Created at the end of the nineteenth century, Sherlock Holmes has remained a regular feature of popular culture for now more than a century. However, versions of the detective that have appeared in recent years are strikingly different from the character created by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, while some characteristics remain similar. This dissertation examines the persistence of Holmes as a function of copyright management that matched shifting literary expectations, following this with an exploration of three categories of discourse in which contemporary Holmes texts participate: feminism, postcolonialism, and neurodiversity. It first locates Holmes's difference from prior detectives in his humanist characteristics and then demonstrates that a restrictive character management strategy shared by Conan Doyle and his sons, the subsequent rights-holders, constructed a base version of the character. When the copyright passed out of their hands, the new owners' more permissive attitudes toward using Holmes matched popular interest in deconstructing characters and ideas, allowing for a variety of new approaches to the detective. The second half of the dissertation explores some of these new approaches, beginning with critiques of Holmes's masculinist, misogynist science that are exposed and repaired through new texts. Following that, a pair of postcolonial texts demonstrates contrasting styles of handling the detective's imperial associations, and a final discussion of Holmes as a neurologically different individual brings him to both neurodiversity and disability studies. Authors' deployment of the detective can contain complex narratives, and while these texts are fascinating the dissertation will conclude with a note of concern regarding their continuing popularity.

"Paradoxes of Particularity: Caribbean Literary Imaginaries," explores Caribbean literary responses to nationalism by focusing on Anglophone and Francophone post-war Caribbean novels as well as a selection of short fiction published in the 1930s and `40s. Because many Caribbean nations gained their independence relatively recently (Jamaica and Trinidad in the 1960s, the Bahamas, Grenada, Dominica, St. Lucia, and St. Vincent in the `70s, Antigua and St. Kitts in the `80s) and because some remain colonial possessions (Aruba, Martinique, Guadeloupe, etc.), nationalism and its alternatives are of major literary concern to Caribbean authors. This project considers how and to what extent the writings of such authors as Edouard Glissant, Maryse Condé, and Robert Antoni counter nationalist tendencies with Pan-Caribbean alternatives, arguing that the Caribbean texts under examination propose that we view the Caribbean as a unified region despite substantial differences (racial, linguistic, colonial, etc.) that otherwise tend to encourage separate, nationalist sentiments. Moreover, these Caribbean texts paradoxically emphasize discrete identities based on racial pasts and language communities, even as they forward a Pan-Caribbean ideology: uniqueness is, for many Caribbean writers, the fundamental basis for a unified sense of "Caribbeanness." This project dubs the phenomenon the "paradox of particularity," and identifies it as a postcolonial rhetorical strategy in twentieth-century Caribbean fiction. After an historical introduction, Chapter One examines the increasingly Pan-Caribbean content of Barbadian literary journal Bim, Martinican ex-patriate journal La Revue du Monde Noir, and BBC radio program Caribbean Voices. Each of these media sources encouraged contributors to focus on topics that were of central and unique concern to his/her island community. However, these concerns often overlapped: authors from multiple islands submitted fiction and essays touching on labor struggles, the plight of the poor, wartime anxieties, and racial inequalities. Thus, in printing that which was nominally unique and particular to individual islands, these widely digested media sources in fact highlighted similarities throughout the archipelago, setting the stage for bolder expressions of a particularity-based regionalism. Chapter Two focuses on the Pan-Caribbean antillanité of Edouard Glissant. In Glissant's fiction, the only character capable of both recovering this past and of uniting the Caribbean is the defiantly isolated maroon (and, occasionally, his male descendants). Set against the backdrop of Martinique's fight to become a semi-autonomous département of France and the emergence of Jamaica and Trinidad as independent national entities, Glissant's novel La Lézarde (1958) at once celebrates postcolonial zeal for independence, and emphasizes that national autonomy is the first step in a process of regional unification. Chapter Three looks at gendered and cultural counterpoints to Glissant's notion of "marooning," through novels that reimagine the history of New World slavery and the Caribbean Black Power Movement. The chapter focuses on Simone Schwarz-Bart's Pluie et Vent Sur Telumée Miracle (1972), in which an ostracized sorceress attempts to unite her fragmented community, Maryse Condé's Moi, Tituba, Sorcèriere Noire de Salem (1988), which imagines a Glissantian link between Barbados, other Caribbean islands, and North America through the benevolent workings of a black female maroon, André and Schwarz-Bart's La Mulâtresse Solitude (1972), which both recuperates an historical maroon figure (as, indeed does Condé) and imaginatively reconstructs the African past which informs her New World rebellion, and Michelle Cliff's Abeng (1984), which features a psychologically marooned heroine who imagines not only a unified Caribbean, but also a Caribbean that serves as the racially inclusive bridge between diasporic communities in North and South America. Ultimately, in identifying female maroons as the unifying agents of cultural transmission, Schwarz-Bart, Condé, and Cliff's experimental fiction not only proposes a feminist, regional alternative to patriarchal nationalism, but imaginatively links colonized Caribbean citizens to broader, nation-less communities of suffering. Chapter Four focuses even more explicitly on formal and linguistic experimentation by examining Trinidadian Robert Antoni's Divina Trace (1991), and Martinican Patrick Chamoiseau's Texaco (1992) in relation to literary postmodernism. Rather than casting a wise maroon as the oracular voice of wisdom, both novels deluge us with a heteroglossic babble of voices, paradoxically suggesting that the potential for Caribbean interconnectedness lies in the collision of multiple, idiosyncratic uses of language. Moreover, by testing the boundaries of the novel form, these texts gesture toward the possibility of formally innovative alternatives to the nation-state. Thus, this project both identifies the "paradox of particularity" (in which difference is the defining component of group identity) as a postcolonial tactic in twentieth-century Caribbean fiction and demonstrates the intense political engagement of experimental modernist and postmodern Caribbean fiction. By strategically keeping individuality and collectivity in tension with one another, these writers offer a model for postcolonial independence that both preserves autonomy and avoids mimicking the colonial Western nation-state.

This dissertation argues that the representation of queer space in colonial and postcolonial Indian fiction and film counters the marginalization of the sexual dissidents, both in the Indian nation-state and the Indian diaspora. The spatial reclamation in these texts, I contend, also interrogates the received notion of queer empowerment by shifting the emphasis from visibility and inclusion to alternative agential modes such as secrecy and camouflage. This departure from liberal Eurocentric discourses defines the essence of my project. The main body of my dissertation consists of analysis of texts by Anglophone, regional and diasporic Indian writers and filmmakers: Rabindranath Tagore's short stories (c.1890), Ismat Chughtai's "Lihaaf" (1941), Shani Mootoo's "Out on Main Street" (1993), Nisha Ganatra's Chutney Popcorn (1999), Anita Nair's Ladies Coupe (2001), Manju Kapur's A Married Woman (2002), and R.Raj Rao's The Boyfriend (2003). I examine the different ways in which these texts represent queer space and how they imagine an alternate cartography for the disenfranchised sexual citizens. In order to contextualize the process of this dispossession, I examine the relationship between colonialism, nationalism and alternative sexualities by focusing on the contemporary historical and theoretical debates around the issues. My theoretical framework combines two emergent discourses in contemporary academia: cultural geography and postcolonial rethinking of the constructions of gender and sexuality. In the texts that I examine, queer space emerges as a site of contestation with an underlying consciousness of conflicts, not as utopian loci of disconnection with reality.

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This dissertation examines a range of popular contemporary texts in a post-Saidian context. It begins with an analysis of Orientalism, as that text influences almost any discussion of representations of Easmest relations. Now, almost twenty years after Orientalism was first published in 1978 it is still a crucial text, and it still needs to be understood and argued with. The other texts looked at in this dissertation include novels, drama, films, opera, a musical, and the print and electronic mass media. They are texts that either represent or comment on EastIWest relations. The main texts I examine fall roughly into two categories: ones that are clearly orientalist and ones that are postorientalist. Those that are orientalist repeat the same myths of Orient Said describes in Orientalism. Those that are postorientalist challenge those myths by repeating and elaborating them, reversing and displacing the orientalist gaze. The methodological approach is an eclectic blend of cultural studies and literary criticism. Such an approach enables analysis of a variety of texts, fiom classical nineteenth century books and myths through to contemporary postmodern representations, that deal with identity politics. My thesis is that contemporary postcolonial representations that deal with East and West and that use and displace the very terms such categories rest upon, can be called "postoriental".

Aboriginal Australian heritage forms a significant and celebrated part of Australian heritage. Set within the institutional frameworks of a predominantly ??white?? European Australian heritage practice, Aboriginal heritage has been promoted as the heritage of a people who belonged to the distant, pre-colonial past and who were an integral and sustainable part of the natural environment. These controlled and carefully packaged meanings of Aboriginal heritage have underwritten aspects of urban Aboriginal presence and history that prevail in the (previously) colonial city. In the midst of the city which seeks to cling to selected images of its colonial past urban Aboriginal heritage emerges as a significant challenge to a largely ??white??, (post)colonial Australian heritage practice. The distinctively Aboriginal sense of anti-colonialism that underlines claims to urban sites of Aboriginal significance unsettles the colonial stereotypes that are associated with Aboriginal heritage and disrupts the ??purity?? of the city by penetrating the stronghold of colonial heritage. However, despite the challenge to the colonising imperatives of heritage practice, the fact that urban Aboriginal heritage continues to be a deeply contested reality indicates that heritage practice has failed to move beyond its predominantly colonial legacy. It knowingly or unwittingly maintains the stronghold of colonial heritage in the city by selectively and often with reluctance, recognising a few sites of contested Aboriginal heritage such as the Old Swan Brewery and Bennett House in Perth. Furthermore, the listing of these sites according to very narrow and largely Eurocentric perceptions of Aboriginal heritage makes it quite difficult for other sites which fall outside these considerations to be included as part of the urban built environment. Importantly this thesis demonstrates that it is most often in the case of Aboriginal sites of political resistance such as The Block in Redfern, the Aboriginal Tent Embassy in Canberra and Australian Hall in Sydney, that heritage practice tends to maintain its hegemony as these sites are a reminder of the continuing disenfranchised condition of Aboriginal peoples, in a nation which considers itself to be postcolonial.

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<p>The purpose of this essay is to examine sfi (Swedish for immigrants), which is an ingrational-political tool with objective of teaching immigrants to read and write in Swedish. With the use of critical discourse analysis we examine the discursive practices within sfi. We also examine our methodological and theoretical approaches, and our application of them. Our research questions are as follows:</p><p>• How are the discursive usage of “person centered” and “society centered” expressions being used?</p><p>• How well does our methodological and theoretical resources work?</p><p>In our theoretical viewpoint we use “post colonial theory”, which is a perspective concerned with global power relations seen from a historical perspective. Colonialism, in this view, still continues to determine the course of the world and cultural identity formation even after it has formally ended. According to our second theoretical viewpoint, “Governmentality”, the focus of analysis concerns differing forms of control. The shift from the state to the individual is of special interest.</p><p>The results of the analysis show that the integrational-political discourse order within sfi seems to be fragile. We also find that “person centered” expressions are more frequent than “society centered” ones.</p><p>The results also show that our theoretical and methodological resources are bound with certain difficulties. Firstly, critical discourse analysis has been found to be inadequate with regard to our empirical material. It was first when we applied Ulrich Becks theory regarding individualization that the discursive practice became comprehensible in a larger context. Secondly, our results showed that governmentality was problematic in the context in which it was used.</p>

<p>This paper is an analysis of the novel Season of Migration to The North by Tayeb Salih. Season of Migration to The North was first published in 1967 and it is the most accomplished among several works in modern Arabic literature.</p><p>I shall focus on one of the two major characters, Mustafa Said, a young Sudanese student whose brilliant career at school in Sudan and Cairo eventually brings him to England; he has a successful academic career in England as a lecturer at the University of London.</p><p>One of the major themes of the novel is the confrontation between Mustafa Said and England, which in other terms is described as the confrontation between East and West. The conflict is rooted in colonialism. Mustafa Said’s native country, Sudan, was a British colony when the story takes place. It is a period marked by war, oppression and colonial violence. Hence Mustafa Said comes to England as a conqueror and invader. The confrontation is mainly depicted through Mustafa’s relationships with a number of English women. These relationships are nothing less than complex and they symbolize the clash of two cultures within a Western context.</p><p>My main purpose is to more closely examine the relationship between Mustafa Said and the English women. In these relationships an important part is played by the stereotypes; the women see Mustafa as an object of their “oriental desire”. This is something he is well aware of but chooses to use the stereotype of himself as the typical Arab-African male, (so as) to seduce and “conquer” the women. In this context the term “orient/oriental” references Edward Said’s theoretical definition as described in his book Orientalism. Questions that will be raised in this paper are: what (is the composition of) the relationships between Mustafa Said and the English women. How does Mustafa Said construct an “oriental identity”, what role does the female body play in the relationships? These questions will all be discussed through a postcolonial perspective. One of the central features of postcolonial theory is an examination of the impact and continuing legacy of the European conquest, colonization and domination of non-European lands, peoples and cultures. What is also central to this critical examination is an analysis of the ideas of European superiority over non-European peoples and cultures that such imperial colonization implies.</p><p>I will be referencing the postcolonial theories of Edward Said in Orientalism but my main focus will be on Black Skin, White Mask by Frantz Fanon, which is a psychological analysis of colonialism.</p>

This project examines the ways in which several texts written in the late twentieth century by African American and Caribbean writers appropriate history and witness trauma. I read the representational practices of Toni Morrison, Ernest Gaines, Paule Marshall, and Fred D'Aguiar as they offer distinct approaches to history and the resulting effects such reconstituted, discovered, or, in some cases, imagined histories can have on the affirmation of the self as a subject. I draw my theoretical framework from the spaces of intersection between diaspora and postcolonial theories, enabling me to explore the values of the African diaspora cross-culturally as manifested in the representational practices of these writers. This study creates an opening into recent discourses of the African diaspora by comparing texts in which the effects of history rooted in diaspora are explored, both in how this history cripples with the impact of trauma and how it empowers dynamic self-actualization and the resistance of the status quo. I argue that in these novels, challenging hegemonic historical narratives and bearing witness to the past are necessary for overcoming the isolating and disempowering effects of trauma, while affirming diasporic consciousness enhances the role of communal belonging and cultural memory in the process of self-actualization.