Since the 1960s, the inhabitants of the British Overseas Territory of Bermuda have serially considered and rejected becoming a sovereign nation. This thesis investigates the extent to which the positions taken by politicians and social commentators, who are involved in the debates concerning independence, are informed by their lived experiences and understandings of the island’s past. Grounded in an analysis of the island’s past, this thesis also investigates how Bermudians have historically defined belonging in the political sphere and public spaces according to ‘race’ and class and how this affects the way in which they interact with each other and regard their relationship with the United Kingdom. The study critically engages with postcolonial theory and asks what the existence of this 21st century colony says about the processes of colonialism and post-colonialism. It also considers how this study fits with other research concerning other remaining Overseas Territories to show the value of conducting in-depth studies of specific societies. By surveying archival documents and conducting interviews a fuller understanding of the political and social development of this island is gained, as viewed by colonial administrators, local government officials, and those who publicly challenged the norms that allowed for social and political inequality on the island. These methods are used to engage with questions of how ideas of self and nation were shaped by segregationist formal education and how this was either reinforced or challenged by what was taught around the kitchen table and in the wider society. It explores how Trade Unionist and the fledgling Progressive Labour Party (PLP) saw a move to independence as part of a wider aim to rectify social injustices. The continuity and change in the debate is then reviewed to see how and the extent to which changes both internally and externally interact with narratives of the past to inform how those involved in the debate imagine the island’s future.

In this study I argue that the recent proliferation of punitive and restrictive asylum policies indicates that the British government is prepared to tolerate levels of violence against certain human bodies, from particular countries, to a much greater degree than would be tolerated for others. Archival evidence is presented to show that hierarchical conceptions of humanity have a long history, rooted in British colonial activities, and that such ideologies continue to operate in the contemporary period. The project involves documenting three ‘critical junctures’ when ideas of human hierarchy were challenged at the political institutional level. These critical junctures are used to make the case for a historically informed reading of contemporary British asylum policy which takes seriously the epistemic legacies of colonialism. The study adapts Desmond King and Rogers Smith’s ‘racial institutional orders’ approach, originally conceived in the US context, to the British case, and incorporates a post-colonial perspective into the analysis. Through analysing the debates around these issues, it is possible to glean some insight into both the enduring power of ideas of human hierarchy, and the possibilities for transformative change.

The thesis examines labourers’ assisted migration to and from North America during 1850-1885, the dates of societies’ emigration schemes. The dissertation focuses on ‘New Model’ unions: the Engineers, Carpenters, Steam Engine Makers and Iron Founders. Three of these unions had overseas branches; one did not. The dissertation explores the significance of the introduction, development, use and eventual termination of these schemes for labour history. Emigration scheme research is limited, with little recent work published since 1955. The dissertation offers solutions to conflicting views on the exact duration of the Founders’ scheme and supplies evidence that the Engineers continued to fund members even after their scheme officially ended. Furthermore, it argues that scheme-termination was led more by external factors (notably via Contract Labor Acts) than internal factors, and that the duration of the Founders’ scheme related more to overseas branch absence than to fund shortage or ethos. Additionally, the view is challenged that schemes purely supported labour supply regulation and/or escape avenues for agitators and black listed unionists. Unions had different motives, different periods defined those motives, and executives operated in members’ best interests. The research provides new and supporting evidence of inter-society and government emigration co-operation. It focuses on the under-studied topic of return migration, specifically union-funded return, with empirical evidence provided of union funded and non-funded emigrants and returnees. It adopts a range of socio-economic variables. Finally, adding to scant knowledge of internal migration or emigration alternatives, empirical evidence is provided of preemigration and post-return movement of unionists. Correspondence, particularly between overseas branches and union executives, is used throughout. Finally, a major component involves a project at Fall River, which explores the extent that emigrants’ descendants have assimilated in probably the most important receiving area for nineteenth-century skilled Lancastrian workmen.

This thesis, situated between literature, history and memory studies participates in the modern recovery of the long-obscured relations between Scotland and the Caribbean. I develop the suggestion that the Caribbean represents a forgotten 'lieu de mémoire' where Scotland might fruitfully ‘displace’ itself. Thus it examines texts from the Enlightenment to Romantic eras in their historical context and draws out their implications for modern national, multicultural, postcolonial concerns. Theoretically it employs a ‘transnational’ Atlantic Studies perspective that intersects with issues around creolisation, memory studies, and British ‘Four Nations’ history. Politically it insists on an interrogation of Scottish national narratives that continue to evade issues of empire, race and slavery. Moving beyond a rhetoric of blame, it explores forms of acting and thinking in the present that might help to overcome the injurious legacies of the past. Chapters include an examination of pastoral and georgic modes in Scottish-Caribbean texts. These include well-known authors such as James Thomson, Tobias Smollet, James Grainger, Robert Burns; and less well-known ones such as John Marjoribanks, Charles Campbell, Philip Barrington Ainslie, and the anonymous author of Marly; or a Planter’s Tale (1828). Chapters two to four highlight the way pastoral and georgic modes mediated the representation of ‘improvement’ and the question of free, bonded and enslaved labour across Scotland, Britain and the Caribbean in the era of slavery debates. The fourth chapter participates in and questions the terms of the recovery of two nineteenth century ‘Mulatto-Scots’, Robert Wedderburn and Mary Seacole. Bringing ‘Black Atlantic’ issues of race, class, gender, empire and rebellion to the fore, I consider the development of a ‘Scottish-Mulatto’ identity by comparing and contrasting the way these very different figures strategically employed their Scottish heritage. The final chapter moves forward to consider current memorialisations of slavery in the Enlightenment- Romantic period. The main focus is James Robertson’s Joseph Knight (2003) that engages with Walter Scott’s seminal historical novel Waverley (1814) to weave issues of racial slavery into the familiar narratives of Culloden. Robertson also explores forms of solidarity that might help to overcome those historical legacies in a manner that is suggestive for this thesis as a whole.

Modern western understandings of citizenship are closely tied to the nation state. This is the political community where members are expected to exercise their freedoms and practice solidarity. When individuals claim rights across borders and move in and out of different polities the state-centric citizenship model is disturbed. Nowhere is this more pronounced than in the European Union where borders are transformed by transnational migration and internal mobility. This has led some scholars to welcome the emergence of a ‘postnational citizenship’ of human rights. Others argue for the need to protect a comprehensive state membership based on shared identity and active participation. The dichotomy of ‘thick and thin’ citizenship warrants critical attention, however. It risks romanticizing national or postnational membership, overlooking historical and contemporary power struggles and change. Agonistic democratic theory offers a particularly promising way of moving beyond the binary. It constructs a dynamic relationship between citizenship rights, participation and identification. Political conflicts over liberties and membership are seen as practices that re-constitute civic actors. By claiming and contesting rights migrants and citizens take part in the ongoing re-founding of polities and develop, reinforce or change their democratic subjectivity. But agonism like its intellectual counterpart deliberative democracy focuses exclusively on public ‘voice’. It neglects to explore the civic potential of exit, entry and re-entry so integral to migration and EU citizenship. In the thesis I address this problem and develop an agonistic conception of citizenship and cross-border movement. I do so through a heuristic empirical case study of transnational immigration and EU mobility in the Danish family unification dispute. In response to restrictive national policy many have used the freedom of movement in the EU to sidestep or contest domestic rules. Based on 30 narrative interviews with Danish-international couples I draw out and conceptualize practices of contestatory transnational citizenship.

This document deconstructs the issue of forced displacement in Colombia, focusing on the period 1992 – 2004, and has two main methodological features. The first is its interdisciplinary approach, which is both sociological and economic. The second is its multilevel orientation, which aims to tackle forced displacement in Colombia on the individual, community and aggregate levels. Given the lack of interdisciplinary theoretical approaches to forced migration, I propose a new one, based on bounded rationality from economic theory and using Castles (2003) and Richmond (1988) for the sociology of forced migration. In order to properly characterise the concept of forced displacement as one of the many modalities of migration, my literature review expands on the thesis’ remit, both in time and scope, including studies of internal migration in Colombia, between 1960 and 2004. The review reveals some interesting lacunas and regularities in the study of forced migration in Colombia: the lack of interdisciplinary studies, the lack of consensus about the real dimension of forced displacement in Colombia - as a consequence of the divergent and hence unreliable nature of current statistics - the historic role of violence for flows of migration in Colombia, the importance of land appropriation and illegal economic activities as catalysts for the decision to migrate, and the specific profiles of gender and ethnic backgrounds. These issues are addressed in three chapters: one concentrates on deconstructing the different statistics available for forced displacement in Colombia, the systems devoted to collect them and the subjective reasons that may explain the differences between them: another evaluates the recurrence of specific patterns of ethnic background and gender among a displaced community and the third evaluates he lack of social cohesion as anomie, through applying the scale of Srole (1956) as used by Lipman and Havens (1965) in their study of the anomie among displaced people in Colombia.

As the population of Ireland continued to decline in the post-independent period, the number of women entering religious life rose substantially, reaching a peak in the late 1960s. Many of these women lived some or all of their lives outside Ireland. However, despite the recent growth of Irish migration or diaspora studies, very little attention has been given to the role or experience of Irish women religious, who themselves tend not to publish subjective accounts. This is undoubtedly the case with respect to Irish women's migration to England in the twentieth century. Based on the oral history testimonies of twenty-one Irish women religious, this thesis seeks to explore this under-researched area. It focuses specifically on subjectivity and identity formation; on the ways in which Irish women religious have inhabited, negotiated and contested a sense of self as Irish, as women and as Catholics/religious over the course of their lives and in the context of the societies in which they have lived. Utilising various theories, it looks at the complex ways in which subjectivities are formed and displayed, taking account of the role the women play in constructing a self identity as well as other contributing factors, such as how the women feel they are positioned by others and their socio-historical situation. In allowing the voices of Irish women religious to be heard, this thesis challenges the stereotype of religious as silent, without a voice. By focusing on a group of women thus far disregarded, it contributes to our knowledge not only of women religious but Irish women's migration more generally, providing new insights for this expanding area of research.

This study analyses the foreign relations of South Yemen (since 1970 the People's Democratic Republic of Yemen) from independence in 1967 until 1982. It covers the first four Presidencies of the post-independence period, with their attendant policy changes, and ends with the resolution of two of the more pressing foreign policy conflicts with which South Yemen was concerned, its support for the guerrillas in North Yemen, who were defeated in the spring of 1982, and its conflict with the Sultanate of Oman, with whom diplomatic relations were concluded in October 1982. Chapter One provides an outline of the background to South Yemen's foreign policy: the outcome of the independence movement itself and the resultant foreign policy orientations of the new government; the independence negotiations with Britain; and the manner in which, in the post-independence period, the ruling National Front sought to determine and develop its foreign policy. The remaining four chapters focus upon specific aspects of South Yemen's foreign policy that are, it is argued, of central importance. Chapter Two discusses relations with the West - with Britain, France, West Germany and the USA. It charts the pattern of continued economic ties with western European states, and the several political disputes which South Yemen had with them. Chapter Three discusses the issue of 'Yemeni Unity' - the reasons for the continued commitment to this goal, the policy of simultaneously supporting opposition in North Yemen and negotiating with the government there, and the course of policy on creating a unified Yemeni state. Chapter Four considers the attempt to promote revolution in Oman, relations with other states in the Arabian Peninsula and the gradual lessening of tensions between them and South Yemen. Chapter Five discusses relations with the USSR and China - the growth of military and economic links with Russia, the large but not complete area of PDRY-USSR political agreement, and the continued if sometimes tense relationship with China. The study ends with a brief Conclusion, suggesting some broader implications of South Yemen's foreign policy in this period.

The Israeli-Palestinian conflict dates back to 1917, when British Prime Minister Balfour declared Britain’s support for the establishment of a homeland for Jews in the land of Palestine. The conflict has had many political, social, and artistic implications. On the political level, a struggle that has not been solved until this day has evolved. On a social level, many lives have been crushed: thousands of native citizens of the land became refugees, mainly in Jordan, Lebanon, and Syria, but also worldwide. Others, like the Arabs who stayed in what was in 1948 declared to be the state of Israel, have been suffering from an identity crisis; many of these Arabs face unlawful detention, demolition of houses, killing and racism. The Gaza strip has almost always been under siege by the Israeli military machine lately. Meanwhile, the Jewish society has never had a day of peace since the establishment of their state. On the artistic level, the conflict has always had implications for Arab/ Palestinian and Israeli writings., I seek to read the depiction of the conflict with its different violent confrontations from both Israeli and Palestinian perspectives starting with the Palestinian Nakba to the violent Israeli oppression of any Palestinian resistance in the Intifada. I also read literary texts about Palestinian resistance, actual material resistance of the first Palestinian Intifada as represented by both sides in postcolonial terms. In fact, I believe that both Palestinian and Israeli literature could be read in the context of postcolonial discourse. On the one hand, for Palestinian and Arab writers, Palestinian writing is and should be read as resistance literature, or ‘Adab al-muqawamah’, a term coined by Palestinian writer Ghassan Kanafani. Anna Ball’s study Palestinian Literature and Film in Postcolonial Feminist Perspective examines Palestinian literature and film in the light of postcolonial feminism. Ball places the conflict in the context of colonial/ postcolonial discourse and breaks the taboo against using the word colonialism when speaking about Zionism. In fact, the research problem is based on the idea of the inadequacy of ignoring Palestinian and Israeli literature as part of postcolonial studies simply for fear of revealing the colonial status quo of the land. According to Anna Bernard, who seeks to draw attention to what she calls ‘blind spots in postcolonial studies’, mainly Israel/ Palestine: ‘by dismissing a ‘postcolonial’ approach to Israel-Palestine studies outright, [critics like] Massad and Shohat overlook the value of a literary study that seeks to demonstrate the collective and cross-cultural impact of the various modern forms of colonialism and imperialism on artistic production across the globe’. Massad’s argument that there is difficulty in describing space, time and body in Israel/ Palestine as postcolonial is based on his interrogations: ‘Can one determine the coloniality of Palestine/ Israel without noting its ‘‘post-coloniality’’ for Ashkenazi Jews? Can one determine the post-coloniality of Palestine/Israel without noting its coloniality for Palestinians? Can one determine both or either without noting the simultaneous colonizer/colonized status of Mizrahi Jews? (Although one could debate the colonized status of Mizrahi Jews) How can all these people inhabit a colonial/postcolonial space in a world that declares itself living in a post-colonial time?’ Ella Shohat, likewise, is against what she calls the ‘ahistorical and universalizing deployments, and potentially [the] depoliticizing implications’ of the term ‘post-colonial,’ especially that, according to her, it is used instead of important terms like imperialism and neo-colonialism. In spite of the importance of paying attention to the correct description of states of imperialism and neo-colonialism, I still find it possible to read both Palestinian and Israeli texts in postcolonial perspective, agreeing with Bernard ‘that the tools that have been developed for reading these texts comparatively – including colonial discourse analysis, national allegory, minority discourse, and so on – can be usefully applied, tested, and revised in the analysis of Palestinian and Israeli literary and cultural production’. This view resonates with Ashcroft, Tiffin and Griffiths’s in their study The Postcolonial Studies Reader (1995), when they comment on this wide range of relevant fields that the term postcolonial suggests: ‘Postcolonial theory involves discussion about experience of various kinds: migration, slavery, suppression, resistance, representation, difference, race, gender, [and] place’ . In fact, the term ‘postcolonial’ is not necessarily restricted to a real colonial period; it could be used, according to Ashcroft, Tiffin and Griffiths in The Empire Writes Back: ‘to cover all the culture affected by the imperial process from the moment of colonization to the present day. This is because there is continuity of preoccupations throughout the historical process initiated by European imperial aggression’. Between the view of the land of Palestine as a lawful possession of the Jews and that which sees Jewish presence as a settler or colonial one, a debate about reading the conflict and literary production tackling the conflict within theories of colonial and postcolonial studies arises. What makes reading the Israeli/Palestinian conflict and its literature and literary production within the paradigm of postcolonialism problematic is worth some further investigation. First, the preference and focus on the discursive practices of colonialism over the material practices has resulted in excluding the Israeli/ Palestinian conflict from the field of postcolonial studies by a number of critics like Ella Shohat and Joseph Massad, which is more elaborated on later. Second, the debate about the Zionist project as a settler colonial one could also problematize analysing the conflict within postcolonial theories. The first chapter explores the Israeli/ Palestinian and Arab writing of the conflict from a colonizer/colonized perspective. I mainly focus on the representation of violence as an essential element in a colonized society and the decolonization process, drawing on Frantz Fanon’s theory that violence is inevitable in any colonized community as the backbone of the analysis. For this purpose, I have chosen Syrian playwright Saad-Allah Wanous’s play Rape (1990), to compare with Israeli playwright Hanoch Levin’s play Murder (1997), since both plays represent violence as a vicious circle that does not lead anywhere in the Palestinian/Israeli conflict, even though it is an everyday act that has become a way of life for both sides. Crucial terms in the field of postcolonial studies such as resistance/terrorism are examined. Some similarities between the ways the two playwrights write the conflict are also highlighted, which supports the idea that literature can always find shared ground between any two conflicting parties. In Chapters Two and Three I write about the history of the conflict as a chain of endless violent confrontations; violence in this case is on the national level when the two nations fight each other. Chapter Two addresses some of the landmark events in the history of the Jewish and Palestinian peoples, mainly the Israeli War of Independence/Nakba as the same historical event seen from the two extremely different colonizer/colonized perspectives. The chapter also addresses what the Holocaust has to do with the two events and how the Holocaust was exploited by the Israeli state to silence any condemnation of the Israeli/Zionist settler colonial project in Palestine and later on to silence any international condemnation of the Israeli 1967 occupation of more Palestinian and Arab lands.

This thesis explores the ways in which transnational same-sex couples construe and experience transnational migration, intimacy, and home. The study was initially born out of the need to contribute to the young, but growing body of scholarly work in relation to queer migration studies. For long, the figure of ‘the migrant’ was founded on heterosexual terms only, thus impeding any possibility of exploring the lives of those with non-normative gender and sexual identities. During the last two decades or so, new scholarship has tried to alter this picture, arguing for a more inclusive assessment of global migration. This project aims to further the scholarly conversations in this regard, but it also wishes to go beyond the traditional economic and political spheres in which the migrant is usually placed in; hence, it promotes a study of migration that is also preoccupied with the intimate and emotional life of LGBT+/queer migrants. In this sense, this research is interested in how 12 transnational same-sex couples (that are also binational) understand and practice intimate life and home. Indeed, examining the life of these couples in migration offers a unique opportunity to delve into the intimate and domestic dimensions of transnational migration, and therefore, to show how the research participants actively negotiated and sustained family life and a sense of belonging in today’s rapidly changing and globalising world. The ‘transnational’ component will be key across this thesis, as it enables the possibility of understanding the couples’ different movements, attachments, networking and (emotional and material) practices that explicate and buttress their migratory journeys. The study was carried through the use of ethnographic techniques, namely, narrative interviewing, observation, and the construction of material culture narratives at the participants’ home(s). This methodological combination allowed for an in-depth and careful exploration of the individual and coupled biographies of the research participants. Particularly, this thesis illustrates how working with material culture brings richness and additional depth to empirical data, as well as it provides new opportunities for creativity and interaction with research participants. In the end, this research project chiefly aims to provide gay men, lesbians, and other non-heterosexuals in transnational relationships additional tools to reflect on their lives, sense of belonging, citizenship status, and the value that is politically and socially bestowed on to their relationships, families and overall personal commitments. Indeed, I wish to bring attention to the intimate side of migration; to the fact that migrants, like the ones in this research, have meaningful and on-going personal and interpersonal attachments and commitments. This is why I argue that studying this can be key to a deeper and better understanding of the phenomenon of migration in the 21st Century.