This thesis is an anthropological and historical exploration of Singapore's emergence as a nation state and determines what it means to have a Singaporean national identity today. As a relatively new country, Singapore and its government has worked to carefully construct its national identity in the past fifty years after independence from the British in 1965. This thesis will show Singapore as a distinctive entity in the study of nationalism and nation building, especially in comparison to the decolonization efforts of other countries in the region and throughout the world in the twentieth century. It is a carefully constructed nation state, and its distinctiveness lies in the authoritarian government's neo-colonial policies, its economic success due to its capitalist system, semi-democratic political environment, and its multiethnic population.

Many scholars have attempted to reframe our understanding of international law in order to re-establish the credibility of international norms in an age of widespread doubt about the power of law. This study seeks to contribute to this project by examining how the relationship between a specific understanding of modernity and the assumption that the modern state is the only proper location of politics enables a discipline built on idealized categories framing active agency in relation to modern politics. The consequence is not only a tightly circumscribed discipline that constantly reproduces particular understandings of the future potential of international law but also limits what we understand meaningful practices of international law to be. The specific example investigated is that of the Sami, the indigenous and transnationally nomadic people of Fennoscandia. Looking not only at how the Sami have made use of supranational avenues to challenge the sovereignty of the Swedish state (especially in the European Court of Human Rights) in the name of individual human rights, this case suggests that human rights are best understood as a political practice among other political practices rather than as a system of idealized, legal abstractions. The analysis works through a reading of international law as one of many modern political tools that may be used in order to engage political problems of modernity, just as, in other circumstances, we may think about political tools in terms of the possibilities of political contestation about the common interests of a society. One of the common assumptions shared by all the texts and writers under examination involves an understanding of modernity as a structured and ordered teleological process towards the realization of man’s enlightened freedom. Considering the limited possibilities exposed by such texts suggest that if we want to re-imagine what we take international law to be then we must begin with engaging alternative understandings of modernity; more precisely, we must acknowledge the heterogeneity of contemporary experiences. My exploration of the joint implications of the work of Marshall Berman and Dipesh Chakrabarty concludes with a call to avoid reductionist accounts of international law and to think about the modern world as a dynamic, ever-changing and always malleable place, a place in which human experiences continuously alter the political orders within which we operate. / Graduate / 0616 / mkoblanck@gmail.com

The overall aim of the study is to investigate how a social and collective memory is mobilized by the directors’ depiction of ethnicity and gender roles from a post- colonial and gender perspective. The thesis focuses on how ethnicity and gender roles are depicted in each movie and how this results in a mobilization of a social and collective memory. The results show that Django Unchained mobilizes a memory by its use of the invective nigger and iconic acts of slavery, such as whipping and cotton picking. From a gender perspective, the results show that men worked with jobs that required more strength, compared to the jobs of women and thus mobilizes a memory of how we remember the gender roles of slaves. Nevertheless, these memories can result in traumas and to recover from them, memories must be revisited. Similarly, yet differently, the results show that 12 Years a Slave mobilizes a memory by its use of the invective nigger and by the use of songs that solidified the hierarchy present during slavery. In other words, these songs were used to exhibit the level of supremacy Caucasians possessed from a post-colonial perspective. The conclusion drawn in the study is that 12 Years a Slave, as a historical source, provides audiences with considerably more authenticity compared to Django Unchained. Therefore an individual might feel as if he or she has lived the life of Solomon Northup and experienced and endured everything he did.

My dissertation is a critical ethnography of grassroots feminist agencies and immigrant organizations involved in the governance of gender violence in Toronto, Ontario. Along with examining the agencies operating on the outskirts of the law, I also observe the organizations that contract directly with the provincial government to counsel abusers prosecuted through the city’s specialized domestic violence courts. Drawing on the methodological and theoretical insights of socio-legal studies, postcolonial feminism, and governmentality scholarship, my research explores the governance of domestic violence through the community. Specifically, I examine how the voluntary sector performs the state’s work of prosecuting domestic violence, punishing offenders and building citizens. My research reveals the significant influence that community organizations exert on the prosecution of gender violence and in defining the conditions of punishment for offenders. Through court observation of Toronto’s domestic violence plea court, I show how grassroots administrative workers transform into hybrids of the prosecutor and defense within governance networks. In addition, based on interviews with service providers delivering counseling to offenders, I document how non-profit organizational habits add distinctive flavors to the administration of punishment, materializing in governing regimes that emphasize care in some contexts and discipline in others. Finally, I also explore the dual constructions of immigrant counselors as both the experts and the “others” to the nation with regards to gender violence. In contrast to assumptions of ignorance amongst the immigrant “other” in the liberal imaginary, my findings indicate that the notion of women’s empowerment is nothing new or unfamiliar within Toronto’s diasporic communities; several of the immigrant anti-violence experts involved in this research credit their politicization and training “back home” as foundational to their involvement in feminist and the anti-violence movement. These findings challenge liberal assumptions of the East as a space devoid of the cultural material of women’s empowerment, which form the backbone of Western performances of modernity.

The purpose of this study of Anglo-Egyptian writer Ahdaf Soueif’s two novels, In the Eye of the Sun (1999), first published in 1992, and The Map of Love (2000), first published in 1999, is to examine how they are arenas for hybrid politics in the post-colonial Egyptian context and the Arab diasporic context. This thesis examines how Soueif deals with residual colonial logics by using Post-colonial theories of transculturation. These theories reveal, through an analysis of Soueif’s use of Pharaonicism and her depiction of social and religious divides, that Soueif sometimes legitimizes and sometimes contests the results of transculturation by using products of this very process of transculturation. In the diasporic context, Soueif’s work deterritorializes these hybrid politics of legitimation and contestation by collapsing disparate temporalities and emphasizing continuity between them. To do this she deterritorializes and reterritorializes Pharaonicism, as well as Western literary tradition, the English language and political activism, to emphasize the cultural affinities between Egyptians/Arabs and Western culture. In this manner, she composes an integration strategy designed to facilitate her incorporation into her Western society of settlement, Great-Britain. This allows her to build a political platform from which she can contest and influence politics in her homeland, her society of settlement and the shape of Western cultural and political hegemony on a global scale. She is consequently able to transcend residual colonial logics through the very hybrid politics that they have created. Moreover, in the process, through the political agency that she exercises in her writing and activism, she builds a deterritorialized diasporic identity based on integration into many spheres of belonging that problematizes the victim model of diaspora in Diaspora studies.

Doctor of Philosophy(PhD) / This study traces a particular instance in the evolution of Indigenous organisation at Ngukurr, as it developed from mission to town. It is framed in terms of a contrast between centralised and laterally extended forms of organisation, as characteristic modes associated with Indigenous and non-Indigenous Australians. It is also framed in terms of a contrast between orders of value indicative of centralised hierarchies and laterally extended forms of organisation. Central to this account is the way in which evolving social orders provide different foci for the realisation of authority and autonomy in people’s lives at Ngukurr. I trace the ways in which missionaries and government agents have repeatedly presented autonomy to Aboriginal people at Ngukurr as a form of self-sufficiency, both in the course of colonial and post-colonial regimes in Australia. I also trace a failure in Aboriginal affairs policies to recognise forms of sociality and organisation that do not operate to locate the autonomous subject in a hierarchy of relations, premised on the capacity of individuals for economic independence. I also address Aboriginal responses to non-Indigenous interventions at Ngukurr, which have largely differed from missionary and policy aims. I show how Aboriginal evangelism emerged as a response to assimilation initiatives, which affirmed an evolving Indigenous system of differentiation and prestige. I also show how this system has been transformed through dynamics of factionalism associated with the control of resource niches, which has been playing out since the 1970s at Ngukurr. By illustrating how centralised and laterally extended forms of organisation engage each other over time, this study reveals the highly ambiguous values now attending varied realisations of autonomy and expressions of authority in the contemporary situation. There is then a pervasive tension in social relations at Ngukurr, as the dynamism of laterally extended and labile groups continually circumvents the linear pull of centralised hierarchies.

Doctor of Philosophy(PhD) / This study traces a particular instance in the evolution of Indigenous organisation at Ngukurr, as it developed from mission to town. It is framed in terms of a contrast between centralised and laterally extended forms of organisation, as characteristic modes associated with Indigenous and non-Indigenous Australians. It is also framed in terms of a contrast between orders of value indicative of centralised hierarchies and laterally extended forms of organisation. Central to this account is the way in which evolving social orders provide different foci for the realisation of authority and autonomy in people’s lives at Ngukurr. I trace the ways in which missionaries and government agents have repeatedly presented autonomy to Aboriginal people at Ngukurr as a form of self-sufficiency, both in the course of colonial and post-colonial regimes in Australia. I also trace a failure in Aboriginal affairs policies to recognise forms of sociality and organisation that do not operate to locate the autonomous subject in a hierarchy of relations, premised on the capacity of individuals for economic independence. I also address Aboriginal responses to non-Indigenous interventions at Ngukurr, which have largely differed from missionary and policy aims. I show how Aboriginal evangelism emerged as a response to assimilation initiatives, which affirmed an evolving Indigenous system of differentiation and prestige. I also show how this system has been transformed through dynamics of factionalism associated with the control of resource niches, which has been playing out since the 1970s at Ngukurr. By illustrating how centralised and laterally extended forms of organisation engage each other over time, this study reveals the highly ambiguous values now attending varied realisations of autonomy and expressions of authority in the contemporary situation. There is then a pervasive tension in social relations at Ngukurr, as the dynamism of laterally extended and labile groups continually circumvents the linear pull of centralised hierarchies.

This cultural research explores the relation between racial representation and emotions/affects as part of the struggle for racial minorities’ visibility. It is informed by conjunctural theory in cultural studies, with the use of textual narrative and affective analysis. It focuses on Hong Kong’s television culture as a site for context configuration, or conjuncture, for constructing the inter- and intra-ethnic relations between the dominant ethnic Chinese and ethnic minorities (EMs), via the production of emotions. Chapter One introduces a conjunctural understanding of the construction of EMs in Hong Kong through revisiting some of the most prominent theoretical works that explore the transformation of Hong Kong identity, in order to point out an underlying Hong Kong-Chineseness as a cultural center, and to argue that the demand of the present conjuncture is to respond to the necessity of generating an alternative “EM-context” suitable for reimagining Hong Kong identity. Chapter Two attempts to map out this “EM-context” by reviewing the major popular non-Chinese figures on TV, namely Louie Castro, Gregory Rivers (known as “Ho Kwok-wing”) and Gill Mohinderpaul Singh (known as “QBoBo”) in order to study how their particular cultural visibility can open up ways to rethink the problems surrounding visibility. The narrative affective approach to study racial relations is applied to the reading of No Good Either Way (TVB) in Chapter Three and Rooms To Let (RTHK) in Chapter Four. Together, these two core chapters explore the affective configuration of “anxieties” and “shame” in the two TV programmes. It is suggested that these affective landscapes help position EMs as either a “sweetened trouble-maker” (in the work place) or “assimilating neighbor” (in the domestic sphere), both of which fall short of being able to construct a new context/conjuncture for understanding the cultural presence of EMs. This research rejects the study of race/ethnicity through content analysis of stereotype, and opts for an approach that reads affects and narratives in the search not for representational visibility, but for what is termed “conjunctural visibility.” Ultimately, Chapter Five concludes with a discussion of the dynamics of “soft” and “hard” representations of the ethnic other: the former in the mode of “sugarcoated racism” which involves the figure of EM as the sweetened troublemaker appealing for audience’s sympathy, and the latter in the form of public pedagogy aimed at educating the audience (through shaming) to treat their EM neighbor as the assimilated other. This research study aims at making a small contribution to the understanding of the struggle for conjunctural visibility among EMs in Hong Kong.

This dissertation is a social history of the Uganda Prisons Service in the late colonial and early post-colonial periods. Focusing particularly on prison officers, it advances four key arguments. Firstly, it argues that global visions of the prison were crucial in shaping the Service’s development, its institutional culture, and the professional identities of its personnel. From the late colonial period onwards, this vision was anchored on notions of penal welfarism, which positioned the prison as a centre of rehabilitation, staffed by professionals who possessed technical expertise. Secondly, the penal welfare model was combined with an emphasis on the prison’s role as a driver of economic development and a source of public revenue – features that were seen as compatible with penal modernity. Thirdly, this vision of the prison gave the Service a particular imaginative capital, which prison officers used as an important resource. It provided them with a common set of principles and norms through which to define their professional role. Senior officers adopted it with alacrity, pursuing further professionalization through engagement with transnational penal reform networks. Others summoned it as a source of claim-making, using it to call on the state to provide them with greater benefits and treat them as respectable public servants. Finally, visions of penal modernity and professionalism were contested throughout the periods under study, leading officers to engage in boundary work. Officers were regularly defining their role in relation to other spaces of incarceration, such as local government prisons and informal detention sites. With the take-over of Idi Amin in 1971 and the militarization of the state, prison officers’ professional identities were profoundly challenged, but also became particularly important, providing them with a conceptual boundary that at least partially demarcated them from Amin’s regime. Ultimately, the case of the Uganda Prisons Service reminds us of the importance of studying prisons beyond their coercive capacities, paying attention to how such institutions became the focal point of debates over modernity, authority, and professionalism. More broadly, this study challenges the narrative of failure that has dominated popular and scholarly portrayals of state institutions on the African continent, rejecting generic depictions of the postcolony as a site of chaos and disorder.

This thesis traces the mechanisms and sources responsible for the generation of civic social capital (a set of shared norms and values that promote cooperation between groups, enabling them to participate in the political process) by black churches in West Perrine, Florida. Data for this thesis includes over fifty interviews and participant observations, archival records, newspaper articles, and scholarly journals. Despite the institutional racism of the first half of the twentieth century, many blacks and whites in Perrine developed levels of trust significant enough to form an integrated local governing body, evidence of high levels of csc. At mid-century, when black and white interactions ceased, Perrine's csc decreased, leading to the deterioration of Perrine's social and physical conditions. Perrine's csc increased in the1980s by way of broad-based coalitions as Perrine's churches invested their csc in an effort to eradicate crime, clean up its neighborhood, and win back its youth.