Over the past century, the Japanese community in Peru has grown to be the second largest in South America. Their arrival and subsequent success in small businesses posed a threat to the Peruvian attempt to “whiten” their population. Because of this, racial conflicts arose between the Japanese and Peruvians, leading to the widespread “Yellow Peril” epidemic. Anti-Japanese sentiments caused immigration reduction laws and in the years leading up to WWII, tensions grew. During this time, the Japanese community remained ethnically close, maintaining transnational ties with Japan. This changed after the war, when their sojourner mentality changed to the permanence of Peru as a home. The community slowly built up to where they are today as a respected ethnic minority. They were able to do so because of the creation of a new pan-ethnic identity, Nikkei. This new identity allowed the Japanese population to adopt certain aspects of both their Japanese and Peruvian identities, both which at this point were becoming problematic to represent who they were. Identity formation of immigrants is a complicated process in which identities of the new country clash with lasting identities from their home country. The Nikkei identity allows for the Japanese to still maintain certain ties with Japan, yet not be constrained to being totally Japanese. During the process of assimilation into Peruvian society, the Japanese have come to rely on their new Nikkei identity as a way to distinguish themselves within Peruvian society, while at the same time resisting exclusion and marginalization.

Masters of Art / In my thesis entitled ‘African Tradition and Modernity in Zakes Mda’s The Heart of Redness’, I analyze the way Western modernity and African traditions interact in Mda’s novel. I suggest that both modernity and tradition interact to produce a hybrid culture. This will become apparent in my analysis of the way Mda depicts the cattlekilling episode and the effects of Nongqawuse’s prophecy, and also in the novel’s contemporary characters. Mda shows the development of an African modernity through the semi-autobiographical figure of Camagu who is not slavishly indebted to Western ideas of progress, but is a hybrid of African values and a modern identity. In my thesis I will look at the way Mda also addresses the issue of the oppression of the Xhosa in colonial history, and the way he demonstrates that the divisions of the past deeply influence post-apartheid South Africa. In this regard, I will show how The Heart of Redness is a critique not only of colonial oppression, but also of the newer injustices plaguing the post-apartheid South African society. The focus of Mda’s critique in this regard is the proposed casino that stands as a model of environmentally destructive, unsustainable and capitalist development. Instead, Mda’s novel shows an alternative modernization of rural South African society, one which is based on community upliftment and environmentally friendly development. Through an exploration of the above aspects of the novel, my thesis shows that Mda’s writing exemplifies a hybrid African modernity, one that incorporates Western ideas as well as African values.

Magister Psychologiae - MPsych / This qualitative study aims to use some of Frantz Fanon’s critical insights to explore how individuals within the Health Sciences Faculty at the UCT experienced change and perceived the transformation process instituted by University management and the change taking place in the wider society. Frantz Fanon, a critical theorist born in a Martinique, university-educated in France and later employed in Algeria, wrote extensively on how the colonial condition affects the psychology of individuals, thus inter-linking psychology and politics. This study selected six individuals who had experienced the institutional context before and during the process of transformation. Data was collected by way of unstructured interview schedules. A Fanonian psychoanalytic-inspired discourse analysis was employed to analyse the data. The data showed that broader discourses influences the way people talk about phenomena. Our past still plays a role in the way we construct current realities.

This thesis focuses on the development of the first project for FIU’s ICAVE, The Globe Experience, presented as part of the “First Folio! The Book That Gave Us Shakespeare” exhibit during February, 2016. The thesis is divided into two parts. The first part is the project itself: a virtual reality recreation of going to The Globe Theater to see a play by William Shakespeare. The second part examines the digital project and outlines how Walter Benjamin and postcolonial theorists influenced the design of The Globe Experience, resulting in, what I call, a “temporally and spatially disjointed London.” From this examination, the thesis goes on to question the role of canonical literature in the humanities. I go on to make the argument that the design decisions made in recreating The Globe reveals the ways in which canonical literature can reinforce and support hierarchical ideologies which can impede student learning.

This study examines the cultural production and political history of Nicaragua from the 1960s to the early 1990s and interprets Francisco Goldman’s The Ordinary Seaman alongside Central America’s literary boom period, the nation-building project of the revolutionary letrados, and race relations between Nicaragua’s Pacific region and its two autonomous sectors of the Atlantic coast. It is argued that Central American ways of seeing are colored by the interplay between a revolutionary past, the myth of the pure Indio or mestizo, and the erasure of national identity in the US contact zone. Rather than recuperating a Central American identity, it is maintained that exposing the construction of said identity uncovers the hidden blackness and the heterogeneity of the Central American isthmus. Ultimately, the thesis aims at giving visibility to forgotten and ignored Central American narratives, histories, and people, and stresses the significance of studying the region within a literary and black Atlantic perspective.

Magister Educationis - MEd / Cost-sharing is neither a new subject nor a recent practice in the financing of students’ higher education in Zimbabwe. The practice of cost-sharing in Zimbabwe’s higher education dates back to the colonial period. Unlike those African countries that have historically had free higher education, in Zimbabwe cost-sharing has always been part of its higher education financing formulae. As a result, whereas the challenge in other African countries has been to shift from free higher education to cost-sharing, the challenge in Zimbabwe has been that of moving from one cost-sharing model to another. While Zimbabwe has experimented with various cost-sharing strategies, literature on the country’s experiences with the practice is limited. This study fills the knowledge gap by identifying and accounting for the shifts in the conception and practice of cost-sharing in the financing of students’ higher education in Zimbabwe. Consistent with the study’s focus on describing and understanding historical processes (shifts in cost-sharing policy over time) in higher education financing in Zimbabwe, a qualitative approach was adopted to gather and analyze data. In particular, the study used an historical research design to identify and account for the policy shifts in higher education financing in Zimbabwe from 1957 to 2009. The scope of the study was limited to student funding in the public university sector. The study used documents as the major sources of data, while interviews and focus group discussions with key actors in higher education financing in Zimbabwe provided additional data to validate data generated from document sources. The study demonstrates that Zimbabwe adopted cost-sharing in higher education financing at the very point of inception of the first university in the country, the University College of Rhodesia and Nyasaland, which is now the University of Zimbabwe in 1957. Starting (in 1957) with a deferred tuition fee policy that was complemented by a mortgage type loan system and government grants, a confluence of global, national and local forces combined in specific fashion in specific historical epochs over time to ‘negotiate’ and ‘renegotiate’ the student funding models. It is further shown that during the colonial era, while the cost-sharing model rode on the back of a favourable Government loan and grant system aimed at promoting access to higher education, the racist basis of colonial education policies created bottlenecks that severely curtailed access to higher education by the majority black population. Colonial education policy iii regimes deliberately limited the feeding streams into university enrolments by black students, resulting in a proportional mismatch between the number of white students entering university and that of black students. Thus, during the colonial era, access to higher education was largely a function of the ‘barrier’ system in African education that defined inequality between whites and Africans. Independence in 1980 saw the new socialist government embracing the loan and grant based cost-sharing model and further implementing radical measures to democratize access to education. However, the increase in student numbers and in higher education institutions, coupled with poor loan recovery, and the ascendancy of neoliberalism at about the turn of the twenty-first century presented serious challenges to the state’s capacity to adequately fund higher education. In the process, the loan and grant system declined gradually and was eventually replaced by an upfront tuition fee policy that took a toll on access to higher education. Noting the inadequacies of policy interventions through the introduction of the Cadetship Scheme, the ‘successor’ to the loan and grant system, the study recommends the resuscitation of the loan system. It is however, important that such reintroduction of the loan system be predicated on the development of a robust framework that ensures that loans are allocated to students who are in real financial need and that there is in existence, effective and efficient loan recovery machinery.

No description available.

This written portion of my thesis will document and codify how I as dramaturg, writer and director adapted and staged the classic Harlem Renaissance novel Infants of the Spring by Wallace Thurman. I walk the reader through how seeing as a director influenced my creative choices through key aspects of production: script development, design, and building the ensemble. The thesis will conclude with a post-production reflection and summary.

This essay examines the relationship between language, identity, power and visibility in Ocean Vuong’s On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous (2019). This is achieved by applying post-colonial theories regarding double consciousness, and the construction of an Other. Theories put forward by Spivak and Fanon are also discussed in relation to this. By looking at how language is used, both by characters and author, we can see what an immense role language playes in the construction of identity and in the establishing of power.

[pt] O imaginário de beleza e sexualidade ainda se faz presente em diferentes segmentos, como o de turismo, com o objetivo de vender o Brasil como produto. Ao colocar a mulher brasileira como centro deste imaginário, verifica-se que há um processo de silenciamento desse sujeito, impossibilitando-o de que se autorrepresente. Esse processo de silenciamento do sujeito feminino é analisado por autores pós-coloniais, como Gayatri Spivak, que considera esse sujeito duplamente subalternizado: pelo patriarcado e pelo colonialismo. O presente estudo buscou, então, compreender de que forma a subalternização de agentes do Norte Global às mulheres brasileiras se materializa em um contexto de turismo. Para atingir o estado de conhecimento estabelecido, foram realizadas entrevistas em profundidade com 11 mulheres brasileiras que tiveram experiências de turismo em países do Norte Global. A análise dos dados mostra que a subalternidade se materializa por meio da visão da mulher brasileira como sendo associada a prostituição; da figura feminina como um objeto sexual; e da percepção de que o Brasil é um país repleto de atrasos, trazendo às entrevistadas sentimentos negativos quanto à sua identidade perante povos Eurocêntricos. / [en] The imaginary of beauty and sexuality is still present in different segments, such as tourism, with the aim of selling Brazil as a product. By placing the Brazilian woman at the center of this imaginary, it appears that there is a process of silencing this subject, making it impossible for him to represent himself. This process of silencing the female subject is analyzed by post-colonial authors, such as Gayatri Spivak, who considers this subject doubly subordinate: by patriarchy and colonialism. The present study then sought to understand how the subordination of agents from the Global North to Brazilian women is materialized in a tourism context. In order to reach the state of knowledge established, in-depth interviews were conducted with 11 Brazilian women who had tourism experiences in countries of the Global North. Data analysis shows that subordination is materialized through the view of Brazilian women as being associated with prostitution; the female figure as a sexual object; and the perception that Brazil is a country full of delays, bringing to the interviewees negative feelings about their identity before Eurocentric peoples.