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Thesis (Ph.D.)--Brigham Young University, 1994. / Chairman: Thomas G. Alexander. Includes bibliographical references (p. 250-253).

The extent of the social and political transformations that have taken place in Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania since the collapse of the Soviet Union is remarkable, but the research has pointed out some controversial aspects of their developments. Crucially, there is a discrepancy between the governments' commitment to creating democratic political regimes, to ensuring harmonious social relations and to accommodating the ethno-cultural diversity of the resident communities.

This project is a relational ethnography that explores valuation as a social process and its relationship to the production and reproduction of inequality in urban space. I connect the subjective valuation process with struggles over material resources and the politics of recognition. With each chapter of this dissertation I demonstrate that race and ethnicity are encoded in the value of urban spaces through analyses of various micro-level meaning-making practices and structures that constitute cultural processes relevant to valuation. In addition to participant observation, I incorporate semi-structured photo-elicitation interviews, unstructured interviews, a semiotic analysis and analyses of existing literature to historicize the project. My overall epistemological objective is to marry a political and material focus on worth with a study of the mechanisms through which culture enters into valuation processes and, consequently, inequality.

This dissertation argues that interethnic romance narratives reflect and express central religious, political, racial, and gendered identities and agendas of Jewish American literature and culture in the early twentieth century. Chapter One shows that fin-de-siècle Reform Jewish women authors employed interethnic romance narratives to express a belief in America as exceptional as a place of religious and gender egalitarianism. Chapter Two turns to journalist and fiction writer Abraham Cahan, who wrote interethnic romance narratives to weigh the balance between idealism and pragmatism, socialist universalist values and the principles of Jewish nationalism in determining the character of Jewishness in America. Chapter Three demonstrates that Jewish American women’s popular fictions of interethnic romance in the 1920s employed interethnic romance plots to show women’s independence and mobility in light of early feminism and to express the limitations of feminist discourse when it ran counter to their ethnic identities. Chapter Four describes how narratives of interethnic romance written by Yiddish writers I. I. Shvarts, Joseph Opatoshu, Isaac Raboy, and David Ignatov employ tropes of interethnic romance together with geographical border crossings into non-immigrant or non-Jewish spaces, co-locating physical dislocation and disorientation and intimate interpersonal desire and unease. Together, these studies demonstrate the significance of interethnic romance in the American Jewish collective imaginary in this period and reveal the flexibility and longevity of this central theme in American Jewish discourse.

This thesis examines modalities of identity and representation for the Indo-Fijian diaspora and its second shift diasporic remove in Liverpool, Sydney, Australia. Indo-Fijian Literature in English, Fiji-Hindi, Memoir form of Indo-Fijian diasporic writings along with representations of Indo- Fijians in other texts are examined in the first instance to enable siting of various identities and representations. This is used as a springboard to engage with instances of production; expression and consumption of Popular Culture in Indo-Fijian diasporas are examined towards a critical inquiry into the problematic of Indo-Fijian diasporic identities and representations. The problem at hand is the issue of identity and representation between the binaries of homogeneous constructs of a people and their lives and that of heterogeneous modalities that takes in difference and the place of the individual and their everyday lived space in the Indo-Fijian diaspora. Modes of identity and representation in its various modes, literary, non-literary narratives and in the production, expression and consumption of popular culture is examined in this thesis towards a construct of a diaspora, of a people, beyond convenient reductive homogeneous constructs. / Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)

Settler colonisation produced particular colonial subjects: indigene and settler. The specificity of the relationship between these subjects lies in the act of settlement; an act of colonial violence by which the settler physically and symbolically displaces the indigene, but never totally. While indigenes may be physically displaced from their territories, they continue to occupy a marginal location within the settler nation-state. Symbolically, as settlers set out to distinguish themselves from the metropolitan 'motherlands', indigenous cultures become a rich, 'native' source of cultural authenticity to ground settler nationalisms. The result is a complex of conflictual and ambivalent relations between settler and indigene.This thesis investigates the ongoing impact of this colonial relation on the contemporary identities and relations of Maori (indigene) and Pakeha (settlers) in Aotearoa New Zealand. It centres on the operation of discursive strategies used by both Maori and Pakeha in constructing their identities and the relationship between them. I analyse 'found' texts - non-fiction books, media and academic texts - to identify discourse 'at work', as New Zealanders make and reflect on their identity claims. This investigation has two aims. Firstly, I map the terrain of discursive strategies that bear the traces of colonial domination and resistance. Secondly, I seek to explore the possibilities for replacing colonial relations with non-dominating forms of relationship between Maori and Pakeha.The thesis is in two parts. Part I focuses on theories of identity, centring on essentialism and hybridity. I argue that both modes of theorising bear the traces of colonial relations and neither offers the means to 'escape' colonial relations. Part II focuses on theories of intersubjectivity, bringing relationality to the fore. I argue that epistemological relations (including identity relations) always involve a degree of violence and exclusion and that, consequently, these necessary relations must be held in tension with an awareness of the ethical dimension of intersubjective engagement. Utilising the ethics of Emmanuel Lévinas, I argue that a combination of an ethical orientation towards the other and a 'disappointed' orientation towards politics and epistemology, offers the means to developing non-dominating relations with the cultural other.

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