This essay investigates women’s situation at home and in society, in Arundhati Roy’s The God of Small Things, from a gender performance perspective. The essay also explores the pedagogical implications of using the novel in the EFL classroom. The gender performance perspective is explored through the analysis of three female characters, Ammu, Mammachi and Baby Kochamma, whose lives reflect women’s struggle to escape traditional caste values, patriarchy and colonial power. The pedagogical perspective focuses on existing trends in literature and language teaching and the possibilities that postcolonial literary texts have to offer in the EFL classroom.

This thesis examines literary representations of the city of Brussels in Francophone diasporic writing. Drawing on and exploring the usefulness of memory and trauma studies, postcolonial theory, and spatial studies in a Belgian context, this thesis reads six novels, spanning a contemporary period from 1985 to 2011, by Francophone writers, who themselves or whose parents originate from countries with a history of Belgian and French colonialism: Leïla Houari’s Zeida de nulle part (1985), Pie Tshibanda’s Un fou noir au pays des Blancs (1999), Saber Assal’s A l’ombre des gouttes (2000), José Tshisungu wa Tshisungu’s La Flamande de la gare du Nord (2001), Mina Oualdlhadj’s Ti t’appelles Aїcha, pas Jouzifine (2008) and Patrick François’s La dernière larme du lac Kivu (2011). In doing so, this thesis investigates the multiple ways in which these writers imagine and construct the urban space of Brussels through intersecting transnational trajectories and histories of violence. By analysing how they ‘write’ Brussels, the very architecture and landscape of which are clearly marked by colonialism and labour migration, this thesis offers a critical exploration of how experiences and memories of displacement and exile shape the perception of the urban space in these texts. I argue in particular that these writers either recode certain urban spaces or create new ones in order to construct narratives of marginalisation and belonging. Finally, this thesis aims to join the emerging discussion of ethnic-minority writing in Belgium by providing an understanding of the ambiguous role of Brussels as a postcolonial metropolis and post-war destination for labour migration, while seemingly remaining a peripheral location for Francophone literary production in a cultural sphere that still gravitates towards Paris.

This thesis investigates to role consumerism plays when young, black, underclass characters try to build their identities in Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye (1970) and Angie Thomas’ The Hate U Give (2017). Through implementing intersectional analysis and postcolonial theory this essay discusses how social positions are read and understood in a mass culture that heavily favours the visual. In this culture we are all judged by our appearance and I will argue that for the poor, black, female characters in the novels, that means being the underdogs of consumer culture. Although the two novels are published half a century apart, both relate to consumer culture and how it affects the African-American community. In addition, each of the novels are produced during a wave of black uprising and strong civil rights movements. In Morrison’s novel the characters are left longing for the looks and lifestyle of white Americans, emphasising the need of the social movement’s claim ‘Black is Beautiful’. In Thomas’ novel there are a multitude of consumer objects that are coded black, such as Jordan sneakers and hip hop-music. Yet, the police shooting of young Khalil cannot be avoided by the success ‘Black is Beautiful’ brought in terms of commercialising blackness. The shooting instead brings attention to 2017’s great campaign ‘Black Lives Matter’. What is similar in both novels is that the characters, who find themselves othered in Western discourse, strive to become someone recognised as a subject, a Self. In the quest to move beyond the stereotypes ascribed to them, almost all the characters long for goods that signal their social position as someone who has succeeded, living the American Dream. Yet, in Morrison’s novel there is a critique against capitalism and consumerism, an idea that you cannot consume a subject position in a racist society. That kind of critique against capitalism is absent in Thomas’ novel.

Doctor of Philosophy A Doctoral Thesis submitted to the School of Language, Literature and Media Studies, Faculty of Humanities, University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, South Africa; in fulfillment of the requirements for the award of PhD in Media Studies 2015 / This study blends critical discourse analysis with ethnographic inquiry into the nature of discursive constructions of subaltern identities in postcolonial contexts of news production by mainstream news organisations in colonial and post-independence Zimbabwe. The main thrust of the study was to establish continuities and disjunctures in newsroom cultures of production in colonial and in post-independence situations in which marginalized former colonial subject populations are caught up. It employs a multidimensional synchronic and diachronic case study approach where one newspaper organization specifically The Herald’s coverage of episodic forced removals of subject populations is studied across different historical moments. The paper’s coverage is then critically compared and contrasted with that of other newspapers then in existence and contemporaneously operating at that time. The selected historical moments of forced removals were only heuristically chosen to the extent that they demonstrated the greatest potential for drawing media attention and thus present an opportunity for the ordinary subaltern populations to appear in the news. The content analysis generally tended to demonstrate that the same canibalesque evident in the newsification of subjects of colonial domination was pretty much evident in the way news in the post-independence period constructed the subalternity of marginalized groups. The institutionalization of the so called universal news values tend towards symbolic annihilation of subaltern ways of knowing. The newspaper as a cultural form, this study established, remains ill-suited and instrumentalised to serve the ends of emancipation and empowerment. The press in Zimbabwe retain many traces of its colonial parentage with serious negative ramifications for their claim to a democratic function

The Irish throughout their tumultuous history immigrated not only to North America but across Latin America, particularly to Cuba, Puerto Rico, Colombia, Chile, Argentina, and Mexico. Ireland and many of these Latin American countries share a close yet under-examined relationship, inasmuch as they are predominantly Catholic, post-colonial, hybrid populations with fraught immigrant experiences abroad and long histories of resisting Anglo-centric imperialism at home. More particularly, the peoples of these nations engage intimately with the dead (as shown, for example, by the Mexican Day of the Dead and Celtic roots of Halloween), and the dead appear frequently in literature from these countries that takes up issues of colonialism and anti-colonial struggles. The dead can function as repositories for forgotten history and allies in counter-imperial struggle; these roles become particularly important in the 20th century, wherein the forces of economic modernization have rushed to erase the memories of the dead. From the speech of the dead in the prose works of Juan Rulfo, Máirtín Ó Cadhain, Samuel Beckett, and Carlos Fuentes, to the anticolonial poetics of William Butler Yeats and Julia de Burgos, this thesis examines how these two regions have, both in parallel and in concert, utilized the dead to bolster various nationalistic projects. This dissertation also explores patterns of Irish/Latin American literary citation and influence, tracing, for example, how Jorge Luis Borges’s responded to James Joyce, or how a scene from Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels is re-enacted in the novels of Flann O’Brien and Gabriel García Márquez. This project contributes to comparative approaches to Irish literary and modernist studies, improves our nascent understanding of how the Irish and Latin Americans have interacted throughout their overlapping histories, and expands our comprehension of how the dead have been and continue to be utilized across the developing world to resist economic neo-colonialism.

This thesis concerns the colonial subject, subjectivity, and resistance in postcolonial theory and literature. It argues that contemporary attempts within the practice of postcolonial theory to retrieve a colonial subject from a representation that issues from a dominating colonial discourse can only be met with failure. Thus, this thesis follows Spivak's claim that the colonial subject is merely a production of positions granted by its very representation, which is to say, a given. However, this thesis also recognises that Spivak's assertion cannot account for moments of resistance to colonial discourse that abound in postcolonial literature. As such, this thesis claims that the colonial subject is not wholly given; that if one approaches the colonial subject through Gilles Deleuze's re-writing of subjectivity, demonstrated in the concept of 'the body without organs', then a transcendent configuration of the colonial subject is revealed. In elucidating this claim, this thesis turns to the fiction of South African academic and novelist, J.M. Coetzee. It is argued that Coetzee writes the Other by 'staging it', that is by testing the limits and eventually going beyond the authoritarian regime of representation. Thus, this thesis is constructed by three main chapters that offer both a rethinking of postcolonial theory in light of the work of Deleuze, and a reading of a selected cynosure of texts authored by Coetzee. The first chapter is a reading of Coetzee's Dusklands that concentrates on the body as a site of resistance to the manoeuvres of representation, demonstrating it to be a site that takes authority in the production of truth from the 'objective', structured methodology of reason, while the second chapter offers a reading of Coetzee's Waiting for the Barbarians that interrogates the postcolonial concern with 'space'. It is in this novel that Coetzee renders space in terms of its dynamic relationship with the nomad, which ultimately problematises the colonial endeavour to organise, represent, and thereby, 'know' the world. The final chapter engages Coetzee's Foe by way of a sustained critique of the operation of language, and demonstrates how Coetzee manages to test the boundaries of representation through language use. As such, each chapter offers a specific account of an entire programme that tends towards the transgression of the binds organised by the operation of representation.

ABSTRACT Cultural beliefs and values implicitly shape every aspect of the way we parent our children and how we communicate about parenting. For parents who are migrants and experiencing parenting in a new country it is essential that child and family health professionals better understand how the cultural self influences practice. Child and family health professionals work with families who come from cultures other than their own on a daily basis. How they communicate with these families is the subject of this ethnographic study into culture and communication in child and family health. Taking culture as its starting point this study explored the everyday communication experiences of child health professionals including child and family health nurses, social workers and doctors in a statewide child and family health service in South Australia. Data included participant observation, video and in-depth interview data. Drawing on insights from cultural studies including postcolonial and feminist scholarship the analysis showed that child health professionals attempted to use contemporary discourses of service provision such as partnership with enthusiasm and with genuine intent. However their application of partnership was limited by unexamined binary constructs within dominant pedagogic tools of culture and communication. Analysis showed that four key binaries structured the communication practice of participants in this study; public or private knowledge, ideologies of sameness or difference, organisational or professional philosophies of practice and the expert or partner in intercultural communication. Three body analysis is introduced as a strategy to work with these binary challenges that seem to present when practice attempts to incorporate theory without consideration of the contexts of use. The combination of postcolonial feminist critique and three body analysis stimulates an explicit examination of health care inequalities as they intersect with the ongoing effects of colonisation. Current professional strategies for working with people who are new arrivals or migrants to Australia focus on understanding differences associated with particular ethic and cultural groups. Despite much work being undertaken to understand difference, in practice this culturalist approach underpinned by a belief in the essential nature of human kind, has resulted in people who are migrants or new arrivals continuing to report poor communication by health professionals as a primary barrier to their health care. Theoretical analysis suggests that this approach ignores differences in power relations among ethnic groups and ultimately manifests in racism. Further, contemporary communication pedagogies in child and family health reinforce this inattention to relations of power when health professionals are instructed to communicate in ways that are regardless of difference. By advocating that people are treated the same, historic and situated issues of gender, race, and socioeconomic inequalities are ignored. In this way binaries of sameness/difference are perpetuated. Those parents located in marginalised positions of difference experience inequities in health care. In this study, child and family health professionals frequently drew from their own personal experiences of parenting to determine the content of information given to new parents, and to inform their approach to intercultural communication. In doing so they unselfconsciously conflated their personal and professional pedagogies and presented all information as professional. Child and family health practices are deeply cultured. Many practices are not scientifically proven and as such do not fit comfortably with the rational scientific medical paradigm with which they are aligned. Where disciplinary knowledge can be assessed and evaluated, this study found that there was no equivalent place for the evaluation of understanding of cultural knowledge — it was assumed as universal. Deeply cultured personal information tendered by participants represents a normative world that is white, western, middle class and gendered. Participants did not recognise themselves as cultured, nor did they recognise the potential impact of bringing this unexamined cultural self into the professional encounter. This resulted in seepage of practice that was democratically racist. This is where outward commitments to justice equality and fairness paradoxically exist with conflicting personal ideologies of sameness. Challenged to find a place for these constructs to coexist participants outwardly identify with the organisationally preferred position of social justice or evidence-based practice. However, participant observation and discussion of practice demonstrated that when conflicting personal beliefs and values were left unattended they found ways of surreptitiously creeping into and shaping the consultation. It seems that modernist theories do not provide adequate ontological and epistemological understandings for working with, and valuing pluralism in multiculture. Rather they constrict and limit practice which leads to an unrecognised perpetuation of colonising agendas in child and family health. Findings from this study contribute to the growing need to find ways to work with and unsettle existing binaries of communication and culture. The methods also suggest ways forward to support change in practice leading to professional development that is mindful and regardful of plurality in culture and communication. Interweaving three body analyses with postcolonial feminism offers a decolonising strategy for application in the multiculture that is Australia. Due to the spatial and temporal spaces created by using three bodies alongside postcolonial feminism, this combination becomes a tangible approach to deconstruction, for child and family health professionals that is both theoretical and practical.

This dissertation employs the methodologies of postcolonial theory and hyperreal theory (following Baudrillard), in order to investigate articulations of identity, nation and representation in contemporary Australian poetry. Informed by a comparative analysis of contemporary Latin American poetry and cultural theory (in translation), as a means of re-examining the Australian context, this dissertation develops a new transnational model of Australian poetics. The central thesis of this dissertation is that contemporary Australian poetry engages with the postcolonial at its limits. That is, at those sites of postcoloniality that are already mapped by theory, but also at those that occur beyond postcolonial theory. The hyperreal is understood as one such limit, traceable within the poetry but silenced in conventional postcolonial theory. As another limit to the postcolonial, this dissertation reads Latin American poetry and theory, in whose texts postcolonial theory is actively resisted, but where postcolonial and hyperreal poetics nevertheless intersect. The original critical context constructed by this dissertation enables a new set of readings of Australian identity through its poetry. Within this new interpretative context, the readings of contemporary Australian poetry articulate a psycho-social postcoloniality; offer a template for future transactions between national poetry and global politics; and develop a model of the postcolonial hyperreal.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Hong Kong, 2007. / Title proper from title frame. Also available in printed format.

<p> </p><p>Two recent tendencies are brought together in this study; the emergence of a postcolonial academic discipline and the restructuring of international development aid and cooperation. Researchers have tried to advocate a postcolonial perspective in policies for international development. This study investigates to what extent this has been done in key documents from SIDA and USAID. A qualitative dimensional analysis was performed from which the results are then used for a comparative analysis. The findings show that documents from both agencies only to a limited extent express a postcolonial perspective, though; documents from SIDA show a stronger prevalence of a postcolonial perspective in some dimension and in the overall index. As demonstrated with the MIP index, both agencies policy documents have more non-postcolonialist rhetoric. The documents demonstrate a development discourse in which the donor countries own national development is prioritized at the cost of that of the receiver countries.</p>