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This essay explores and investigates post-colonial identity in Ireland in Hugo Hamilton’s The Speckled People: A Memoir of a Half-Irish Childhood (2003) and The Sailor in the Wardrobe (2006). Relying primarily on Homi K. Bhabha’s postcolonial criticism, which draws on some ideas from psychoanalysis, this essay argues that the autobiographies resonate well with the ideas of culture as a strategy of survival and of the post-colonial child as an analyst of Western modernity. Thus, three chosen concepts; ‘the Uncanny’, ‘Third Space’ and ‘Hybridity’ work together to reveal a recurring theme of split and duplicity in reference to the colonial past throughout. Furthermore they also reveal that the actual writing of the autobiographies in itself must be regarded as a way of responding to and negotiating that very same split and duplicity in reference to Ireland’s past.

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Multiculturalism is a current issue in our globalized society, which also the library field must relate to. In the Swedish Library Act from 2014 it is stressed that users with another linguistic background than Swedish shall be prioritized. However, an undifferentiated comprehension of what multicultural services at the library really means prevails, and the underlying values of the concept are rarely questioned. The purpose of this bachelor thesis is to problematize the concept of multiculturalism in a library context, by the identification of ideological patterns in the research discourse. Nine Library- and Information Science research articles that discuss multiculturalism at the public library have been scrutinized, and we found that the articles are dominated by a palpable Western and colonial perspective. Four discourses were identified in the empirical material, which all can be linked to changes in the macro-sociological context. As a theoretical and methodological framework we have chosen Norman Fairclough's critical discourse analysis (CDA) in combination with Homi K. Bhabha's postcolonial theory. CDA focuses on linguistic text analysis, in order to uncover how discourses both influence and are influenced by the social context, while Bhabha's theory questions how Western scholars create an illusion of fixed cultural identities. By combining these theories we wished to problematize the Western knowledge production, and initiate new approaches regarding how to work practically with these issues. Our conclusion is that there are similarities in how Western scholars depict multiculturalism and ethnicity at the library, which might impact the library practice in a negative way.

Through a close reading of Tsitsi Dangarembga’s Nervous Conditions, this essay shows the key links between the novel and Frantz Fanon’s major works. In addition to providing a deeper understanding of Dangarembga’s narrative as a whole, it takes into particular consideration the em­bedded criticism of colonialism in the text. The psychological conditions implied by the title play a central role: the essay shows how these conditions relate to the colonial situation and how refusing to consent to subjugation can be understood as radical criticism of colonial, Christian, as well as patriarchal superstructures as well as forming clear opposition to the colonial institution. The analysis is primarily based on Fanon and his comprehension of other theorists. It also draws on the ideas of Homi K. Bhabha, which will provide an additional level of understanding regarding questions about colonial identities in general, and Dangarembga’s characters Tambu, Nyasha, and Babamukuru in particular.

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諾貝爾文學獎得主奈波爾(V. S. Naipaul)可以說是當代文學中最具爭議性及最難以捉摸的一位作家，因為他對自己祖國千里達的前殖民國英國懷有一種好惡相參的矛盾態度。奈波爾的自傳性小說《抵達之謎》，故事橫跨三十年，描述一位曾被殖民的離散敘事者其人生旅程。旅程始自敘事者還是一個得到牛津大學獎學金的十八歲學生，終至敘事者成為在英國有立足之處的作家，其間歷經迷惘、錯置、覺醒、安頓等過程。在後殖民批評及文學的「信條」下，奈波爾的作品理應對大英帝國表示出一種明確的對抗態度，但其作品卻幾乎未能達到此一預期，而這也使得他必須承受遭指控為背叛者的衝擊。批評家普遍將奈波爾稱為英國的喉舌，而本論文旨在提供一個有別於此的觀點。本論文想要處理的關鍵問題如下：奈波爾是否真的是大英帝國的擁護者？如果不是的話，他如何與英國性(Englishness)協商以換取發言位置？ 論文首章對奈波爾及《抵達之謎》的批評做簡短的回顧。第二章以法農(Frantz Fanon)的觀點來檢視敘事者與白人女性角色的關係，以說明敘事者從崇拜英國文化到擺脫對英國謬誤幻想的發展。筆者也嘗試描繪出敘事者成為一個作家的軌跡。藉此，筆者認為敘事者經歷一段從目光狹隘的英國經典作家模仿者，到寫自己人生故事的作家的歷程。在第三章，本文認為在倫敦及英國鄉間的停留期間，敘事者看出帝國中心的破敗以及英國文化核心中英國性的矯揉造作。第四章首先就「離散」這個概念做一回顧，並說明奈波爾及《抵達之謎》如何能置於這樣的概念之下來解讀。筆者指出，敘事者同時身為離散者及流亡者的身份，使得他能夠取得一個「對位」的觀點，而此觀點幫助敘事者發展其後殖民牧歌，揭發英國性背後的殘酷。第五章揭示筆者對現存奈波爾批評中潛在缺陷的根本關懷。本論文希望藉由提供非主流但具建設性的觀點來補足現存的奈波爾批評。 / A Nobel laureate in literature, V. S. Naipaul is arguably the most controversial and elusive writer in contemporary literature because his signature is his ambivalence on England, a country which once colonized his mother country Trinidad. Spanning thirty years, The Enigma of Arrival, Naipaul’s autobiographical novel, delineates an ex-colonial and diasporic narrator’s life journey—from an eighteen-year-old schoolboy granted a scholarship to Oxford University to a writer gaining a foothold in England—of disorientation, dislocation, awakening and anchorage. Under the “doctrine” of postcolonial criticism and literature, Naipaul’s works are expected to express an explicit and confrontational attitude towards the British Empire, but his works hardly come to terms with such expectation, which makes him bear the brunt of the accusation of being an apostate. This thesis aims at providing a different viewpoint from criticism in general which labels Naipaul as the mouthpiece of England. The pivotal issues this thesis intends to tackle are as follows: Is Naipaul really an exponent of the British Empire to the core? If not, how does he negotiate with Englishness for a position of enunciation? The opening chapter offers a brief review of criticism about Naipaul and The Enigma of Arrival. In Chapter II, I examine the narrator’s relationship with white female characters in the light of Fanon’s perspective, trying to illustrate the progression in which the narrator at first worships the English culture but at last sheds his false fantasy. I also try to chart the trajectory of the narrator’s becoming a writer. By doing so, I intend to argue that the narrator undergoes a course from a blinkered colonial emulating English canonical writers to a writer writing his own life story. In Chapter III, I argue that during his stay in London and the English countryside, the narrator discerns the dilapidation of the imperial center and the artificiality of Englishness in the heart of English culture. Chapter IV begins with a review of the concept “diaspora” and how Naipaul and The Enigma of Arrival could be situated in this concept. I point out that the narrator’s identity as a diasporan and an exile enables him to obtain a “contrapuntal” perspective that contributes to the narrator’s postcolonial pastoral which exposes the cruelty behind Englishness. The concluding chapter reveals my ultimate concern about the latent flaw in the established Naipaul criticism, unfolding my intention to make this thesis complement the Naipaul criticism by contributing an alternative yet constructive perspective.

Taking as its central motif Hans-Georg Gadamer’s claim that “the true locus of hermeneutics is [the] in-between,” this thesis defends Gadamer’s concept of the fusion of horizons as radically interstitial against recent allegations that link his project to Romantic interpretive commensurability. Distancing Gadamer’s philosophical hermeneutics from both the Romantic hermeneutical approach and the incommensurabilist alternative proposed by John D. Caputo, this study reassesses Gadamer’s contributions toward understanding the other in a manner that avoids both imperious reductions and hyperbolic valorizations of the other’s alterity. Extending this discussion to cross-cultural interpretation, this thesis concludes by arguing for the fusion of horizons as a model for conceiving a new postcolonial space, irreducible to the commensurabilism of colonialism and the incommensurabilism of nativism. To this end, Gadamer is brought into discussion with Homi K. Bhabha, whose work on cultural hybridity offers a striking parallel with Gadamer’s fusion of horizons.