Theatre is a location of cultures, the reflection of our daily lives, the present moment we are living. This thesis focuses on studying performances of the Hakka Contemporary Theatre created by female directors (Hakka and Non-Hakka) in Taiwan to observe how they combine western modern theatre forms with Hakka traditional and cultural elements and further transformed the specifics of Hakka culture on stage and represented various images of Hakka women. Through applying theories in relation to diaspora discourse, the hybridity of post-colonialism and postcolonial feminism and theatre study as the foundation of academic research, I attempted to critically examine the hybrid forms and development of the Hakka Contemporary Theatre to explore in depth the meaning of Hakka culture represented in theatre. In this thesis, I firstly offer performance analysis and draw on hybridity discourse and feminism in relation to post-colonial study to discuss three elements: the interaction and negotiated relationship between Hakka women (including female directors and the Hakka actresses), Hakka culture, and modern theatre forms. Furthermore, as part of my research, I critically reflect upon a practical performance project I have undertaken to illustrate how Hakka culture could be presented as subject and be constructed as the subjectivity of the Hakka ethnic group in post-colonial Taiwan. I hope that this thesis may encourage more Taiwanese to appreciate the value of Hakka culture and offer Taiwanese theatrical practitioners a practice of critical hybridity in associating ethnic and cultural issues of Taiwan in the future.

Ce mémoire explore les différents témoignages que nous ont laissés les soldats et officiers polonais ayant combattu du côté de la France durant l’existence du Duché de Varsovie, entre 1807 et 1815. L’objectif premier de l’analyse est de déterminer quelles étaient les représentations qu’ont faites les Polonais de la France et des Français et quelles attitudes ils ont adoptées envers leurs alliés. La première partie du mémoire fait un survol des sources en présentant plus en détail les auteurs étudiés ainsi que les différentes formations militaires dont ils ont fait partie. La section suivante porte quant à elle sur les représentations de la France et des Français dans les écrits polonais en mettant en perspective de nombreux extraits issus des mémoires et de la correspondance des officiers. En dernier lieu, le mémoire explore les représentations que se sont faites les auteurs de leur propre nation, les attitudes qu’ils ont adoptées envers leurs alliés français au courant des guerres napoléoniennes ainsi que l’influence du parcours suivi par les auteurs suite à la chute de l’Empire en 1815. En empruntant des concepts d’analyse aux post-colonial studies ainsi qu’à plusieurs ouvrages récents portant sur la psychologie des combattants, le mémoire en vient à illustrer l’existence, chez les militaires polonais, d’un double discours mêlant admiration et désir de résistance face à l’influence française en Pologne. Ceci contredit l’idée reçue que les militaires polonais sont entièrement dévoués à la cause de la France et de Napoléon et appui l’idée d’une interaction mutuelle plus complexe qui entraîne l’écriture d’une histoire où les Polonais ne sont pas que des témoins passifs des guerres d’Empire.

This project explores visually experimental poetry as a particular trend in Caribbean poetry since the 1970's. Although visual experimentation in Caribbean poetry is immediately recognizable ??? for example, its play with font styles and sizes, its jagged margins, its division of the page into multiple discourse spaces, its use of images ??? little critical attention has been paid to the visual qualities of Caribbean poetry. Instead, definitions of Caribbean poetry have remained focussed upon oral/aural aesthetics, excluding its use of and contribution to late 20th century experimental poetic practice. By focussing on the poetry of Shake Keane, Claire Harris, Marlene Nourbese Philip, Kamau Brathwaite, and LeRoy Clarke, I bring post-colonial literary criticism into discussion with contemporary debates regarding visual poetic practice in North America. In so doing, this project values Caribbean visual poetry both for its expression of Caribbean cultural experience and for its contributions to broader experimental poetry movements. I argue that visual experimentation functions to disrupt traditional linear reading processes, which thereby allows poets to perform the flux of time and space in post-colonial contexts. Furthermore, such disruption of linear reading practices, often manifested by the positioning of multiple discourses on one page, serves to create a polyvocal discourse that resists patriarchal and colonialist power structures. Valuing the visual qualities of Caribbean poetry as signifying elements, this dissertation explores the aesthetic and social implications of inscription and visual design in Caribbean poetry.

This thesis examines the context and practices of emotion management for National workers in International Non-Governmental Organizations (INGOs) through a study of national workers recruited into disaster intervention in India. The research draws on postcolonial theory and problematizes current work exploring the implications of race and intersectionality within emotion management. The data collection strategy involved a narrative-based semi-structured interview process with a view to surfacing social and discursive constructions. The interpretation comprised of three levels of reading that included explication, explanation and exploration based reading using postcolonial and poststructural-feminist theories. Results highlight the dominance of neoliberal practices in INGOs and explain how these practices foreground various colonial continuities in the ways in which INGOs respond to disasters. Neoliberal practices inform and impact on the emotion management of National workers as they create a masculine and instrumental emotion regime where emotions and compassion are seen as dispensable. The colonial continuities on which neoliberalism draws, have an impact on the relationships between National and Expatriate workers. These relationships become ‘emotional encounters’ based on asymmetries that disadvantage the former. This understanding paves the way for proposing changes in contemporary disaster management practices. In this context the emotion management of National workers is a complex performance. These complex performances are linked to the postcolonial concepts of mimicry, sly-civility and hybridity and to the operation of power through desires and subjectivity. Through this context based interpretation, emotion management and theorising can be extended in useful ways. In particular, I go beyond the normative nature of much current theorising. In doing so I am able to consider emotion management as an ‘embodied emotional performance’ that places additional stress on stigmatised identities. This formulation helps break down the binaries that inform our current conceptualisation of emotion management such as emotion work and emotional labour; surface and deep acting; real and fake emotions; felt and expressed emotions. It also blurs the distinction between emotional labour and aesthetic labour. Further, it helps identify different forms of resistance to neoliberal dictates about the role of emotions in organizations. This allows for the recognition that embodied emotional performances enable conformity as well as creative resistance against emotion norms in organizations.

The major concern of this study is to examine the current process of national development in the two African states of Mozambique and Guinea Bissau. Recognizing the fact that the problem of development is the foremost challenge to all contemporary African nations, the pursuit of an alternative approach to the process of development by the two countries, is certainly a break-away from the change in continuity of the colonial capitalist mode of production, characteristic of Africa today. Contrary to the general practice in Africa which limits the concept of development to economics, and the enrichment of the petty bourgeoisie, the process of national development in Mozambique and Guinea Bissau has rightfully been conceptualized in terms of its economic, social, political, and ideological complexities, while the uplift of the masses occupies the center of the economic activity. The study critically examined the economic dimensions of the development process in both Mozambique and Guinea Bissau. The specific concern centered on industrialization and economic integration, the design and character of agriculture, the mechanisms of distribution of national wealth, the alternative measures of unemployment control, and the strategy followed in an attempt to eliminate post-colonial linkages. Viewing the role of politics in the overall process of development as an essential one, especially with regard to structural transformation and mobilization, the study examined the political dimensions of development in these countries. The focus was placed on the role of the party, structural transformation and mass participation, the distribution of power and national integration, political consciousness and rural politicization, in addition to their various implications on the development process. The study shows that the political elements have rendered the process of development, creative and complementary, cohesive, as well as dynamic. With regard to the social dimensions of development, the study examined the particularity of education, the unique innovations in health care and housing, and the progress made so far in the attainment of self-reliance. Faced with the task of assessing the efficacity of this approach to national development, the study without pretending to provide the cure for all development problems in Africa, concluded by uncovering the commendable merits and uniqueness of the approach, but also cautions against blind copying, while at the same time it encourages others to take a critical look at this experience in an attempt to assess the extent to which it can apply to their concrete conditions.

Thesis advisor: Zine Magubane / Using content analysis of the three largest United States Newsweeklies this thesis explores representations of young women's sexuality during the early 2000's. While popular culture during this period is focused on "Girls Gone Wild" causing widespread feminist concern over the "third wave's" definition of a feminist sexuality, no young women with sexual agency are presented in the magazines. Instead the women presented, who are overwhelmingly white, are either too pure to posses any information regarding sexual activities, engaged in sexual activities that they are coerced or forced into, or are celibate. The combination of these discourses expose a narrative of female empowerment through chastity that mirrors the Victorian-era ideals of white womanhood. Using post-colonial theory the thesis argues that this representation, combined with the erasure of all other alternatives is indicative of a identity crisis within the collective United Sates conscious. / Thesis (MA) — Boston College, 2009. / Submitted to: Boston College. Graduate School of Arts and Sciences. / Discipline: Sociology.

In order to survive assimilative pressures since the time of colonization, the marginalized Mapuche people have been forced to hybridize with dominant normative gender, ethnic, and religious constructs of the Chilean state. Historically competing beliefs and practices fueled imperious, state-driven hegemonic modes of domination through structural oppression of the Mapuche in attempt to normalize the distinct indigenous population. When assimilation failed, the enduring clash of beliefs and practices led to the construction of indigenous difference as deviant and inferior to justify marginalization of the Mapuche people. This thesis illustrates how contemporary issues of health embody the deeply rooted conflict between the Mapuche and the Chilean nation. It examines three examples of the clash, resistance, and adaptation of Mapuche health practices and concepts within the construction of the state in this assimilative process. These three instances of unequal hybridization of cultures are 1) the development of the traditional Mapuche healer, the machi, 2) the incidence and conceptualization of sexually transmitted disease within the Mapuche community, and 3) the change in food practices and consumption in Mapuche communities.

The purpose of this paper is to examine and to analyze the arguments about a possible Swedish law against the veil. I have therefore highlighted how notions about the veil creates and reproduces power-structures and meaning-systems. I structured the arguments in a pro et contra schedule and then analyzed them by using a theoretical framework consisting post-colonial feminism, orientalism, multi-culture and intersectionality together with research produced by Joan Wallach Scott (2010), Pia Karlsson Minganti (2007) and Anne Sofie Roald (2003). The results of the study shows that the people who either argue for or against a veil-law agree that the veil is an oppression of women and that it must be resisted. To be objective in the discussion of the veil seems to be impossible and the women it affects deprived voice. A piece of cloth has never been as controversial as the veil and the question is whether it is possible to reach consensus on its symbolism, the arguments that I analyzed contradicts it.

This dissertation means to examine Faulkner¡¦s Depression-Era fiction as a post-traumatic syndrome pervasive in the Southern psyche. I read Faulkner from a cultural triangulation of race, class, and gender in Yoknapatawpha. These triangular coordinates often close in on somewhere on the far horizon, in their relations with the Civil War and its aftermath. That is the way history insinuates herself into Faulkner¡¦s art. Opening with a chapter on The Sound and the Fury, I contend that the novel sets an eschatological scene for my investigation of its relation with the bulk of Faulkner¡¦s writing throughout the ¡¦30s. The Compsons¡¦ apocalyptic ¡§now,¡¨ 1929, is thoroughly checked for its temporal entanglement with the Confederate memories. How Faulkner¡¦s Great Depression contemporaneity laments over the Lost Cause gives us a topological context where the Confederate vestiges pop out at every corner. In Chapter two, I will slash vertically into white ideology for another visage of the white South¡¦s trauma¡Xa class-aware orchestration of monologues in the apocalyptical ¡§now.¡¨ Who lies dying is a self-consuming question among the Bundrens. This is where Faulkner comes closest to the socio-economic issue in the 30s. In the analysis of As I Lay Dying, I will engage with Diaspora theories of cultural displacement, along with a Marxist elucidation of ¡§structure of feeling¡¨ to fully denote the submerged living standards of the poor whites in the Depression Era. As for the third chapter, I will engage with the places in which the white Southern subjectivity itches¡Xrace and racism, and the dominant Yankee influence embodied by the Carpetbagger offspring Joanna Burden¡¦s unsuccessful taming of an ¡§interpellated¡¨ mulatto, Joe Christmas. The Diasporic depths in Faulkner¡¦s oeuvre carries on with all the cultural and identitarian others coming into the South to challenge the white supremacist in Light in August. Joe Christmas¡¦s wandering is not so much a victimization of racism, as he is a chameleon in identity relations inserted in a fanatical, politicized South¡Xa praxis around which different identities cite their own traumas. Moving from a vicarious way to retell the stories in a time of loss and upheaval, the fourth chapter touches the per se of the South¡¦s historical trauma, the defeat in the Civil War and its aftermath. I investigate two variants in the South¡¦s collective reproduction of this traumatic origin: Absalom, Absalom! with its gothic chronotope that runs parallel with the progressive modernity, i.e., the milieu of Quentin¡¦s apocalypse now; The Unvanquished with a deconstructive lens to look at the southern cavalier fatherhood, namely, Bayard Sartoris¡¦ rejection to avenge his father in its ¡§An Odor of Verbena.¡¨ The former rejects Anderson¡¦s ¡§homogeneous empty time¡¨ and the latter bids farewells to the Cavalier past by an overdose of romanticism and then an abrupt reversal at the apogee of the romantic vision. Concentrating on a self-therapeutic outlook on Faulkner and his South, I trace a symbolic economy of ¡§working through¡¨ in which Faulkner rehearses the Southern history by multiple overexposures of its trauma. It is also a project to tie Faulkner¡¦s own identity formation to a process of victimization in relation to these memories: his southern diasporic self in the 30s against the capitalistic centers of an intellectual New York and a commercial Hollywood. Faulkner embeds a humiliation in either vision. He is an epitome of the South¡¦s memories of loss and its concomitant pain.

This thesis is the study of Great Power nvaliy during 1958-1963, a period of both increasing political and economic cooperation in Western Europe and transatlantic relations within NATO against a background of the Cold War France and Britain are the focus of our analysis. The two states show the same characteristics in this period: Both powers had come out of World War H as victors and, despite having been much weakened by the war, had won an international status a Great Powers thanks to a permanent seat in the United Nations Security Council. They were both colonial powers tiying to adjust to a new world order based on East-West bipolarity and the domination of the two super-powers. Against a background of international decline from pre-war power, both France and Britain were looking for new ways to secure their rank and international influence through both NATO and the EEC, while trying to adapt to a changed bi-polar and post-colonial world order. NATO and Europe are therefore the main issue area of this thesis, which is structured as a series of studies into the main areas of Anglo-French rivalry in the above period. We show that the real reasons for failed negotiations - whether over the Free Trade Area, tripartism in NATO, or British membership of the EEC - are to be found in Great Power rivahy for a leading place in Europe. We thus contend that Anglo-French political rivalry ultimately led to a breakdown of negotiations, rather than any of the negotiations themselves breaking down, and that NATO affairs and European affairs were closely linked. Each state failed to accept the other within its respective sphere of influence, since each had mutually exclusive interests, a factor which in the end, despite sincere efforts in both Paris and London, wrecked Anglo-French cooperation on Europe and NATO and thus prevented the two states from working together on restoring their declining international rank.