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.

The relation between the Catalan nationalist forces as well as the other sub-nationalisms and the Spanish Government has been a matter discussed throughout all the Spanish democracy. In recent years the challenge to the Spanish state set by the Catalan government when taking a unilateral approach on Independence has resulted in the imprisonment and exile of political leaders. The aim of this thesis is to analyse the events that occurred in Catalonia after the Catalan elections of 2015 and the unilateral approach on self-determination taken by the Catalan Autonomous Government with the promise of a binding referendum. The laws passed by the Catalan government which were rejected by the Constitutional Court, as the law itself denied the authority of the Constitutional Court and declared independence. This resulted in the application of the 155th article of the Spanish Constitution, suspending autonomous government, to enforce the Constitutional Court’s resolutions by the Spanish government. The essay will focus on the discourses given by politicians to criticize or justify these actions, analysed through theoretical and political normative perspectives.

Le Banat est une région d’Europe balkanique conquise en 1716 par les Habsbourg sur l’Empire ottoman et directement administrée par Vienne. Dans les discours des administrateurs habsbourgeois, l’usage des catégories nationales est pragmatique. Il permet de déterminer les pratiques de gouvernement acceptables envers des groupes aux limites floues, dans le respect des intermédiaires traditionnels et d’une communication politique effectuée en langue vernaculaire. Mais l’action d’un État uniquement fiscal et militaire est remise en cause par l’élargissement de son périmètre d’action et l’arrivée d’une nouvelle génération de fonctionnaires en 1769. L’influence du caméralisme et de la statistique administrative amène à considérer les nations sous un angle exclusivement culturel. Mais cette identité imposée n’est pas assimilée par les populations. Celles-ci se réapproprient l’ancien usage des nations privilégiées dans leurs revendications politiques au cours des années 1780. / The Banat is a large region of the Balkans. It was conquered in 1716 by the Habsburg power over the Ottoman Empire and then governed directly from Vienna. In this context, the Habsburg civil servants made a pragmatic use of national categories. They were a means to determine an acceptable political behaviour towards groups defined by vague social boundaries, while respecting traditional middlemen and using the vernacular for political communication. However, the action of this strictly fiscal and military State was called into question by the widening of its prerogatives and the arrival of a new generation of civil servants in 1769. The influence of Kameralismus and the administrative statistic led the latter to consider the nations from a cultural point of view. But this imposed identity did not seem to be taken up by the population. On the contrary, people began to use the old sense of the privileged “nations” in their political claims directed to the emperor in the 1780s.

Cette thèse appréhende les processus identitaires et les transformations socioculturelles en cours au travers de l’appropriation du rap au Gabon depuis la fin des années 1980, ainsi que l’enchevêtrement de ces productions de catégories identitaires avec des rapports de pouvoir campés dans le domaine des hiérarchies entre aînés et cadets, des relations de genre, des stratifications des réseaux de la musique, ou des rapports de force avec les autorités politiques. Une investigation dans les archives du Gabon éclaire d’abord la manière dont, tout en marquant des ruptures avec la génération précédente, les rappeurs se sont inscrits dans la continuité de plusieurs décennies de pratiques de musiques dans la ville et de dialogues transnationaux avec les productions culturelles en circulation dans l’espace Atlantique. Une deuxième partie se consacre à la description des relations de genre et de la construction de la masculinité, révélant l’agentivité développée par certaines femmes des mondes de la nuit et de la musique. Enfin, une troisième partie se focalise sur les revendications identitaires et idéologiques des rappeurs et sur les nationalismes qu’ils réinventent, dans des emboîtements entre l’ethnique, le national, le panafricanisme et le transnational. Elle traite des métamorphoses de la sorcellerie dans les réseaux du rap et de la world music africaine, du spectacle de la nation, et des mobilités transnationales au travers desquelles quelques rappeurs forment de nouvelles catégories identitaires hybrides. / This dissertation apprehends the identity processes and sociocultural changes taking place through the appropriation of rap music in Gabon since the end of the 80s, as well as the entanglement in power relations of those identity categories produced by young people, in the field of hierarchies between elders and youngers, of gender relations, of musical network stratifications, or towards the political authorities.An investigation in the archives of Gabon firstly highlights how, while marking ruptures with the previous generation, rappers were enrolled in the continuity of several decades of urban musical practices and transnational dialogues with some cultural productions circulating in the Atlantic space. A second part is devoted to the description of gender relations and to the construction of masculinity, revealing the agency developed by some women into the urban worlds of the night and of music. Finally, the third part focuses on rappers’ identity and ideological claims, and on the nationalisms they reinvent in negotiation between ethnic, national, transnational and panafrican levels. It deals with the transformations of witchcraft in rap music’s networks and in African world music market, with the spectacle of the nation and with transnational mobilities through which some rappers form new hybrid identity categories.

Beaucoup ont qualifié la construction de mouvements identitaires à base linguistique de Nouveaux Mouvement Sociaux dans les années 70. S’il est vrai qu’en France ils se sont fait connaitre à ce moment-là, en réapparaissant sous de nouvelles formes, il n’en demeure pas moins qu’ils puisent leurs racines dans une opposition historique aux Etats modernes européens. La longévité et la structuration des réseaux militants des langues basque et catalane, tant en France qu’en Espagne, en sont la preuve. Ainsi, outre les grands cycles de protestation, ce sont surtout les nouvelles formes de l’action publique locale et de la construction européenne qui vont permettre une prise en compte et une mise en œuvre de politiques linguistiques en Pays Basque et en Catalogne. La construction collective de manière transfrontalière des politiques linguistiques de la langue montre combien les acteurs collectifs deviennent des acteurs essentiels à la mise en œuvre de politiques publiques contemporaines. Et ce, non seulement en les cadrant lors des luttes politiques et lors de leurs élaborations mais également en étant des acteurs essentiels à l’expertise et à la mise en œuvre, puisqu’ils en sont la cause et les bénéficiaires à part entière. Finalement, les réseaux d’action politique en faveur de la langue se transforment, une fois la langue devenue enjeu et objectif de politique publique, en réseaux d’action publique local ouvrant ainsi un nouveau cycle d’action. / The construction of language-based identity movements was called New Social Movements in the 70’s. If in France, they make themselves known at that time, reappearing under new forms, the fact remains that they originate from an historical opposition with the Europeans Modern States. The longevity and the structuration of the language-based militant networks of basque and catalonian languages, both in the Basque country and in Catalonia, are the proof. Besides the larges protest cycles, it is above all the new forms of local public policy and of European construction which will permit consideration and implementation of language policies in the Basque country and in Catalonia. The collective construction and across borders of language policies shows how collective actors become key players in the implementation of contemporary public policy, not only framing politics and policy making but also being essentials in the expertise and implementation because they are the cause and the beneficiaries. Finally, policy networks based on language turn, once the language become issue and target of public policy, on local public networks opening a new cycle of action.

xi, 236 p. A print copy of this thesis is available through the UO Libraries. Search the library catalog for the location and call number. / Writers in the Caribbean, like writers throughout the postcolonial world, return to colonial texts to rewrite the myths that justified and maintained colonial control. Exemplary of a widespread, regional phenomenon that begins at mid-century, writers such as Aimé Césaire and George Lamming take up certain texts such as Shakespeare's The Tempest and recast them in their own image. Postcolonial literary theory reads this act of rewriting the canon as a political one that speaks back to power and often advocates for political and cultural independence. Towards the end of the twentieth century and at the beginning of the twenty-first century, Caribbean women writers begin a new wave of rewriting that continues in this tradition, but with certain differences, not least of which is a focused attention to gender and sexuality and to the literary legacies of romance. In the dissertation I consider a number of novels from throughout the region that rewrite the romance, including Jean Rhys's Wide Sargasso Sea (1966), Maryse Condé's La migration des coeurs (1995), Mayra Santos-Febres's Nuestra señora de la noche (2006), and Dionne Brand's In Another Place, Not Here (1996). Romance, perhaps more than any other literary form, exerts an allegorical force that exceeds the story of individual characters. The symbolic weight of romance imagines the possibilities of a social order--a social order dependent on the sexual behavior of its citizens. By rewriting the romance, Caribbean women reconsider the sexual politics that have linked women with metaphorical constructions of the nation while at the same time detailing the extent to which transnational forces, including colonization, impact the representation of love and desire in literary texts. Although ultimately these novels refuse the generic requirements of the traditional resolution for romance (the so-called happy ending), they nonetheless gesture towards a reordering of community and a revised notion of kinship that recognizes the weight of both gendered and sexual identities in the Caribbean. / Committee in charge: Karen McPherson, Chairperson, Romance Languages; David Vazquez, Member, English; Tania Triana, Member, Romance Languages; Judith Raiskin, Outside Member, Womens and Gender Studies