In reading the literary criticism on Janet Frame's work it soon turns out that Frame was deconstructive before the concept was even invented. Thus, deconstruction is used in this essay to close-read a passage in the title story of her collection of short stories, The Lagoon (1951). The main hierarchical dichotomy of the passage is found to be the one between "the sea" and "the lagoon," in which the sea is proven to hold supremacy. "The sea" is read as an image of the great sea of English literary/cultural reference whereas "the lagoon" is read as an image of the vulnerably interdependent, peripheral pool of it, in the form of New Zealand literary/cultural reference. Through this symbolic and post-colonial reading the hierarchical dichotomy between "the sea" and "the lagoon" is deconstrued and reversed. In the conclusion, a post-colonial trace of Maori influence displaces the oppositional relation between "the sea" and "the lagoon."

The German Armed Forces were originally thought to be completely innocent of all war crimes associated with unethical Nazi racial policies. This has been proven not to be the case. History has adjusted itself to show that Wehrmacht forces were guilty of virtually every war crime except for the sexual violation foreign women. Due to the long-standing assumption that Nazi racial ideology prevented the intermingling of the “Aryan” race with the “unworthy” Eastern European races, this myth was rarely questioned. Given the lack of hard evidence proving that civilian women were raped by invading Wehrmacht troops, a firm conclusion is out of the question. However, with a concrete understanding of the Nazi attitude towards sexual relations, the components in the East that led to a breakdown in Wehrmacht discipline, and the resulting reaction of the Soviet Union in light of this brutality, one can surmise the type of violence women were forced to endure. Through the research conducted in this thesis, it is likely that the mass rape of Eastern European women did indeed occur. The silence that surrounds this issue is highly indicative of the cultural elements that prevent an open discussion of this topic. This thesis is meant to spark a discussion of the implications and reverberations of mass rape in a wartime setting.

During the 1960s and 1970s, tribes across Indian Country struggled for tribal sovereignty against “termination” policies that aimed to disintegrate the federal government’s trust responsibilities and treaty obligations to tribes and assimilate all Indians into mainstream society. Individual tribes, pan-Indian organizations, and militant Red Power activists rose up in resistance to these policies and fought for self-determination: a preservation of Indian distinctiveness and social and political autonomy. This thesis examines a crucial, but often overlooked, element of the self-determination movement. Hundreds of tribal and national-scope activist newspapers emerged during this era and became the authentic voices of American Indians and the messengers of the movement. This thesis examines the stories of several key newspapers. By looking at the opportunities and challenges their editors faced and the different approaches they took, this thesis will assess how they succeeded and fell short in telling authentic stories from Indian Country, fighting for distinct indigenous culture and rights, and reshaping public discourse and policy on American Indian affairs.

Women of color are still trapped in the colonialist trajectory of Delacroix’s sexualized Women of Algiers (1834) and alienated from the world of Sargent’s Daughters of Edward Darley Boit (1882) in contemporary media images that serve to exocitize, fetishize, and commodify non-white female bodies. These historical and contemporary images form a psychological weight both imposed on women of color by outside perceptions and by now-cemented internal perceptions. While women do not passively absorb media images, it cannot be ignored that the hypersexual Asian/American woman in representation “haunts the experiences and perceptions of Asian women” despite attempts to reject these images and efforts to identify empowering aspects of images of sexual power (Shimizu 2007). Ideas and expectations of sexual openness in women of color seep into our consciousness at many moments in our personal lives and cast doubt on Asian/American women’s engagements with sexuality. Resistance of and escape from objectification as an erotic racial signifier of difference are attempted through abstraction and self portraiture.

This thesis explores the structures of white supremacist capitalist patriarchy as embodied in US systems of oppression and violence both within the United States and in El Salvador. As the United States illegally funded and trained the Salvadoran military during its 1978-1992 civil war, it simultaneously transformed the domestic prison system into one of mass incarceration, torture, and social death. In examining both policies, their roots in violence, racial capitalism, and gendered oppression emerge. Furthermore, by focusing the examination within a gendered lens, the potential of such methods of resistance such as radical transnational feminist praxis come to the forefront as today’s most integrated method of tearing down such pernicious systems of violence. As this thesis connects the dots between seemingly disparate structures of exclusion and incapacitation, the global levels of both infrastructural violence and feminist resistance surface.

This thesis examines the issues of the modern French education system through an analysis of the film, Entre Les Murs (2008) and French education's socio-historical and political context. The study finds that the way in which France thinks about authority, language, and multiculturalism leads to the exclusion of certain students from the learning process. The aim of the study is to critically rethinks these issues in light of theories on race, identity, and postcolonialism in order to eventually propose solutions so that all students may fully flourish in modern French society.

En 1985 Alemania Occidental, Bélgica, Francia, Luxemburgo, y los Países Bajos, establecieron el Acuerdo de Schengen sobre la cooperación en la abolición de fronteras interiores como respuesta al Acta Única Europea que creó el mercado común en la Unión Europea. Este acuerdo se evolucionaría a la Convención de Dublín en 1990, y los dos se convertirían en la base de la política de asilo en la Unión Europea, estableciendo un enfoque intergubermental en ella. Es la provisión del mercado común sobre la libre circulación de personas que inició estos acuerdos intergubermentales. La libre circulación de personas involucra a todo extranjero también, incluyendo a los refugiados. A lo largo de esta tesis, se explora las razones para el establecimiento de los acuerdos intergubermentales y que efecto tienen en la formación de la política de asilo en la Unión Europea. También explora el efecto para la obligación a los refugiados según la Convención sobre el estatuto de los refugiados de 1951. Con el precedente de los acuerdos intergubermentales como Schengen y Dublín y la desgana de renunciar a la soberanía nacional sobre el asilo, el enfoque intergubermental, o sea, la cooperación en asuntos fronterizos en vez de la armonización de las políticas nacionales, queda aun cuando se incorporaron Schengen y Dublín a la ley comunitaria durante la época del Tratado de Ámsterdam. Sólo con el Tratado de Lisboa entonces podemos ver un cambio en el régimen de asilo fuera del enfoque intergubermental, más hacia la armonización.

In his groundbreaking work of postcolonial theory, Orientalism, Edward Said puts forth the idea that imperial Europe asserted an identity by constructing the character of its colonized subjects. Said writes that his book tries to “show that European culture gained in strength and identity by setting itself off against the Orient as a sort of surrogate and even underground self” (3). The object of this thesis is a related project, for it too is a search for imperial Britain’s surrogate or underground self. Yet rather than positioning this search within the British colonies, this thesis takes as its context a land and people that were at once more intimate and more alien: the races and landscapes of Fairyland. This Thesis attempts to situate the fairy folklore and literature from the Victorian era within the context of greater social and political ideologies of the age, specifically those pertaining to national identity, imperial power and race. In doing so it will analyze Charles Kingsley’s Water-Babies, Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, Kenneth Grahame’s The Golden Age, George MacDonald’s The Princess and the Goblin, Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre and Frances Hodgson Burnett’s The Secret Garden concluding that the British self proposed by these works was an uncomfortable manifestation, and haunted by the anxieties and discontinuities that arose as imperial Britain attempted to navigate an identity within Victorian conceptions of race and power.

This research utilizes an agency framework to examine the complexities of the participation of indigenous women in local, national, and global spaces of activism. By examining the connections between processes of globalization of indigenous and women’s rights, development agendas, local politics, and gender dynamics in indigenous organizations, this research highlights the connection of ethnicity, gender, and power in an indigenous organization of Cotacachi, Ecuador, and for Ecuadorian and Latin American indigenous leaders and professionals working in national and global arenas. Four interconnected topics are explored: (1) the understanding of indigenous women’s participation in the history of their organization within a context of interethnic discrimination and poverty that especially affects indigenous women; (2) the relation between indigenous women and the changing demands on indigenous leadership due to reconfigurations of rural livelihoods, the ascendance of the indigenous movement as a political actor, and the sustained presence of development projects; (3) the challenges indigenous women face and the strategies they enact as local leaders in their communities and organization negotiating essentialized constructions of indigenous women’s identity and forms of gender inequality; (4) the transition to local, national, and international formal politics and indigenous activism in which indigenous women’s legitimacy increasingly necessitates both experience in the indigenous movement and professionalization and expert knowledge. Using an ethnographic methodology including interviews and participant observation, the research explores the participation of indigenous female leaders who, even if their strategies have favored working within the indigenous movement’s wider agenda, are also contesting forms of gender, ethnic, and class inequality they find in their own organizations and beyond. Thus, the research highlights the challenges they face, the strategies they resort to, and the possibilities of articulating a differentiated agenda that reflect their particular interests.

My dissertation explores the narrative of Aurora Bertrana (1892-1974), an unknown writer today, but a successful and recognized female author in Catalonia and Spain during the mid 20th century. The written work of Aurora Bertrana is almost never mentioned in manuals of literature. Relegated almost to absolute oblivion, her rich, intellectual writting has not received the attention it deserves. I have studied seventeen of Bertrana’s novels –practically her entire oeuvre– written in Catalan and Spanish, including the following excellent books that have escaped critical attention: Ariatea (1960), “El pomell de les violes” (mn.), L’inefable Philip (mn.), La aldea sin hombres (mn.), La madrecita de los cerdos (mn.), Entre dos silencis (1958), La ninfa d’argila (1959), Fracàs (1966) and La ciutat dels joves: reportatge fantasia (1971). I have analyzed her writing, published and unpublished, from a feminist approach, taking into account the intellectual history of Spain and Catalonia. Bertrana’s strong commitment to controversial, social issues reveals her association with the modern and noucentists Catalan trends of her time. Her novels also reveal a unique interest in Europe at war and in non-Western cultures and lifestyles that draws attention to the situation of women in different circumstances and cultural geographies. My research is therefore anchored on interpretive and theoretical parameters that intersect, with a consideration of gender, such as class-and-gender, war-and-gender and travel-and-gender. I have used the work of feminists such as Simone De Beauvoir, Shulamith Firestone, Jelke Boesten, Margaret and Patrice Higonnet, Michelle Zimbalist Rosaldo, and Julia Kristeva to help assess Bertrana’s engagement with gender and socio-political issues. This approach is particularly well suited for a writer like Aurora Bertrana, a Catalan and Republican intellectual woman forced into exiled during the Spanish Civil War and the dictatorship of Francisco Franco.