This study examined the role of black-owned banks in facilitating economic emancipation for African Americans in the South from 1888 to 1910. The concept of a separate, but equal America legalized by the United States Supreme court in 1896, Plessy v. Ferguson provided the impetus for a separate economy in the South. As a result, commercial and savings banks emerged as institutions for the economic liberation of African Americans. A case study investigating the efforts of three banks in contributing to the economic development of the African-American community during this era was conducted. The study examined race and empowerment and the role of banks in accommodating thrift, wealth accumulation and investing human and financial capital. The findings determined that commercial and savings banks formed the cornerstone of economic liberation and emancipation for African Americans in the Jim Crow South from 1888 to 1910. It concludes that bank founders embodied a Black Nationalist ideology of self-determination, race pride and economic cooperation when creating these institutions.

The focus of this essay is to investigate homosociality in terms of ethnicity in Ernest Hemingway's 1926 novel The Sun Also Rises. The main method used in the investigative analysis is close reading of the novel, and the essay relates this close reading to theories expressed in a number of critical essays and articles regarding the novel itself and other subjects relevant to the analysis. Furthermore, the relationships between the main character and other male characters are compared. The main findings of this essay are that homosociality is a central theme in Hemingway's novel and that homosocial desire often decides how the main character Jake Barnes reacts to the statements and actions of other characters. Furthermore, the amount of homosocial desire aimed at one character is most often decided by the ethnicity of that character.

This thesis offers an analytical discussion of contemporary fictional and autobiographical narratives by migrants who write in a language other than their mother tongue and/or grew up in a bilingual environment. While not all literature by ethnic minority writers is necessarily concerned with the experience of growing up in or living between cultures, the present study deals with those writers whose texts self-reflexively and counter-discursively seek to define and express individual identity at the interface of two or more cultures. The writers discussed not only move spatially between places but also shift emotionally and intellectually between different languages and cultures as well as literary texts from these cultures. The focus is on language and the literary text itself as it becomes the site for an interaction of cultural codes. The methodology adopted draws eclectically on theories which explore the space between" from anthropological, linguistic, post-colonial and feminist perspectives. The thesis examines different textual paradigms of countering dominant discourses as found in ten representative texts from Australia, Canada, Germany and the United States which have been chosen to cover a range of cultural experience. The texts discussed are: Angelika Fremd's Heartland and Josef Vondra's Paul Zwillinq; Caterina Edwards' The Lion's Mouth, Henry Kreisel's The Betrayal and Rachna Mara's Of Customs and Excise; Franco Biondi's Abschied der zerschellten Jahre: Novelle and Akif Pirincci's Tranen sind immer das Ende: Roman; Sandra Cisneros' The House on Mango Street, Eva Hoffman's Lost in Translation: A Life in a New Language and Richard Rodriguez' Hunger of Memory: The Education of Richard Rodriguez. It is shown that self-reflexive negotiation of Self and Other in the text takes different forms depending on the writer's ethnic and racial background, his/her gender and the adopted country's social and political attitudes toward the newcomer. Re-writing, however, which is understood as an intentional, political dialogue with specific texts, is a recurrent counter-discursive strategy in the texts discussed. Finally, the thesis argues that the re-writing of traditional literary genres, such as Novelle, short story cycle, autobiography, Bildungs roman and quest novel, rather than of a particular text, as in other post-colonial contexts, is the most prevalent form of "writing back" in migrant literature. Texts written by migrants not only creatively revise literary conventions, challenge the concept of “national literature" and undermine canonically established categories, but also defeat attempts to approach a text with a single "appropriate" theory to reveal the strategies and the effects of cultural hybridity.

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Most notions of European identity conceptualise <i>one</i> idea what it means to identify with Europe.  In this thesis, I acknowledge the possibility of variation in meaning of <i>European identities.  </i>My conceptual framework of identity portrays Europe as a collectivity (Malesevic & Haugaard 2002).  To operationalise European identities, I refer to Brubaker & Cooper’s (2000) distinction concerning the empirical use of the notion of ‘identity’.  I develop viable models of the contents and the structures of European identities based on political and cultural perceptions of communality in Europe.  Furthermore, I characterise European identities as utilitarian and/or affective across the European Union.  Based on two surveys (EuroBarometer 57.2 and EuroBarometer 60.1), I present evidence of the different understandings of what people consider their European identities.  With confirmatory factor analysis, I first show that people basically distinguish between political and cultural identities.  Although combinations of both types can be found in most countries, people mention different reasons as to why they identify with Europe.  Using proportional ordered logistic regression models, European identities are described as utilitarian and/or affective.  Again, the results show differences.  Identification with Europe is the outcome of both affective and utilitarian perspectives on Europe.  But the varying degree to which people construct their identities as emotional or utilitarian at the national level highlights the need to consider plural European identities.  Accepting this diversity, a comparison of both analyses shows in which ways the contents and the characters of European identities could be combined across Europe.

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Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Western Sydney, 2000. / A thesis "presented for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy, University of Western Sydney." Includes bibliographical references.

Thesis (M.A.)--Ohio University, June, 2008. / Title from PDF t.p. Includes bibliographical references.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Washington, 1994. / Vita. Includes bibliographical references (leaves [259]-269).