the 21st theology. This dissertation first retrieves underappreciated attempts to revive demonology among 20th century American and European theologians. This theological tradition, which I dub “Euro-American political demonology” endorses possibilities for Christian demonology as a political theological doctrine in a world of violence and systemic injustice. The second chapter, drawing from Black studies and decolonial theory, analyzes the precise role of Christian demonology in the emergence of the anti-Black colonial reality. Returning to Euro-American political demonology, the third chapter assesses whether this demonological tradition responsibly and effectively speaks to the anti-Black colonial context, putting these thinkers in conversation with liberation, postcolonial, and decolonial theologies. I determine that Euro-American approaches demonology, while instructive, do not take sufficient account of the modern anti-Black colonial context, nor the particular implication of demonology in the emergence of that very social reality. Aligning with emerging decolonial approaches to theology, the final two chapters turn to Black and womanist reflections on demonology, demonization, and the practice of discerning the spirits. For Black American populations, demonology has remained a salient language for articulating resistance and healing in a world of demonizing, anti-Black, violence. Womanist theology, in particular, approaches demonology in the context of the difficult praxis of Black persons discerning their divine dignity living under a colonial matrix that demonizes Black flesh. The final chapter traces the themes of demonology and discernment in the literature of James Baldwin, commending Baldwin as a resource for decolonial approaches to demonology. Baldwin, particularly through his literary work exhibits a Black grammar of the demonic which frames the drama of discerning the spirits. For Baldwin, discernment is an embodied and communal praxis of embracing possibilities of Divine love and resisting the powers of anti-Black coloniality. / Thesis (PhD) — Boston College, 2022. / Submitted to: Boston College. Graduate School of Arts and Sciences. / Discipline: Theology.

Yes / Tuck and Yang famously wrote that “decolonization is not a metaphor”…but are archaeologists still thinking metaphorically? The origins of archaeology as a discipline can be traced to colonial endeavours and the pursuit of instilling and maintaining racist hierarchies; as such, colonialist attitudes and approaches have become entrenched in the very foundation of archaeology. Fortunately, the past decades have seen a movement towards rectifying these past injustices, with more recent actions aligned with the broader decolonial movement that can be seen throughout academia. But has any part of archaeology been “decolonized” yet? In this article, I will examine the current state of decolonizing archaeology, with reference to actions occurring in adjacent disciplines, such as heritage and museum studies. Particular attention will be paid to projects that have attempted a decolonial approach, and the results of said project. This will be framed by an honest and critical self-reflection of my own attempts to “decolonise” my research, placing both its successes and failures in context with the broader literature on postcolonial archaeology today. This framework will also delve into the ways in which my identity as a Chinese American migrant working in Britain colours my perspective on decolonising archaeology.