No description available.

The purpose of this dissertation was to compare British policy towards Ireland/Northern Ireland and United States and Canadian Indian policies. Despite apparent differences, it was hypothesized that closer examination would reveal significant similarities. A conceptual framework was provided by the utilization of Hartzian fragment theory and the theory of internal colonialism. Eighteen research questions and a series of questions concerned with the applicability of the theoretical constructs were tested using largely historical data and statistical indices of social and economic development. The research demonstrated that Gaelic-Irish and North American Indian societies came under pressure from, and were ultimately subjugated by colonizing fragments marked by their high level of ideological cohesiveness. In the Irish case the decisive moment was the Ulster fragmentation of the seventeenth century which set in juxtaposition a defiant, uncompromising, zealously Protestant, "Planter" community and an equally defiant, recalcitrant, native Gaelic-Catholic population. In the United States traditional Indian society was confronted by a largely British-derived, single-fragment regime which was characterized by a profound sense of mission and an Indian policy rooted in its liberal ideology. In Canada the clash between two competing settler fragments led to the victory of the British over the French, and the pursuit of Indian policies based on many of the same premises that underlay United States policies. The indigenous populations in each of the cases under consideration suffered enormous loss of land, physical and cultural destruction, racial discrimination, economic exploitation and were stripped of their political independence. They responded through collective violence, by the formation of cultural revitalization movements, and by intense domestic and international lobbying. They continue to exist today as internal colonies of the developed fragment states within which they are subsumed.

Abstract not available. / Thesis (Ph.D.)-University of Natal, Durban, 1991.

This study documents the rise of party political public relations in Northern Ireland and explores its impact on the media and the peace/political process more generally. While this research primarily charts and describes the chronological development of public relations pertaining to Northern Ireland's four main political parties (the SDLP, Sinn Fein, the DUP and the UUP), it also explores the media-source relations or interactions between journalists and public relations personnel. Significantly, political public relations has expanded considerably in Northern Ireland since the mid-90s, and political parties are increasingly utilising PR to enhance their media relations capabilities and improve their image (or `brand') with the public. What was once mainly the remit of the British government and its agencies in Northern Ireland (that is, political public relations) has now become an area in which the four main political parties (to varying degrees of success) have become increasingly more professional and well-resourced. The result of this expansion of party political public relations has seen the regional media in Northern Ireland become increasingly more vulnerable to the promotional efforts of `spin doctors' or media relations personnel from all four parties. This research, while acknowledging that there are undoubtedly multiple factors involved in how people decide to vote, argues that the 71.12% Yes vote in favour of the Good Friday Agreement can be partly explained by the significant impact of public relations strategies and techniques employed by a number of key behind-the-scenes players and conducted publicly by influential, high-profile figures. Essentially, it challenges the argument prevalent in the vast majority of literature on elections that public relations campaigns have very little `effect' on voting behaviour or that those changes of voting behaviour are due either to other factors or to long-term media campaigns and influences. This research also argues, on the one hand, that the electoral success of both Sinn Fein and the DUP in recent years (the two parties `hungry' for political power, who became the leading political parties in nationalism and unionism respectively) can be partly explained by their `courting' of the media and their development of strong and efficient communications structures. On the other hand, the recent electoral failure of both the SDLP and the UUP can be partly explained by their laissez-faire or complacent approach to both public relations and the media, and their weak and inefficient communications structures in comparison to both Sinn Fein and the DUP.

No description available.

In the immediate post-independence period, forms of state-sponsored Irish nationalism were pre-occupied with exclusive cultural markers based on the Irish language, mythology and folk traditions. Because of this, a postcolonial examination of how such nationalist forms of identity were fetishised is necessary in order to critique the continuing process of decolonization in Ireland. This dissertation investigates Brian O’Nolan’s engagement with dominant colonial and nationalist literary discourses in his fiction and journalism. Deleuze and Guattari define a ‘minor’ writer’s role as one which deterritorializes major languages in order to negotiate textual spaces which question the assumptions of dominant groups. Considering this concept has been applied to postcolonial studies due to the theorists’ linguistic and political concerns, this dissertation explores the ‘minor’ literary practice of Brian O’Nolan’s authorial personae and writing techniques. Through the employment of Deleuze and Guattari’s concept of the deterritorialization of language alongside Walter Benjamin’s models of the flâneur and translation, and Claude Lévi-Strauss’s concept of bricolage, this thesis examines the complex forms of postcolonial narrative agency and discursive political resistance in O’Nolan’s work. While O’Nolan is often read in biographical terms or within the frameworks of literary modernism and postmodernism, this thesis aims to demonstrate the politically ambivalent nature of his writing through his creation of liminal authorial selves and heterogeneous narrative forms. As a bi-lingual author, O’Nolan is linguistically ‘in-between’ languages and, because of this, he deterritorializes both historical and literary associations of the Irish and English languages to produce parodic and comic versions of national and linguistic identity. His satiric novel An Béal Bocht exposes, through his use of an array of materials, how Irish folk and peasant culture have been fetishized within colonial and nationalist frameworks. In order to avoid such restricting forms of identity, O’Nolan positions his own authorial self within a multitude of pseudonyms which refuse a clear, assimilable subjectivity and political position. Because of this, O’Nolan’s authorial voice in his journalism is read as an allusive flâneur figure. Equally, O’Nolan deterritorializes Irish mythology in At Swim-Two-Birds as a form of palimpsestic translation and rhizomatic re-mapping of a number of literary traditions which reflect the Irish nation while in The Third Policeman O’Nolan deconstructs notions of empirical subjectivity and academic and scientific epistemological knowledge. This results in an infinite form of fantastical writing which exposes the limited codes of Irish national culture and identity without reterritorializing such identities. Because O’Nolan’s ‘minor’ literary challenge is reflective of the on-going crisis of Ireland’s incomplete decolonization, this thesis employs the concept of ‘minor’ literature to read Ireland’s historical past and contemporary modernity through O’Nolan’s multi-voiced and layered narratives.

No description available.

No description available.

No description available.