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This survey of twentieth and twenty-first century novels, guidebooks, magazines, and the social media platform Instagram illustrates the discursive paradigm by which Western backpacking tourists encounter the formerly colonized world. The "postcolonial playground" avails the non-Western world as a theatre for recreation and meaning-making, an engagement which renders locals as accessories to an experience, perpetuating colonial-era power dialectics that continue to privilege the Western subject over the individuals in whose homes they travel. Ideologically and in praxis, the postcolonial playground has become the naturalized disposition of Western tourists seeking their next holiday. In so many words, the formerly colonized world has been recolonized by tourists, who are oblivious to the regime of privilege that extorts locals in popular tourist destinations.

Includes bibliography. / White South African author Olive Schreiner (1855-1920) and African American author Pauline Elizabeth Hopkins (1859-1930) are well-known and celebrated literary figures in their own right, but are seldom read side by side. Furthermore, these authors and their works are traditionally placed on different spectrums of feminist literary genealogies despite writing during a similar time-frame and sharing converging feminist agendas. This thesis analyses The Story of an African Farm (1883), Schreiner’s first completed novel, alongside Hopkins’ first full-length novel, the romance Contending Forces: A Romance Illustrative of Negro Life North and South (1900). Individually, these novels and their authors do radical work in liberating their female characters from the patriarchal and racial oppression prevalent in each context. This thesis argues that reading the two in tandem offers unique insight into a specifically transnational and transracial feminist consciousness emerging at the turn of the nineteenth century. Identifying multiple links between the novels’ feminist concerns and their intersecting negotiations with race and empire, this comparative literary study establishes temporal, spatial and conceptual links between the two works, arguing that these links transcend both the space and race of their novels’ local contexts in order to suggest a definitive transnational and transracial feminist awareness. Such a reading moreover disrupts traditional genealogies of western feminism, urging scholars to look beyond the narrow scope of feminist “waves” and schools in order to detect nuances, convergences and relationships between texts which such genealogies disregard.

By investigating three texts, namely Chrétien de Troyes' Erec and Enide, Geoffrey Chaucer's "Clerk's Tale", and the anonymous Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, I seek to demonstrate how clothing, honour, gender and gifts shape the experiences of the characters as they find their social place, and disrupt the body as a category on which to base nobility. Although my texts emerge from different social and historical circumstances, the clothing they depict represents similar social transactions of class, gender and honour in the courtly space: ladies are made suitable for marriage through dresses, and a knight is forced to come to terms with the fallibility of his honour through his armour and a girdle. Vital to my investigation is the category of the body, on which Medieval theories of class and virtue were based. Clothing that is frequently used as a constituting symbol of acceptable bodies proves fallible; Enide and Griselda take up royal robes and positions unsuited to their humble origins, and Gawain cannot maintain his honourable manhood when faced with the lure of the life-saving girdle. The characters' divergence from the norms of symbolic representation through clothing alienates the performance of honour from the body, thereby destabilizing bodily superiority (nobility) as a basis for social elevation. Enide and Griselda change their clothing and their social position, but neither woman's translation alters their core characteristics of virtue and goodness. Clothing is physically removable from the body, which poses a challenge for a society so invested in its representative and symbolic power. My investment in clothing as it relates to 'correct' social performance relies on the disjuncture between the characters' natural embodiment of honour and the clothing they receive as gifts. The obligatory reciprocation of gifts takes on the nature of economic transactions, linking clothing to gendered expectations of honour and virtue. Throughout these texts, changeable clothing, whether received as a gift, put on or taken off, demonstrates the heightened attention paid to the rapidly-changing social structure of commercialising society in the high- to late-Medieval era. Removable and improvable, clothing disrupted concepts of class and gender, allowing for greater social freedom in the courtly space.

The 'new' nationalisms that have developed in postcolonial Jamaica and South Africa invite the reclamation of the slave mother, while simultaneously 'cleansing' her body of slavery's atrocities for the purpose of national healing. Michelle Cliff's Abeng and No Telephone to Heaven, and Zoë Wicomb's David's Story and Playing in the Light, reveal this national practice of elision, and especially how the disremembering of slavery factors into personal identity formation. A deeper glance into this process exposes the lingering white supremacist, patriarchal symbolic at the centre of these nations, which maintains its centrality through the erasure of the slave mother and the disavowal of rape - two things which inevitably obscure the intersection of race and sex. The colonial residue of shame and trauma, left uninterrogated in the national script, imprints itself on women of colour and affects our legibility in society today. This dissertation evaluates the exclusion of slavery and the slave mother from the national script, and highlights this exclusion in postcolonial literature to reveal its impact on an intimate level. In my analysis, I interrogate the Lacanian symbolic to showcase the white male universality it employs, which alongside the intersecting discourses of race and sex, render women of colour illegible. Furthermore, in burying the slave past, the traumatic histories of rape are buried with it. Without a platform to excavate this trauma in the national space, there is a resulting disidentification with the nation among the women of colour it fails to represent. Additionally, I suggest that the Post-Traumatic Stress Disorders that undeniably ensued postslavery, including Rape Trauma Syndrome (RTS) and what Joy DeGruy calls Post-Traumatic Slave Syndrome (PTSS), are ultimately undealt with and therefore have potentially intergenerational, melancholic ramifications. In narrating the lives of mixed-race characters, both Cliff and Wicomb reveal shame's transgenerational chokehold, resulting from neglected legacies of trauma. For the protagonists' ancestors, shame results in the denial of blackness, which manifests as a lost ideal among their descendants. As the search for identity collapses with ethnognesis and the reclamation of the black mother, Clare Savage's, Marion Campbell's, and David Dirkse's trauma remains unresolved, leading to a state of melancholia and unbelonging. Because the national scripts in Jamaica and South Africa are so exclusive, it becomes necessary to invent alternative modes of belonging. The projects of rememory and memory justice have the power to engender this sense of belonging, and therefore also create a platform for past trauma to be reconciled. In conclusion, I posit that the mining of folklore is crucial in the search for slave memory and collective healing, but also, when the erasure of slave memory has rendered these stories hidden, it is important to generate our own stories, memories, and truths.

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Thesis advisor: Robert Faulkner / The following sketch attempts to look at the ways in which Francis Bacon helped to bring about the modern age by presenting a system of skepticism, in the form of his doctrine of idols, which initiated the break away from classical philosophy and Christian theology and made room for a new, secular science. By looking at Bacon’s peculiar and esoteric writing style as well as his detractors’ assessments of him, I show not only what they got wrong about Bacon but also and more importantly that many of their criticisms of Bacon’s role in the history of science and philosophy depend on his very success in brining about a reformation of men’s minds. I show how far-reaching his doctrine of the idols is and how it initiated the trend in modern philosophy to create systems of skepticisms that are based on human reason’s self-criticism. Finally, I show how Bacon’s doctrine of idols led to his refutations not only of philosophical doctrines but of Christian theology as well. / Thesis (MA) — Boston College, 2015. / Submitted to: Boston College. Graduate School of Arts and Sciences. / Discipline: Political Science.