Thesis (PhD)-- Stellenbosch University, 2014. / ENGLISH ABSTRACT: This study engages with the complete novelistic oeuvre of the Zanzibari-born author Abdulrazak Gurnah, whose fiction is dedicated to the theme of migration. With each novel, however, Gurnah deploys innovative stylistic features as an analytic frame to engage with his signature topic. From his first novel to his eighth, Gurnah offers new insights into relocation and raises new questions about what it means to be a migrant or a stranger in inhospitable circumstances and how such conditions call for a negotiation of hospitable space. What gives each of his works a distinct aesthetic appeal is the artistic resourcefulness and versatility with which he frames his narratives, in order to situate them within their historical contexts. This allows him to interrogate the motives behind his characters’ actions (or behind their inaction). Gurnah, therefore, employs a variety of narrative perspectives that not only challenge the reader in the task of interpreting his complex works, but which also allow for the pleasure of carrying out this task. In its exploration of migrant subjectivities and their multiple and varied negotiations to create enabling spaces, this thesis shows how Gurnah’s fiction deploys various artistic strategies as possible ways of thinking about individual identity and social relations with others. In short, this thesis explores how Gurnah’s texts become discursive tools for understanding the complexity of migrancy and cultural exchanges along the Swahili coast, in Zanzibar, in the Indian Ocean, and in the UK. / AFRIKAANSE OPSOMMING: Hierdie tesis is ‘n studie van die geheelwerk van die Zanzibar-gebore skrywer Abdulrazak Gurnah, wie se fiksiewerk gewy is aan die tema van migrasie. Hoewel daar so ‘n deurlopende en kenmerkende tema in die geheelwerk is, ontwikkel die skrywer stilistiese vernuwing in elk van die individuele romans. Vanaf sy eerste roman tot en met sy agtste en mees onlangse, bied Gurnah se romans aan die leser nuwe insigte in die tema van verhuising, en die romans vra elkeen nuwe vrae oor wat dit beteken om ‘n migrant of vreemdeling te wees in onverwelkomende omgewings. Die romans wil ook vra wat die opsies is vir die individu om sulke omgewings meer verwelkomend te ervaar, of meer verwelkomend te maak. Wat Gurnah se werk so uitsonderlik maak en wat elke individuele roman ‘n kenmerkende estetiese eienskap gee, is sy vernuf en veelsydigheid as skrywer, en veral sy vermoë om sy verhale te historiseer. Hierdie historisering stel hom in staat om die beweegredes van sy karakters en hulle aksies (en dikwels ook gebrek aan aksies) te verken sowel as te bevraagteken. Gurnah maak gebruik van ‘n aantal estetiese perspektiewe wat nie alleen ‘n uitdaging stel aan die leser nie, maar wat terselfdertyd ‘n hoogs bevredigende leesaktiwiteit moontlik maak. Hierdie tesis is ‘n ondersoek na die aard van Gurnah se werk, en veral die verkenning van die innerlike wereld van die verhuisde, en die veelvoudige verskeidenheid van onderhandelings wat sulke individue het met hulle omgewing. Die tesis verken die maniere waarop Gurnah se tekste beskou kan word as kreatiewe handleidings met die doel om die kompleksiteite van verhuising en migrasie te begryp; en veral verhuising en kulturele wisselwerkinge aan die Swahili-kus, sowel as Zanzibar, die groter Indiese Oseaan-wereld en ook die Verenigde Koninkryk.

British imperial culture and indigenous patriarchy both work to subjugate women. There is very little room for resistance. Madness as protest is a dominant theme in Victorian literature as well as late twentieth-century postcolonial writing by women. This thesis refashions our understanding of the madwoman trope by investigating writers’ use of it to capture the diverse experiences of ‘other’ madwomen. Instead of a strictly Eurocentric approach to female protagonists’ experiences of madness, the thesis places British imperial literary culture in the nineteenth century alongside postcolonial writing by women, whether in the Caribbean (Dominica), South Asia (India) or the Middle East and North Africa (Jordan and Egypt). Jeans Rhys’s Wide Sargasso Sea, Arundhati Roy’s The God of Small Things, Fadia Faqir’s Pillars of Salt and Miral Al-Tahawy’s The Tent are placed alongside Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights and Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre. A transnational approach is necessary to establish commonality between Eastern and Western women’s literary experiences of madness. Such commonality persistently emerges, once one is alert to its possibility, despite the often obvious differences between literary madwomen’s experiences in a transnational frame. The relationship between madness and empire, madness and patriarchy, and madwomen as agents of resistance is exemplified throughout the thesis by closely analysing each literary text.

Thesis (M.A.(Afrikaans))--University of Pretoria, 2009. / Includes bibliographical references.

Univerzita Karlova v Praze - Filozofická fakulta - Ústav germánských studií - germánské literatury Dissertation: Utopia, or Paradise Lost? The Texts of Danish Immigrants in Argentina and Latin American Immigrants in Denmark and Their Images of Denmark Daniela Vrbová 2015 Abstract The thesis explores the texts of Danish immigrants in Argentina in the period ca 1844-1990 and Latin American immigrants in Denmark in the period ca 1973-1990 and it follows particularly the conditions and the purposes of their creation. The texts are considered as representations of migration and exile literature in the body of Danish literature. Both groups of authors were producing the texts independently of one another. However, one can identify a joint effort to create or retain an active relationship to Denmark in all texts. This effort has an existential dimension, too, as one can view it as an act of (re)formulation of their personal identity in exile. The thesis then analyses the texts with a help of postcolonial reading in order to find images of Denmark that are being established in the text. Terms adopted from postcolonial studies (and partially also from New Historicism) about migration and migration literature are explained in a separate chapter. The hypothesis of this dissertation is a possible identification of...

Cette thèse examine la représentation littéraire de migrations depuis des colonies vers les centres impériaux à l'époque de la décolonisation par l'analyse comparative de romans antillais en langue anglaise et maghrébins en langue française traitant d'immigration vers la Grande-Bretagne et la France respectivement. L'attention portée à la relation de domination est un point de convergence majeur. Lamming, Chraïbi et Kateb la présentent comme une relation coloniale ayant des effets tant économiques que psychologiques et culturels. Boudjedra et Ben Jelloun dans les années 1970 placent et l'immigration et la colonisation dans le cadre plus large de l'exploitation capitaliste. La représentation des conditions de vie difficiles et de la marginalisation des immigrés participe dans ces romans d'une critique générale de la modernité européenne. Les auteurs maghrébins dénoncent le caractère oppressant de la rationalité occidentale, tandis que les romanciers antillais se concentrent sur les racines coloniales de l'attitude des Britanniques face aux populations non-Européennes. Des deux côtés, on répond au discours colonialiste et à la représentation positive du colonisateur à travers la manipulation du point de vue et de la voix narratifs et le thème de la folie. La plupart des écrivains réfutent les images négatives des immigrés en insistant sur des aspects négligés, tels que la dimension émotionnelle de leur vécu et les tenants et aboutissants coloniaux des relations entre immigrés et autochtones. Ce faisant, leurs représentations finissent par se conformer à la figure de l'immigré sous-tendant les discours qu'ils dénoncent. Leurs préoccupations se distinguent de celles de générations d'auteurs ultérieures et de discours récents sur les populations d'origine maghrébine et antillaise en France et en Grande-Bretagne / This thesis examines the literary representation of migration from a colony to the imperial metropolis in the period of decolonisation through a comparative analysis of novels by Anglophone Caribbean and Francophone Maghribi writers about migration to Britain and France respectively. A major point of convergence is the focus on the relationship of domination. Lamming, Chraïbi and Kateb address this explicitly as a colonial relationship that is psychological and cultural as well as economic, whereas the 1970s writers Boudjedra and Ben Jelloun place both immigration and colonisation within a wider framework of capitalist exploitation. The difficult material conditions and the racism targeting immigrants are not depicted for their own sake but are the occasion of a wide-ranging critique of European modernity. Maghribi writers attack the rationality of Western civilisation as oppressive, whereas the Caribbean novelists focus on the colonial roots of attitudes to non-Europeans. Both sets of writers nonetheless provide responses to European colonialist discourse and to the positive self-presentation of the coloniser through the manipulation of narrative point of view and voice and through the theme of mental breakdown. Most of the novelists set out to refute negative representations of immigrants by restoring aspects they feel are neglected, in particular the emotional dimension of the immigrant experience and the colonial determinants of the relationship between immigrants and natives. In doing so their representations of immigration often conform to the immigrant figure underpinning the discourses they attack. Their preoccupations are distinct from those of later writers and recent discourses about Caribbean and Maghribi populations in Britain and France : with the exception of Selvon and, more ambiguously, Mengouchi and Ramdane, the novelists are not interested in the process of formation of ethnic-diasporic minorities in France and Britain

This thesis draws on Freud to understand the innate human need to create boundaries and argues that ambivalence is an inescapable dilemma in their creation. It argues that a re-reading of Freud’s major thesis in Totem and Taboo via an engagement with the Dionysos myth and cult scholarship allows for a new understanding of dominant forms of hegemonic psychic and social formations that attempt to keep in place a false opposition of polis and phusis, self and Other, resulting in the perpetuation of oppressive structures and processes. The primary methodological claim of the thesis is that prior psychoanalytic engagements with cultus scholarship have suffered from being either insufficiently thorough or diffused in attempts to be comparative. A more holistic and detailed approach allows us to ground a psychoanalytic interpretation in the realities of said culture, allowing us to critique Freud’s misreading of Dionysos regarding the Primal Father and the psychic transmission of the Primal Crime. This thesis posits that Dionysos needs to acknowledged as a projection of the Primal Father fantasy linked to a basic ambivalence about the necessity of boundaries in psychosocial life. Using research from the classics and psychoanalysis alongside Queer and post-colonial theory, as well as extensive fieldwork and primary source analysis, this thesis provides a grounded materialist critique of psychoanalysis’ complicity in reproducing a false dichotomy between polis and phusis, a dichotomy that furthers the projection onto marginalised groups whose othering is linked to a fear and desire of a return to phusis and denial of its constant presence in the psyche and polis. This re-reading of Dionysos challenges the defensive structures, which are organised around ideas of subjectification that posit that phusis must be severed from polis/ego and projected onto Dionysos and all groups that threaten the precariousness of these boundaries.