This essay analyses how Hinduism is portrayed within different textbooks produced for students attending senior high school in Sweden, spanning the years of 1998 until 2013. The analysis itself aims to identify any orientalist tendencies within the textbooks as well as how gender is portrayed. The textbooks are analysed from a set of criteria, namely, content, visual text, gender and text analysis. The analysis also examines what changes occur in regards to how textbooks portray Hinduism in the courses Religion A and Religion 1. Textbooks constitute a dominant part of the Swedish education system which makes the findings of this essay relevant and important for educators. The theory which acts as a foundation for this essay has been adapted from Edward Said’s Orientalism. Said argues that Orientalism is a political strategy which uses stereotypical descriptions of Hinduism to show the strength and superiority of the West. The textbooks studied here contain Orientalist tendencies to a varying degree and  Hinduism as a religion is portrayed in a simplistic manner throughout. Hinduism is also portrayed in sharp contrast to the structure of western society as a primitive religion in a way that is not fully consistent with how Hinduism is practiced in India and around the world today. There are tendencies toward latent orientalist perspectives. The gender perspective in regards to actual text is roughly unchanged throughout all the material used in the study. However, when viewing the images contained within the material, changes have been dramatic and the more recent textbooks now lean towards being dominated by illustrations of females as opposed to males.  The major change in discourse took place between the textbooks connected to Religion A and the books connected to Religion 1. There were significantly less orientalist tendencies present in the textbooks adapted to Religion 1 and a clear pattern could be discerned. Where orientalist tendencies had been diminished the authors had instead attached explanations to the text and expanded upon the subject-matter enabling the reader to gain a greater understanding of what everyday life as a Hindu entails. Another change which could be found in the analysis is that recent textbooks had adapted its subject-matter to conform to how the realities of Hinduism in India and the rest of the world actually look like today. The outdated and stereotypical attributes previously attached to Hinduism based on a western viewpoint have thus faded or been replaced altogether.

This dissertation explores the relationship between fiction, knowledge and "knowing" in Latin American discourses of China and Japan. By scrutinizing Brazilian and Hispanic American travel journals, novels, short stories and essays from the nineteenth century to the present, Disorientations engages with the epistemological problems of writing across cultural boundaries and proposes a novel entryway into the study of East Asia and Latin American through the notions of "cultural distance," "fictional Sinology" and "critical exoticism." / Romance Languages and Literatures

Various representations of the figure of Salomé and the Biblical legend have been produced in the European, specifically in the English literature and arts throughout the nineteenth century. Oscar Wilde’s 1891 dramatic version of the legend in many ways epitomizes the full potential of the legend and capitalizes on the period’s fascination with the Orient. The climax of the orientalism of the play, the Dance of the Seven Veils, offers a unique reflection on European fantasies about the harem and invites a comparison to Ottoman representations of this same cultural space. This project seeks to analyze the relation between the Dance of the Seven Veils as presented by Wilde, and the figure of dancing woman in the harem of the Ottoman Empire. It is the slippage between the two which has informed various representations of the Oriental female figure in the West. The gap that emerges between the Western representations and the real practices in the harem, allows for a focused critique of Orientalist practices while recovering, in some ways, the actual experience of Muslim women.The vision of the harem that the Dance of the Seven Veils in Wilde’s Salomé offers is informed not by an actual encounter, but by the image of the harem as understood in nineteenth century English culture. At the same time, it participates in Victorian feminist debates on liberating the oppressed harem woman from her veils, her sexualization, and her objectification. Ultimately the dance functions as a reaffirmation of conventional gender roles as understood in Victorian society. / text

It is commonly held that contradiction and ambivalence are typical of Aboriginal policies, particularly those of the late 19th and early 20th centuries. These contradictions, often witnessed between policy and its application, have been recognized as a competition between pragmatic factors and humanitarian concerns. However, as is evidenced by the ‘mix-race discourse’ of the laws and policies that make up Aboriginal policy in Canada, the US, and Australia, these contradictions can in part be explained by a post-Enlightenment science that debated the role and place of mixed-ancestry Natives. While mixed-ancestry Natives were the specific targets of law and policy that aimed to fix their identities in a ‘Native-Newcomer’ racial binary, officials were ambivalent and ambiguous when it came to how they fit into that binary. The question of whether they should be considered ‘Aboriginal’ and if they should therefore be assimilated or segregated remained one of the most enduring questions of Aboriginal policy in the century between 1850 and 1950. This dissertation considers these contradictions and how the role of mixed-ancestry Natives in Aboriginal policies can explain them. Instead of seeing those contradictions as anomalies or as illogical, I posit that they are a logical product of scientific debates over racial hybridity. Fundamentally, I argue that mixed-ancestry Natives were the targets of ambivalent policies that were shaped by debates among nineteenth-century scientists about the implications of racial mixing. These debates were reflected in the inconsistencies and apparent contradictions of the laws and practices that make up Aboriginal policy in Canada, the US, and Australia. In particular, these debates were reflected in the ambiguity and ambivalence of policies that tried to direct how Indigenous peoples of mixed-ancestry should be dealt with, defined, and categorized. The contradictions and ambiguities in law and policy reflect on a larger scale the tension between attempting to apply a hypothetical dichotomized racial hierarchy on the reality of a hybridized society. These tensions were a major influencing factor on the direction and development of Aboriginal policy in these three countries, and produced a consistent albeit ambivalent body of ‘mixed-race’ discourse.

In the mid-1990s, Japanese artists Mariko Mori (b. 1962) and Takashi Murakami (b. 1967) began creating works that referenced Japanese popular culture tropes such as sexuality, technology and the idea of kawaii, or cute. These tropes were associated with emerging youth cultures instigating a “soft rebellion” against social conventions. While emancipated female youths, or shōjo, were criticized for lifestyles based on the consumption of kawaii goods, their male contemporaries, the otaku were demonized for a fetishization of kawaii girls and technology through anime and manga, or animation and comic books. Destabilizing the nation’s patriarchal theory of cultural uniqueness, or nihonjinron, the youth triggered fears of a growing infantilized, feminized automaton ‘alien’ society during Japan’s economically tumultuous 1990s. In response to these trends, Mori and Murakami create works and personae that celebrate Japan’s emerging heterogeneity and reveal that Japan’s fear of the ‘alien within’ is a result of a tenuous post-war Japanese-American relationship. But in denoting America’s position in Japan’s psyche, Mori’s and Murakami’s illustration of Japan as both victim and threat encourages Orientalist and Techno-Orientalist readings. The artists’ ambivalence towards Western stereotypes in their works and personae, as well as their distortion of boundaries between commercial and fine art, intimate a collusion between commercialization, art and cultural identity. Such acts suggest that in the global economy of art production, Japanese cultural identity has become as much as a brand, as art a commodity. In this ambivalent perspective, the artists isolate the relatively recent difficulty of enunciating Japanese cultural identity in the international framework. With the downfall of its cultural homogeneity theory, Japan faced a crisis of representation. Self-Orientalization emerged as a cultural imperative for stabilizing a coherent national identity, transposing blame for Japan’s social and economic disrepair onto America. But by relocating Japanese self-Orientalization within the global art market, Mori and Murakami suggest that as non-Western artists, economic viability is based upon their ability to cultivate desirability, not necessarily authenticity. In the international realm, national identity has become a brand based upon the economies of desire, predicated by external consumption, rather than an internalized production of meaning.

Mémoire numérisé par la Division de la gestion de documents et des archives de l'Université de Montréal / Pour respecter les droits d'auteur, la version électronique de cette thèse ou ce mémoire a été dépouillée, le cas échéant, de ses documents visuels et audio-visuels. La version intégrale de la thèse ou du mémoire a été déposée au Service de la gestion des documents et des archives de l'Université de Montréal.

In the mid-1990s, Japanese artists Mariko Mori (b. 1962) and Takashi Murakami (b. 1967) began creating works that referenced Japanese popular culture tropes such as sexuality, technology and the idea of kawaii, or cute. These tropes were associated with emerging youth cultures instigating a “soft rebellion” against social conventions. While emancipated female youths, or shōjo, were criticized for lifestyles based on the consumption of kawaii goods, their male contemporaries, the otaku were demonized for a fetishization of kawaii girls and technology through anime and manga, or animation and comic books. Destabilizing the nation’s patriarchal theory of cultural uniqueness, or nihonjinron, the youth triggered fears of a growing infantilized, feminized automaton ‘alien’ society during Japan’s economically tumultuous 1990s. In response to these trends, Mori and Murakami create works and personae that celebrate Japan’s emerging heterogeneity and reveal that Japan’s fear of the ‘alien within’ is a result of a tenuous post-war Japanese-American relationship. But in denoting America’s position in Japan’s psyche, Mori’s and Murakami’s illustration of Japan as both victim and threat encourages Orientalist and Techno-Orientalist readings. The artists’ ambivalence towards Western stereotypes in their works and personae, as well as their distortion of boundaries between commercial and fine art, intimate a collusion between commercialization, art and cultural identity. Such acts suggest that in the global economy of art production, Japanese cultural identity has become as much as a brand, as art a commodity. In this ambivalent perspective, the artists isolate the relatively recent difficulty of enunciating Japanese cultural identity in the international framework. With the downfall of its cultural homogeneity theory, Japan faced a crisis of representation. Self-Orientalization emerged as a cultural imperative for stabilizing a coherent national identity, transposing blame for Japan’s social and economic disrepair onto America. But by relocating Japanese self-Orientalization within the global art market, Mori and Murakami suggest that as non-Western artists, economic viability is based upon their ability to cultivate desirability, not necessarily authenticity. In the international realm, national identity has become a brand based upon the economies of desire, predicated by external consumption, rather than an internalized production of meaning.

Thesis (M.A.)--University of Toronto, 2005.

Thesis (Ph.D.)--Texas Christian University, 2008. / Title from dissertation title page (viewed Dec. 8, 2008). Includes abstract. Includes bibliographical references.

Thesis (doctoral)--Universität, Kairo, 1999.