This thesis explores the problem of self-empowerment for the French Caribbean Black woman as presented in the novels Moi, Tituba, sorcière...Noire de Salem and Pluie et vent sur Télumée Miracle. The respective authors, Maryse Condé and Simone Schwarz- Bart, use fiction to convey the plight of women in the French Caribbean. They successfully create characters who refuse marginalization imposed by their patriarchal and oppressive societies. Condé’s novel, set in the 17th century first in Barbados, and then in Puritan New England depicts the challenges Tituba overcomes in reaching liberation. Schwarz-Bart presents the story of Télumée, set in Guadeloupe at the beginning of the 20th century. My study focuses specifically on the characters of Tituba and Télumée to show ways that they thwart the dominant social structures and norms that seek to disempower them. It reveals ways that Condé and Schwarz-Bart make use of literature to reverse European perceptions of gender and race. Consequently, the literary fictions they create suggest possible ways of escaping marginalization and refusing racial and gendered subjugation. / Master of Arts

This research project examines sectarianism and sectarian violence in Pakistan between 1996-2005. It represents a departure from the security-focused research on sectarianism and provides contemporary analysis of sectarian violence by contextualising it. This thesis distinguishes sectarianism as an analytical concept from sectarianism as a phenomenon in Pakistan. The existing literature on sectarianism and sectarianism in the Pakistani context is critically examined, and this research is located within that body of knowledge. In this thesis, sectarian violence is understood as being conducted to reproduce and reinforce exclusivist sectarian discourse. This premise is analysed through the framework of identity formation and identity politics, and spatial understandings of identities. The study examines the locations of sectarian violence in Pakistan, and analyses the spaces where sectarian identity discourse is enforced and maintained through violence. Consequently, the concept of sacred space and sacred time are analysed as locations of sectarian violence. The contestations of public space by competing identity discourses, and the spatial manifestations of those competing identities are analysed. This dissertation also attempts to draw out whether sectarian violence is only located within and through the organised sectarian groups, or whether the sectarian violence indicates wider fault lines in the Pakistani society.

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No / This paper examines the current circumstances of minority ethnic media production. It particularly addresses the tensions that may exist for minority ethnic media workers between their commitment to a professional identity and status, and their negotiation of their own ethnic identity. Through employing a specific model of communities of practice this paper provides an analytic frame which illuminates some of the challenges which may be particularly present in the institutional dynamics and identity politics operating within minority ethnic media enterprises. In noting the synergy between the minority ethnic media activities and the media systems of the dominant ethnic communities this paper argues for a recognition of the role of minority ethnic media in shaping a vigorous public sphere, and advocates a more extensive commitment of research resources to the analysis of their role in the multi-ethnic nation-state and transnationally.

Why, in the aftermath of 9/11, did a segment of U.S. security experts, political elite, media and other institutions classify not just al-Qaeda but the entire religion of Islam as a security threat, thereby countering the prevailing professional consensus and White House policy that maintained a distinction between terrorism and Islam? Why did this oppositional threat narrative on Islam expand and even degenerate into warning about the “Islamization” of America by its tiny population of Muslim-Americans—a perceived threat sufficiently convincing that legislators in two dozen states introduced bills to prevent the spread of Islamic law, or sharia, and a Republican Presidential front-runner exclaimed, “I believe Shariah is a mortal threat to the survival of freedom in the United States and in the world as we know it”? This dissertation takes these puzzles as its object of inquiry. Using a framework that conceptualizes discourses and their agents as fundamentally political, this study deepens the literature’s characterizations of this discourse as “Islamophobia,” the “new Orientalism,” the “new McCarthyism,” and so on by examining how it functioned politically as a form of cultural politics, and how such political factors played a role in its expansion in the decade after 9/11. The approach is syncretic, blending Foucauldian genealogy with its emphasis on power, a more interpretive Bourdieuan relational sociology, and synthetic social movement theory. First, it examines the discourse at its macro-level, in the historical and structural factors that formed its conditions of emergence; specifically: 1) the culturally-resident political framing structure that rendered this discourse meaningful and credible; 2) the politically-relevant social-structural resources that rendered it influential; and 3) the more historically contingent or eventful political openings or opportunity “structure” that otherwise enabled, supported, or incentivized it. Then, it examines this threat discourse at its micro-level, biographically profiling three of its more influential polemicists, analyzing their strategies of cultural politics. The study concludes that this threat discourse functioned as a distinctive strategy by the more entrepreneurial segments of the U.S. conservative movement, who—in the emotion-laden wake of 9/11—seized Islam as another opportune site to advance their ongoing project of cultural politics. / Ph. D.

Tse, Hiu Hin. / Thesis M.Phil. Chinese University of Hong Kong 2014. / Includes bibliographical references (leaves 162-169). / Abstracts also in Chinese. / Title from PDF title page (viewed on 15, September, 2016).

This research project examines sectarianism and sectarian violence in Pakistan between 1996-2005. It represents a departure from the security-focused research on sectarianism and provides contemporary analysis of sectarian violence by contextualising it. This thesis distinguishes sectarianism as an analytical concept from sectarianism as a phenomenon in Pakistan. The existing literature on sectarianism and sectarianism in the Pakistani context is critically examined, and this research is located within that body of knowledge. In this thesis, sectarian violence is understood as being conducted to reproduce and reinforce exclusivist sectarian discourse. This premise is analysed through the framework of identity formation and identity politics, and spatial understandings of identities. The study examines the locations of sectarian violence in Pakistan, and analyses the spaces where sectarian identity discourse is enforced and maintained through violence. Consequently, the concept of sacred space and sacred time are analysed as locations of sectarian violence. The contestations of public space by competing identity discourses, and the spatial manifestations of those competing identities are analysed. This dissertation also attempts to draw out whether sectarian violence is only located within and through the organised sectarian groups, or whether the sectarian violence indicates wider fault lines in the Pakistani society.

This dissertation is aimed at analyzing how ethnic hierarchies question the environmentalization of indigeneity, which is the foundation of the Colombian state's multicultural policy. In particular, the dissertation develops a comparative ethnographic approach to the way in which the "multicultural turn" of 1991 impacted three indigenous communities located at San José del Guaviare, a colonization frontier in the Colombian Amazon: the Nükak, the Jiw and the Tucano. Against the assumption of multicultural policy that indigenous communities form a vast mass of people radically diferent from mainstream (even portrayed as anti-modern), in San José there is an unequal distribution of the Nükak, Jiw and Tucano in different positions inside local ethnic hierarchies. For some, Nükak incarnate what Hale (2004) label as a "good ethnicity", that serves to promote Guaviare as an eco-touristic destination, the Jiw are a "bad ethnicity" that annoys White people in San José, while the Tucano are portrayed as "civilized Indians". Thus, the dissertation states how these ethnic hierarchies contradict some of the core assumptions of multicultural policies that are based on an essentialized understanding of indigenous peoples as "ecologically noble savages." The dissertation argues that the analysis of contemporary experiences on indigeneity in an Amazonian context such as San José, could be better understood if it observes a set of processes and actors including: the historical transformation of senses on otherness, the production of forests as a field of domain under state regulations, the economic crossroads affecting indigenous peoples on their "resguardos" (indigenous lands) and the intervention of state laws, NGOs, indigenous political organizations, settlers, foreign governments and state officials. The analysis of such a variety of processes and actors shaping contemporary experiences on indigeneity in the Colombian Amazon follows the environmentality approach (Agrawal, 2005). From that perspective, I discuss the following ideas: a) indigenous resguardos were designed as governmentalized localities in multicultural policy to regulate and control how indigenous peoples manage natural resources; b) those communities portrayed as followers of the ecological nobility script act as regulatory communities; c) the technologies for governing the ecological realm do not necessarily assure the formation of environmental subjectivities.

This thesis examines the extent to and the way in which the contemporary political and socio-cultural context of South Korea, a divided, postcolonial and Northeast Asian nation is embedded in the national media coverage of global sport events, especially the 2008 Beijing Olympic Games. Attention is given to the implications of current state of international relations, politics and foreign policies between the R.O.K. and its geopolitical neighbours such as the U.S. and the D.P.R.K., Japan and China from the Northeast. The similarities and differences in the symbolic descriptions of Olympic athletes and delegates, and their achievements along with their identity markers such as national identity, regional identity, race and ethnicity are analysed. The global-national patterns and transformations in the power relations between hegemonic and ideological elements, such as nationalisms, racial/ethnic stereotypes, pan-Asian sentiments and Asianism, are examined. According to the characteristics of conservative or progressive, mainstream or sport-specific and print or television media coverage, the ways in which reporting style and tendency are distinctive from each other are clarified. Data was collected from newspapers and television coverage in the period of Beijing Olympic Games and a week before and after the Games. Media content analysis, including thematic analysis, discourse analysis and visual/image analysis, is used to analyse the data in both quantitative and qualitative terms. The theoretical frameworks of identity politics, contemporary cultural studies and figurational sociological concepts of personal pronouns and the established and outsiders are applied. The research findings discuss the twin process of increasing varieties and diminishing contrasts and homogenising and heterogenising tendencies in the globalisation process, which was evident in the South Korean media coverage of the 2008 Beijing Olympic Games and its opening ceremony.