No description available.

This dissertation analyzes the influence of colonialism on the current transportation system in Nigeria, its impact on development and the stringent difficulties experienced in the restructuring of the system for efficient development in the Nigerian economic milieu. These have been accomplished by an analysis of the colonial intentions of the foreign influence under whose auspices the transportation system in Nigeria was initiated and constructed. Also, the post-colonial difficulties in the efforts to restructure the system were critically analyzed. A major assumption made in this dissertation has been that colonialism was the main reason the system was structured the way it stands currently, especially since the system reached its greatest development and expansion during colonialism in Nigeria. All evidences in this study point to the fact that unless the system is completely restructured to better address the developmental needs in Nigeria, development will still be far-fetched and thus negate the importance of transportation as a major vehicle to national development.

Recent studies of globalization provide contrasting views of the cultural and sociopolitical effects of such major corporations as Disney as they invest transnationally and circulate their offerings around the world. While some scholars emphasize the ubiquity of Disney’s products and its promotion of consumerism on a global scale, accompanied by cultural homogenization, faltering democracy, and diminishing state sovereignty, others highlight signs of contestation and resistance, questioning the various state-capitalist alliances presumed to hold in the encounter between a global company, a local state, and the people. The settlement process and the cultural import of Hong Kong Disneyland in Hong Kong complicate these studies because of the evolving post-colonial situation that Disney encounters in Hong Kong. While Disney specializes in “imagineering” dreams, Hong Kong itself is messily imagining what “Hong Kong” is and should be, and how it should deal with others, including transnational companies and Mainlanders. In this thesis, I appropriate Doreen Massey’s ideas of space-time in order to examine Hong Kong Disneyland not as a self-enclosed park but as itself a multiplicity of spaces where dynamic social relations intersect in the wider context of post-colonial Hong Kong. I illuminate the shifting relationship between Disney, Mainlanders, and the locals as this relationship develops in its discursive, institutional, and everyday-life aspects. Through interviews and ethnographic research, I study how my respondents have established and interpreted the meanings of Hong Kong Disneyland, and how they have made use of the park to support their own constructions of place, of politics, and of identity.

The first codes of the Internet made their tentative steps along the information highway in 1969, connecting two computers at UCLA. Since that time, the Internet has grown beyond institutions of research and scholarship. It is now a venue for commerce, popular culture and political discourse. The last decade, following the development of the World Wide Web, has seen access to the Internet, particularly in wealthy countries such as Australia, spread throughout the majority of the population. While this proliferation of users has created many opportunities, it also profiled questions of disadvantage. The development and continuation of a digital divide between the information ‘haves’ and ‘have nots’ was framed as a problem of ‘access.’ In the context of the increasing population online, debates into social inequity have been directed at technical barriers to access, the physical infrastructure and economic impediments to the adoption of the medium by all members of society. This doctoral research probes questions of access with greater subtlety, arching beyond the spread of broadband or the expansion of computers into schools. Forging dialogues between Internet and Cultural Studies, new theories of the screen – as a barrier and border – emerge. It is an appropriate time for such a study. The (seemingly) ever expanding growth in Internet access is stalling. New approaches are required to not only understand the pattern of events, but the type and mode of intervention that is possible. This doctoral research takes theory, politics and policy to the next stage in the history of digital access. By forging interdisciplinary dialogues, the goal is to develop the concept of ‘cultware’. This term, building on the history of hardware, software and wetware, demonstrates the imperative of understanding context in the framing and forging of exclusion and disempowerment. Mobilising the insights of postcolonial theory, Popular Cultural Studies, literacy theory and socio-legal studies, a new network of exclusions emerge that require a broader palette of interventionary strategies than can be solved through infrastructure or freeing codes. Commencing with the Universal Service Obligation, and probing the meaning of each term in this phrase and policy, there is a discussion of networks and ‘gates’ of the Digital Empire. Discussions then follow of citizenship, sovereignty, nationalism and the subaltern. By applying the insights of intellectual culture from the analogue age, there is not only an emphasis on the continuities between ‘old’ and ‘new’ media, but a confirmation of how a focus on ‘the new’ can mask the profound perpetuation of analogue injustices. Access to the Invisible Empire occurs for each individual in a solitary fashion. Alone at the screen, each person is atomised at the point where they interface with the digital. This thesis dissects that point of access. The three components of access at the screen – hardware, software and wetware – intersect and dialogue. All three components form a matrix of access. However, the ability to attain hardware, software and wetware are distinct. An awareness of how and where to attain these literacies requires the activation of cultware, the context in which the three components manifest. Without such an intersection, access is not possible. The size of the overlap determines the scale of the gateway and the value of access. There is an interaction between each of these components that can alter both the value of the access obtained and the point at which the gateway becomes viable and stable for entry into the digital discourse. A highly proficient user with developed wetware is able to extract more value, capital and currency from hardware and software. They have expert knowledge in the use of this medium in contrast to a novice user. In dissecting the complexity of access, my original contribution to knowledge is developing this concept of cultware and confirming its value in explaining digital inequalities. This thesis diagnoses the nodes and structures of digital and analogue inequality. Critical and interpretative Internet Studies, inflected and informed by Cultural Studies approaches and theories, offers methods for intervention, providing contextual understanding of the manifestations of power and social justice in a digital environment. In enacting this project, familiar tropes and theories from Cultural Studies are deployed. Particular attention is placed on the insights of postcolonial theorists. The Invisible Empire, following the path of the digital intellectual, seeks to act as a translator between the digital subaltern and the digital citizen. Similarly, it seeks to apply pre-existing off screen theory and methodology to the Invisible Empire, illuminating how these theories can be reapplied to the digitised environment. Within this context, my research provides a significant and original contribution to knowledge in this field. The majority of analyses in critical and interpretative Internet Studies have centred on the United States and Europe. While correlations can be drawn from these studies, there are features unique to the Australian environment, both socially and culturally, as well as physical factors such as the geographic separation and sparse distribution of the population, that limit the ability to translate these previous findings into an Australian context. The writer, as a white Australian, is liminally positioned in the colonial equation: being a citizen of a (formerly) colonised nation with the relics of Empire littering the symbolic landscape, while also – through presence and language – perpetuating the colonization of the Indigenous peoples. This ‘in-betweenness’ adds discomfort, texture and movement to the research, which is a fundamentally appropriate state to understand the gentle confluences between the digital and analogue. In this context, the screen is the gateway to the Invisible Empire. However, unlike the analogue gate in the city wall that guards a physical core, these gates guard a non-corporeal Invisible Empire. Whereas barbarians could storm the gates of Rome without the literacy to understand the workings of the Empire within, when an army masses to physically strike at these gates, the only consequences are a broken monitor. Questions cannot be asked at the gate to an Invisible Empire. There is no common space in which the digital subaltern and the digital citizen cohabitate. There is no node at which translation can occur. These gates to the Invisible Empire are numerous. The walls cannot be breached and the gates are only open for the citizenry with the required literacy. This literacy in the codes of access is an absolute requirement to pass the gates of Invisible Empire. The digital citizen transverses these gates alone. It is a point where the off screen self interfaces the digital self. Social interaction occurs on either side of the screen, but not at the gateway itself. Resistance within the borders of Invisible Empire is one of the founding ideologies of the Internet, tracing its origin back to the cyberpunk literature that predicted the rise of the network. However this was a resistance to authority, both on and off screen, by the highly literate on screen: the hacker and the cyber-jockey. This thesis addresses resistance to the Invisible Empire from outside its borders. Such an intervention is activated not through a Luddite rejection of technology, but by examining the conditions at the periphery of Empire, the impacts of digital colonisation, and how this potential exclusion can be overcome. Debates around digital literacy have been deliberately removed or bypassed to narrow the debate about the future of the digital environment to a focus on the material commodities necessary to gain access and the potential for more online consumers. Cultware has been neglected. The Invisible Empire, like its analogue predecessors, reaches across the borders of Nation States, as well as snaking invisibly through and between the analogue population, threatening and breaking down previous understandings of citizenship and sovereignty. It invokes new forms of core-periphery relations, a new type of digital colonialism. As the spread of Internet access tapers, and the borders of Empire close to those caught outside, the condition of the digital subaltern calls for outside intervention, the place of the intellectual to raise consciousness of these new colonial relations, both at the core and periphery. My doctoral thesis commences this project.

n/a

The museum and the gallery are two sites in Canada that are instantly imagined as spaces that house the history and culture of the white man. This statement of course is a generalization. However, in my youth, this is how I visualized these particular sites of culture housed here in the west. I know now that there is a rich Indigenous counter-history within the still white spaces of the gallery and museum. My personal interest is with this Aboriginal narrative as it is voiced by artists, writers and curators whose work is tied to the gallery or museum space. This thesis is a reflection on my own praxis as a curator that has since 1997 taken me to both museum and gallery sites. The existence of Indigenous public institutionssuch as an Aboriginal community museum or an Aboriginal contemporary art gallerycreates a red shift within a communitys cultural imaginary. In Canada, many Aboriginal artists, curators, scholars, educators and writers have engaged tirelessly for many decades in decolonizing cultural work that centers Aboriginal voice, history and collective memory. In my curatorial work as co-founder and director of The Red Shift Gallery: an aboriginal contemporary art space in Saskatoon, Saskatchewan, I am indebted to, and inspired by, the experience, example, creativity and wisdom of these cultural workers who continue to forge the way: infiltrating, appropriating, and re-making existing institutions and discourses, as well as creating new Aboriginal-centred events, places, and images, they are shifting the boundaries of what is considered to be relevant both in art, in history, and in the present. In this thesis, I will discuss my emerging praxis as a curator. In the Introduction: Nachimowin-My Story, I reflect on my early life in Cumberland House, Saskatchewan and the cultural lessons I have retained from living with my Cree grandparents, Peter and Margaret Buck, and, the colonial lessons I have learnt in the wider community of Cumberland House. I also talk about the founding of the Misti Saghikan Historical Committee in Cumberland House, which is still to this day a fledgling project. In Chapter 1: Methodology in Motion, I examine how my thinking about curatorial work has been influenced by a number of Aboriginal educators and cultural theorists, including Marie Battiste, Linda Tuhiwai Smith, Graham Hingangaroa Smith, and the cultural workers who participated in the Making a Noise conference and publication, among others. In Chapter 2: The Red Shift, I talk about co-founding The Red Shift Gallery with Joi Arcand and I discuss selected exhibits that I have curated and programmed as director of this gallery and as an independent curator. In chapter 3: Othered Women, I discuss an exhibition I curatedOthered Women (2008)that examine the discursive and material violence of imperialism and its impacts on the lives of Aboriginal women, past and present. In 2008, I was awarded a Canada Council for the Arts Aboriginal Curatorial Residency at aka gallery, Saskatoon. As part of this residency, I developed a three-gallery exhibition, Othered Women, which foregrounds the agency and voice of six contemporary Aboriginal women artists. In selected works, these artists testify to the role of Aboriginal women in the fur trade and the formation of Canada as a country, and, to the multiple ways in which Aboriginal women have been fixed in mainstream Canadian histories under the sign of the Other. This exhibit reveals how these six artists are appropriating, dismantling and transforming the cultural controls of colonial discourse, and, how they are giving voice to their own situated Indigenous-centred knowledge(s) across a range of visual media, including textiles, photo-based work, and installation.

The museum and the gallery are two sites in Canada that are instantly imagined as spaces that house the history and culture of the white man. This statement of course is a generalization. However, in my youth, this is how I visualized these particular sites of culture housed here in the west. I know now that there is a rich Indigenous counter-history within the still white spaces of the gallery and museum. My personal interest is with this Aboriginal narrative as it is voiced by artists, writers and curators whose work is tied to the gallery or museum space. This thesis is a reflection on my own praxis as a curator that has since 1997 taken me to both museum and gallery sites. The existence of Indigenous public institutionssuch as an Aboriginal community museum or an Aboriginal contemporary art gallerycreates a red shift within a communitys cultural imaginary. In Canada, many Aboriginal artists, curators, scholars, educators and writers have engaged tirelessly for many decades in decolonizing cultural work that centers Aboriginal voice, history and collective memory. In my curatorial work as co-founder and director of The Red Shift Gallery: an aboriginal contemporary art space in Saskatoon, Saskatchewan, I am indebted to, and inspired by, the experience, example, creativity and wisdom of these cultural workers who continue to forge the way: infiltrating, appropriating, and re-making existing institutions and discourses, as well as creating new Aboriginal-centred events, places, and images, they are shifting the boundaries of what is considered to be relevant both in art, in history, and in the present. In this thesis, I will discuss my emerging praxis as a curator. In the Introduction: Nachimowin-My Story, I reflect on my early life in Cumberland House, Saskatchewan and the cultural lessons I have retained from living with my Cree grandparents, Peter and Margaret Buck, and, the colonial lessons I have learnt in the wider community of Cumberland House. I also talk about the founding of the Misti Saghikan Historical Committee in Cumberland House, which is still to this day a fledgling project. In Chapter 1: Methodology in Motion, I examine how my thinking about curatorial work has been influenced by a number of Aboriginal educators and cultural theorists, including Marie Battiste, Linda Tuhiwai Smith, Graham Hingangaroa Smith, and the cultural workers who participated in the Making a Noise conference and publication, among others. In Chapter 2: The Red Shift, I talk about co-founding The Red Shift Gallery with Joi Arcand and I discuss selected exhibits that I have curated and programmed as director of this gallery and as an independent curator. In chapter 3: Othered Women, I discuss an exhibition I curatedOthered Women (2008)that examine the discursive and material violence of imperialism and its impacts on the lives of Aboriginal women, past and present. In 2008, I was awarded a Canada Council for the Arts Aboriginal Curatorial Residency at aka gallery, Saskatoon. As part of this residency, I developed a three-gallery exhibition, Othered Women, which foregrounds the agency and voice of six contemporary Aboriginal women artists. In selected works, these artists testify to the role of Aboriginal women in the fur trade and the formation of Canada as a country, and, to the multiple ways in which Aboriginal women have been fixed in mainstream Canadian histories under the sign of the Other. This exhibit reveals how these six artists are appropriating, dismantling and transforming the cultural controls of colonial discourse, and, how they are giving voice to their own situated Indigenous-centred knowledge(s) across a range of visual media, including textiles, photo-based work, and installation.

This research explores the history of an enslaved African-American family who descend from an eighteenth-century ancestor named Anakah, through archival records in order to uncover any inconspicuous clues and a preponderance of evidence positively linking her family to its West African origins. This research also unearthed the Africanisms that prevailed within her family during slavery. Anakah's family was linked to two possible regions in West Africa, but no concrete evidence was found to definitively link the origins of her family to one of those regions. Additionally, familial customs and practices that mirrored West African customs were found among four generations of her enslaved descendants in South Carolina and Mississippi. This research displayed how definitive links to specific West African regions can be plausibly asserted in some families through an in-depth, historical analysis. Although certain Africanisms can not serve as conclusive evidence to adequately identify the West African origins of this family or any African-American family, the documentation of the West African cultural retentions served as an integral part of successfully bridging the gap between Anakah and her family in America and West Africa.

This research was designed to examine the transformation of Stokely Carmichael from a reformist in the Civil Rights Movement to a militant in the Black Power Movement due to experiences which he encountered while an organizer in the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC). The three factors which Stokely Carmichael, as well as some of his corroborators in SNCC, spoke most of were soured relationships with white liberals, the ineffectiveness of moral appeals to the government and white southerners, and the significance of black nationalist politics These factors contributed to Carmichael's shift in ideology and caused many members of SNCC to follow him. The research suggests that Stokely Carmichael and his comrades in SNCC made the transformation to Black Power due to their disappointment with the results of civil rights tactics. However, due mostly to repression fiom the government, they were never able to move past ideological explanations to actually implementing a program The African-American community made the transformation in much the same way that Carmichael and SNCC did Self-pride and a self-definition became prevalent topics of discussion in the African-American community. However, the psychological gains did not cross over into their economic and political lives There was a definite interest in black nationalist politics in the African-American community However, again, any efforts to mobilize the African-American community into a powehl force working for its own self-interest were squashed by the FBI who sought to eliminate any potential black militant leaders.

Arguably, all Canadian students should have a profound knowledge of Aboriginal peoples’ contribution to Canada’s development as the original inhabitants of Canada. However, Aboriginal peoples continue to be marginalized as though unimportant, and subordinate to other cultural groups in Canada’s culturally plural society. The Ontario mainstream education system plays an important role in perpetuating these social distances. Under the mandate of the provincial government, the public education system is responsible for the delivery of educational programming to all Ontario students. In the 1970s, the federal government introduced the concept of multiculturalism to extend citizenship rights to all culturally diverse groups into Canadian society. To help Canada to become more competitive in a globalizing world, the government has sought to change the image of Canada as a White settler state to one of a global and multicultural society. Yet Aboriginal peoples continue to be marginalized in Canada’s socio-cultural landscape in mainstream education, regardless of heightened awareness for their rights and culture, as well as their being recognized as having the fastest growing demographic in Canada. It is in the context of multiculturalism that this thesis examines the influence of multiculturalism on Aboriginal coverage in mainstream school textbooks. Despite Canada’s proclaimed commitment to multiculturalism, I argue that the production of educational curricula and texts still produces a national imaginary that erases the experiences and concerns of Aboriginal population. Far less effort has been made to change the image of Aboriginal people in that narrative, and how students imagine a globalizing Canada with little attention given to the ongoing forms of discrimination that affect how Aboriginal peoples interact with the rest of the world. / Thesis (Master, Geography) -- Queen's University, 2011-11-14 07:57:57.566