Though Miami is one of the places most vulnerable to climate change, climate change threats are not at the forefront of most citizen’s worries. Furthermore, though all Miamians are vulnerable in the face of climate change, they are stratified into communities that will bear the consequences of that threat with different intensities, including frontline communities that struggle to bring visibility to themselves and their concerns. Activist-citizens need to connect the dots between ethical, social, political, economic, and environmental issues and create kinship networks that break through compartmentalized communities. The purpose of this thesis is to explore how climate justice initiatives, like the Miami People’s Climate March, catalyze action and subvert institutional narratives that preclude change by collaboratively reimagining communities as communal ecosystems. These initiatives foreground the relationality between human and nonhuman subjects, demand visibility for frontline communities, and unite diverse populations in solidarity while simultaneously acknowledging and celebrating difference.

No Abstract / Thesis / Master of Arts (MA)

I intend to demonstrate a thematic continuity throughout a large section of Old English poetry, first by tracing the exile-seafaring motif in Genesis, Exodus, Andreas, Whale, the Seafarer, The Wanderer, and incidentally in Christ and Satan, Christ, Guthlac, and Juliana; I then propose to discuss the image of the sea as retributive agent; and finally, I will consider the sea as the path of the dead. / Master of Arts (MA)

<p>The aim of this thesis is to present the results of an investigation of some of the typical theological and Biblical sources to which Marlowe had access at the time of writing Doctor Faustus. These selected materials are classed under three principal headings in order to illustrate clearly the varieties of dramatic use to which Marlowe put them. The evidence of deep familiarity with these materials presented here leads to a consideration of the ways in which Marlowe used Christian doctrine as a central element in his play. A final chapter synthesizes the influence of the religious background on the play's meaning and significance.</p> / Master of Arts (MA)

<p>This thesis examines the hostess figure in Modernist literature from the late nineteenth to early twentieth century as she assembles her environment and, furthermore, her evolving sense of self and "womanhood." The party scene will be examined in three texts to illuminate the concerted work of the hostess to compose her public and private realms and selves. A close reading of these scenes yields a similar observation: each author employs the party scene to dramatize the awakening of their heroine to the fraught duality of her role as a woman subjected to societal demands and private, disquieted stirrings within. In this way, these texts uniquely stage the development of the New Woman of the fin-de-siecle. In conjunction with a historical examination, a consideration of hospitality theory enriches these readings. Jacques Derrida's discussion of the guest-host wager works as a point of leverage in reading the common moment in each party scene when the protagonist's constructed sense of self-as-host reaches an inevitable breaking point and causes the host to reframe his or her sense of self. In each of the three scenes the hostess is left markedly divided with a deeper understanding of her position as a modem woman straddling public and private obligations. This thesis chronologically traces the hostess' increasing development: Kate Chopin frames the earliest fracturing of Edna Pontellier who is left to drift away in The Awakening, in Mrs. Dalloway Virginia Woolf depicts Clarissa Dalloway's jarring evening but allows her to return to her life a quietly changed woman, and ultimately, F. Scott Fitzgerald portrays the hard won social and mental emancipation of Nicole Warren Diver in Tender is the Night. This thesis aims to highlight the party scene and hostess figure as important literary tools that demonstrate the fraught awakening of the New Woman in modernity.</p> / Master of Arts (MA)

<p>This thesis draws on the works of Will Fisher, Lucy Munro, Michael Shapiro, and other critics who have written on the boy actor on the early modem English stage. Focussing on city comedies performed by children's companies, it argues that the boy actor functions as a kind of "third gender" that exceeds gender binaries, and interrogates power hierarchies built on those gender binaries (including marriage).</p> <p>The boy actor is neither man nor woman, and does not have the confining social responsibilities of either. This thesis argues that the boy's voice, his behaviours, and his epicene body are signifiers of his joyous and unconfined social position. Reading the boy actor as a metaphor for the city itself, it originally argues that the boy's innocence enables him to participate in the games, merriment, and general celebration of carnival, while his ability to slip fluidly between genders, ages, and other social roles enables him to participate in and embody the productively disruptive carnival, parodic, and "epicene" spaces of the city itself. In these spaces, when gender and age expectations are temporarily overthrown, individual bodies can desire, dress, and perform however they want.</p> <p>In persistently recognising the boy actor's metabolic ability to metamorphose its gender according to his own, or the individual spectator's desire, and in so doing to explore alternative modes of living and structuring families and other social relationships in the city, Amends for Ladies, Epicoene, The Knight of the Burning Pestle, Eastward Hoi, Ram Alley, and Bartholomew Fair offer strategies by which individual bodies in the audience can pursue their own individual alternative modes of living in the city.</p> <p>I am extremely grateful to my supervisory committee, Doctors Helen Ostovich, Melinda Gough, and Gena Zuroski Jenkins, for their careful reading (and re-reading) of various drafts, and for the swift and thorough commentary that accompanied each reading. Without their assistance, this project would have far less focus, and far more errors. I am particularly thankful for Dr Ostovich's guidance in my consideration of performance practices and interpretation, and for Dr Gough's always helpful recommendations of critical material throughout the year. I am also grateful to Jesse Arseneault, Brandon Kerfoot, Stephanie Leach, and Mathew Martin, who were always willing to read over paragraphs, and who not only listened to me talk nigh-endlessly about boy actors but also provided me with coffee as I did so.</p> <p>"A thankful [wo]man owes a courtesy ever"!</p> / Master of Arts (MA)

<p>p.p1 {margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; font: 11.0px Times}</p> <p>This thesis examines interracial community and masculinity in South African literature, film and mass media. It argues that masculinity is intimately tied to histories of racialization and, as such, represents a significant site for the deconstruction of racially segregatory practice and ideology. Beginning with the post-apartheid nation's multicultural self-advertisement as the "Rainbow Nation," which effaces racial difference, this project argues for a conception of community (national and localized) that acknowledges difference and allows for moments of racial tension within the national narrative. My introduction draws on texts from queer theory and critical race theory and my subsequent chapters look at the ways that men construct and reconstruct community in light of the nation's segregatory apartheid history.</p> <p>My first chapter examines queer masculinity in John Greyson's film Proteus. I suggest that queer narratives have been excluded from the national narrative and that Greyson's film carves out a space for queerness in the nation where it had previously been effaced. My second chapter outlines the ways that white men structure interracial community and their motivations for doing so. I examine the fiction of Damon Galgut and argue that his texts reveal the extent to which "Rainbow Nation" discourse and multiculturalism proceed from the economic and social interests of white men. My final chapter looks primarily at exclusions within the national narrative and questions how we might envision "others" outside community in more ethical ways. I examine K. Sello Duiker's The Quiet Violence of Dreams and interrogate his text for its exclusion of nonnormative masculine bodies and women from its conception of interracial community. In my conclusion, I turn to the recent resurgence of "Rainbow Nation" discourse in the 2010 FIFA World Cup to emphasize the need for a continued interrogation of the way that multicultural discourse excludes bodies from the national narrative.</p> / Master of Arts (MA)

<p>Canadian multicultural policy today serves to define Canadian national identity to both its citizens and the international community at large. In 1971, the federal government officially began to implement an ideology of cultural pluralism, which today serves to guide all Canadian policies, program initiatives, and laws. But while Canada enjoys a reputation as a country free from the racism plaguing the United States and other competing Western nations, numerous activists, academics, historians and politicians have questioned official multiculturalism's ability to truly eradicate racism. In fact, they<br />argue, the policy has quite the opposite effect, entrenching racist ideology under a veneer of liberal inclusion, and masking the asymmetrical relations of power governing<br />interaction between whites and non-whites in this country.</p> <p>While several excellent materialist criticisms of Canadian multiculturalism are available today, these studies have confined their analyses for the most pati to structural forms of racism engendered through legislative and popular discourses. This study seeks to build upon the work begun by these theorists by offering an analysis of the psychic or affective effects of racism upon racialized minority subjects and a reconsideration of the way in which marginal subjectivities are engendered through racist discourses. In order to achieve this end, this study traces the history of legislative and popular racism against a particularly marginalized ethnic group, the Chinese, from their arrival in the midnineteenth century up to their current position in multicultural Canada. In order to explore fully the psychic dimensions of racism, this study also includes an examination of select Chinese Canadian literature in English by Wayson Choy and Fred Wah. These texts not only lend voice to the history of exclusion faced by the Chinese in Canada, but theorize about alternative hybrid subjectivities that offer both sites of individual and cultural expression, and valuable anti-racist politics.</p> / Master of Arts (MA)

<p>The Man of Property is unique among the Forsyte novels in that it is both the only pre-war book and the only book in which the Forsytes are seen in a completely negative light. Forsytes symbolize the forces of Property, which are always striving to suppress all forms of Art. By the end of The Man of Property Property stands triumphant. Bosinney, the Architect-Artist, is dead, and Irene, that embodiment of Beauty, has been enslaved by Soames. In Chancery and To Let trace the gradual changes in both Soames and Irene, and the new relationship of Property and Art. The villainous Soames looks better and better, whilee Irene's goodness begins to dim. When the crisis of Jon's and Fleur's love comes to a head, it is Soames who is noble and self-sacrificing and Irene who is manipulative. When the focus of the novels is not on these two old antagonists, it is increasingly taken up with the problem of Fleur and Jon. It turns out that the possessive Fleur is not as bad as she appears, while Jon is unable to live up to one's natural expectations of him. In the end it seems that Fleur's possessiveness may even be:an asset, as Property and Art arrive at a partnership by the end of To Let. The White Monkey and The Silver Spoon have been criticized as rambling books full of trivial incidents. They actually chronicle Fleur's quest for a still satisfying life which does not include Beauty--that is, Jon. These novels also succeed in illustrating the aimlessness of the post-war generation and the moral rot which seems to be invading all levels of society. In Swan Song the once villainous Soames must become the hero who saves the day for Fleur. She was sure that Jon was the answer to the problems of herself and her age, and he turns out to be a ghastly disappointment. If there is to be an answer, it must come through Soames's discovery of a classically simple peace among the traces of his forbears. In the end it is Soames who is the saviour of the modern age, and Fleur who is its Artist.</p> / Master of Arts (MA)

<p>This project examines the ways in which the global mobility of players has unsettled the traditional nationalistic structure of football and the anxious responses by specific football institutions as they struggle to protect their respective political and economic hegemonies over the game. My intention is to expose the recent institutional exploitation of football's "cultural power" (Stoddart, Cultural Imperialism 650) and ability to impassion and mobilize the masses in order to maintain traditional concepts of authority and identity. The first chapter of this project will interrogate the exclusionary selection practices of both the Mexican and the English Football Associations. Both institutions promote ethnoracially singular understandings of national identity as a means of escaping disparaging accusations of "artificiality," thereby protecting the purity and prestige of the nation, as well as the profitability of the national brand. The next chapter will then turn its attention to FIFA's proposed 6+5 policy, arguing that the rule is an institutional effort by FIF A to constrain and control the traditional structure of football in order to preserve the profitability of its highly "mediated and commodified spectacle" (Sugden and Tomlinson, Contest 231) as well as assert its authority and autonomy in the global realm. The third chapter will assess the English Premier League's home-grown policy - an apparent legislative imitation of the FIF A 6+5 initiative. I will argue that the home-grown policy is a strategic measure intent on reproducing a "white, male English" identity (King 170) as a means of strengthening the "English" presence within both the league and the national squad.</p> / Master of Arts (MA)