"Slash-and-burn" agriculture, or shifting cultivation, is perceived by many to be the leading cause of land degradation in tropical forests. Performed mainly by resource-poor farmers, shifting cultivation is the most widespread form of agriculture in the tropics. Concern over its environmental impacts has led to calls throughout the twentieth century for alternatives by policy-makers and development planners. This study employs a constructivist framework, post-colonial perspectives, and rhetorical methods to understand the images which support such assertions regarding shifting cultivation, primarily in policy-oriented depictions. Elements of Kenneth Burke's "dramatistic" method are used, including the analysis of hierarchies which structure discourse, and pentadic analysis. / Ph. D.

The aim of this study has been to revaluate Bronze Age society using rock art as an archaeological material. It has also sought to question certain prevailing interpretative trends within the research of rock art; ascribing it as ritual practices, expression of a social elite and the adoption of symbols from cultures along the Mediterranean Sea. This has chiefly been made possible through the application of Slavoj Žižeks ideas about the ideological fantasy and the sublime object of ideology. The thesis proposes a connection between art and ideology. A selected sampling of rock carvings from three areas in Sweden has been made in order to further investigate the relationship between different figurative motives both at a regional level, as well as a local. This study claims that rather than having been under the control of an elite, rock art has been accessible for the majority of the population both to produce and view. The depiction of human representation as rock carving does not depict a clear social stratification. It is also argued that the idea of images displayed on the rocks having roots in the imagery of Mediterranean civilizations is a construct of current western ideology, as the symbolic connection between the cultures is tenable at best, according to this study.

The purpose of this study was to examine how the Swedish newspaper Aftonbladet portrayed a man who was a suspect of preparation of terrorist crimes, in articles published between 19th of November 2015 and the 23rd of Januari 2016. The aim was to get a deeper understanding of the portraiture of the person in question, and to point out existing discourses in the analysed material with the help of critical discourse analysis as explained by Norman Fairclough and his theories about identities, social representation and relations. Theories about social representation and postcolonialism were used as a springboard for the analysis. In the study we found two distinct discourses. The discourse for the period prior the man’s release was clearly influenced by denuniation and alienation, and the one found for the period after the man’s release were welcoming. Conclusions drawn from the study are that Aftonbladet portrays the man in a stereotypical manner, as well as legitimizes their own power of influence.

After the change of their country’s political and international statuses, post-colonial and respectively post-communist individuals and collectives develop feelings of alienation and estrangement that do not involve physical dislocation. Eventually, they start imagining their national community as a collective of individuals who share this state. Paraphrasing Benedict Anderson’s definition of the nation as an “imagined community,” this study identifies this process as “imagined exile,” an act that temporarily compensates for the absence of a metanarrative of the nation during the post-colonial and post-communist transitions. This dissertation analyzes and compares ten English Canadian and Romanian plays, written between 1976 and 2004, and argues that they function as expressions and agents of post-colonial and respectively post-communist imagined exile, helping their readers and audiences overcome the identity crisis and regain the feeling of belonging to a national community. Chapter 1 explores the development of major theoretical concepts, such as nation, national identity, national identity crisis, post-colonialism, and post-communism. Chapter 2 and Chapter 3 analyze dramatic rewritings of historical events, in “1837: The Farmers’ Revolt” by the theatre Passe Muraille with Rick Salutin as dramaturge, and “A Cold” by Marin Sorescu, and of past political leaders, in “Sir John, Eh!” by Jim Garrard and “A Day from the Life of Nicolae Ceausescu” by Denis Dinulescu. Chapter 4 examines the expression of the individual and collective identity crises in “Sled” by Judith Thompson and “The Future Is Rubbish” by Vlad Zografi. Chapter 5 explores the treatment of physical and cultural borders and borderlands in Kelly Rebar’s “Bordertown Café”, Guillermo Verdecchia’s “Fronteras Americanas”, Petre Barbu’s “God Bless America”, and Saviana Stanescu’s “Waxing West”. The concluding chapter briefly discusses the concept of imagined exile in relation to other investigations of post-colonial and post-communist dramas and reviews some of the latest perspectives of national identity, reassessing this study from a diachronic perspective.

Agatha Christie set a number of her popular novels in British colonies in the Middle East, Africa and the Caribbean. While there is a lot of research about the portrayal of the colonised in the Middle East, there is only little to be found on those of Africa and the Caribbean. Therefore, this thesis aims to compare the portrayals of the Middle Eastern, African and Caribbean colonised by analysing Christie's The Man in the Brown Suit, Murder in Mesopotamia, Appointment with Deah, and A Caribbean Mystery.

Les références proviennent du Centre des archives diplomatiques de Nantes (France) / Les Textes arabes de l’Ouargha (Lévi-Provençal, 1922), les Textes arabes de Rabat (Brunot, 1931) et les Textes arabes des Zaër (Loubignac, 1952), relatifs à trois régions marocaines, attirent l’attention par leur organisation méthodique, mais aussi par les thématiques abordées. Les Textes, comportant une préface arabe, une transcription en caractères latins et une traduction annotée, donnent une image du Maroc colonial entre 1912 et 1956. Sur les traces de l’orientaliste William Marçais, les trois auto-traducteurs se sont intéressés à l’ethnographie marocaine dans ses différentes facettes. Pour sonder le travail de ces auto-traducteurs, nous avons étudié leur traduction non seulement d’un point de vue comparatif, mais aussi du point de vue du paratexte. De plus, nous avons fait une étude sociohistorique des traducteurs, qui s’est avérée utile pour mieux comprendre leur idéologie et surtout qui a mis en lumière leur appartenance à la communauté d’érudits. Pour ce faire, notre cadre théorique s’est appuyé sur deux volets : volet archéologique et volet critique afin de dégager les normes sous-jacentes dans les interventions délibérées. La préface et les nombreuses notes démontrent clairement le projet de traduction des trois auto-traducteurs, qui est celui de « solidifier l’édifice » de l’Administration française. Force est toutefois d’admettre que l’analyse de l’auto-traduction n’a pas décelé des interventions marquées des traducteurs et donc l’analyse de la transcription en dialecte marocain a pris une grande place dans notre recherche. Cependant, la lecture de cette transcription, soit la traduction intralinguistique de l’oral à l’écrit, et la connaissance de ses tenants et aboutissants mettent en lumière le rôle joué par les auto-traductions, effectuées par des traducteurs au service de l’IHEM, qui est celui de façonner l’image du Marocain et de consolider le projet colonial français au Maroc. / The Textes arabes de l’Ouargha (Lévi-Provençal, 1922), the Textes arabes de Rabat (Brunot, 1931) and the Textes arabes des Zaër (Loubignac, 1952), dealing with three regions in Morocco, draw attention to their methodological organization, as well as to their themes. The three works, consisting of an Arab version, a transcription using Latin characters and an annotated translation, provide a portrait of colonial Morocco between 1912 and 1956. Following in the footsteps of Orientalist William Marçais, the three self-translators concerned themselves with Moroccan ethnography in all its facets. To examine the works of these self-translators, we studied their translation not only from a comparative perspective, but also from a paratextual standpoint. In addition, we conducted a socio-historical study of these translators that proved useful to better understand their ideology and above all shed light on their membership in the community of scholars. For this purpose, our theoretical framework was based on both an archaeological component and a critical component in order to identify the norms underlying the translators’ intentional interventions. The preface and numerous notes clearly illustrate the different translation projects, namely, to “strengthen the edifice” of the French administration. Admittedly, our analysis of the self-translations did not reveal significant interventions and, thus, the study of the Moroccan dialect transcription became an important part of my research. A reading of each transcription – an intralinguistic translation from the oral to the written – and a grasp of all its aspects demonstrate that the role of each of the three self-translations, done by translators in the service of the IHEM, was to shape the image of Moroccans and consolidate the French colonial project in Morocco.

Den här uppsatsen undersöker gestaltningar av rumslighet i Yxta Maya Murrays roman Locas och i Helena María Viramontes novell ”The Cariboo Cafe”. Utifrån en lefebvriansk förståelse av det sociala rummets produktion görs en feministisk, postkolonial läsning av rummets betydelse i texterna. Med utgångspunkt i detta teoretiska ramverk diskuteras tematiseringen av plats, rum och identitet i berättelserna. Vidare används en narratologisk analys av texternas användning av deixis och fokalisering för att visa hur språket fungerar som en granskande skildring av olika platsers och rums villkor. En sådan läsning tillåter texterna att träda fram som avslöjare av specifika maktordningar och som kritik mot dessa. / This essay examines the spatial descriptions in Yxta Maya Murray’s novel Locas and in Helena María Viramontes’ short story “The Cariboo Café”. Based on Henri Lefebvre’s understanding of the production of social space, a post-colonial, feminist reading of the texts’ spaces is executed. Rooted in this theoretical framework, the texts’ thematization of space, place and identity is discussed. Furthermore, a narratological analysis is added to the investigation through a scrutiny of the usage of deixis and focalization. It is shown how the usage of language in the texts functions to further expose different bodies’ divergent access to different spaces. This reading permits the texts to appear both as revealers of specific power systems, and as critics of them.

Thesis (M. A. (English Studies)) --University of Limpopo, 2018 / This study seeks to examine the concept of identity in the post-colonial South Africa. Like any other African state, South Africa was governed by a colonial strategy called apartheid which meted out harsh conditions on black people. However, the indomitable system of apartheid was subdued by the leadership of the people, which is democracy in 1994. Notwithstanding the dispensation of democracy, colonial legacies such as inequality, racial discrimination and poverty are still yet to be addressed. As mirrored in Sindiwe Magona’s Beauty’s Gift (2008) and Mother to Mother (1998) and Kopano Matlwa’s Coconut (2008) and Spilt Milk (2010), the colonial past perhaps paved a way for social issues to warm their way into the democratic South Africa. This study will use the aforementioned novels penned in the post-colonial period to present an evocation of identity-crisis in South Africa. It will then employ these methodological approaches; Afrocentricity, Feminism, Historical-biographical and Post-Colonial Theory to assert and re-assert the identity that South Africans have acquired subsequent to the political transition from apartheid to democracy. KEY WORDS: Apartheid, Colonialism, Democracy, Identity, Post-Colonialism

<p>By applying discourse analysis to six interviews with officials and development workers at the Swedish solidarity organisation AGS, this thesis analyses power in development cooperation, and the construction and function of discourses surrounding the field. It discusses rhetorical and strategic shifts from development aid to partnership and solidarity. By exploring how the informants speak of priorities, privilege and difference in relation to ideas of race or ethnicity, and class, the objective is to show how the solidarity position and development context is discursively created. What differs between solidarity, partnership and development aid? In what ways are the White Western Development Worker image constructed and challenged? The thesis discusses contemporary postcolonial relations between and within African and Swedish societies. It examines difficulties regarding gender mainstreaming efforts as an example of how Swedish development workers and officials discursively construct and deconstruct images of Selves and African Others.</p>

By applying discourse analysis to six interviews with officials and development workers at the Swedish solidarity organisation AGS, this thesis analyses power in development cooperation, and the construction and function of discourses surrounding the field. It discusses rhetorical and strategic shifts from development aid to partnership and solidarity. By exploring how the informants speak of priorities, privilege and difference in relation to ideas of race or ethnicity, and class, the objective is to show how the solidarity position and development context is discursively created. What differs between solidarity, partnership and development aid? In what ways are the White Western Development Worker image constructed and challenged? The thesis discusses contemporary postcolonial relations between and within African and Swedish societies. It examines difficulties regarding gender mainstreaming efforts as an example of how Swedish development workers and officials discursively construct and deconstruct images of Selves and African Others.