In this dissertation the author argued for a postcolonial reading of the sublime that takes into account the racial and gendered underpinnings of Immanuel Kant's and Edmund Burke's classic theories. The thesis used the understanding of the sublime as a lens for an analysis of the cultural politics of landscape in a range of late imperial and early modern texts about Africa. A re-reading of Henry Morton Stanley's central African exploration narratives, John Buchan's African fiction and political writing, and later texts such as Alan Paton's fiction, autobiographies and travel writing, together with an analysis of colonial mountaineering discourse, suggest that non-metropolitan discourses of the sublime, far from being an outmoded rhetoric, could manage and contain the contradictions inherent in the aesthetic appreciation and appropriation of contested colonial landscapes.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--State University of New York at Binghamton, Department of Comparative Literature, 2008. / Includes bibliographical references.

Thesis (Ph.D.)--Michigan State University. Dept. of English, 2008. / Title from PDF t.p. (viewed on July 10, 2009) Includes bibliographical references (p. 209-217). Also issued in print.

Abridged habilitation - Rheinische Friedrich-Wilhelms-Universität, Bonn, 2007. / Includes bibliographical references (p. [479]-549) and index.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Oklahoma, 2003. / Includes bibliographical references. Also available on the Internet.

This thesis is a study of representations of disability in a selection of Anglophone Indian literature written between 1981 and 2006. In this thesis, I argue that, in fiction by Salman Rushdie, Rohinton Mistry, Indra Sinha, and Firdaus Kanga, disability often takes on positive symbolic value as it represents the potential for the postcolonial polis to survive and thrive, but that the ultimate death or medical normalisation of disabled characters in many of these narratives is tied to a loss of political optimism. While these texts in many instances disturb norms surrounding able-bodiedness and disability, they often ultimately narrate a pessimistic conformity to scripts of normalization, and in so doing, map the unjust triumph of a prescriptive national or international politics onto a prescriptive politics of the body. As disability is eliminated, so is the potential for resistance to latent colonial or hegemonic forms. On the other hand, those fictions that narrate a sustainable disabled presence suggest the potential for the community or nation to emerge from oppressive social structures unscathed. I focus on applying literary disability scholarship to Indian novels which demand scrutiny through a disability studies lens, given their dependence upon the disabled body as a metaphoric object and the continuities in their disability representation and the representation of history. While the focus of my work is upon the nuances of disability representation as it is used to parallel the rise (and sometimes fall) of political optimism in these examples of Anglophone Indian literature, I also read toward an understanding of how the postcolonial perspective of these fictions may inflect and complicate disability representations, and investigate Western notions of normalcy as they are represented as intruding upon this literature and as disciplining the body in these texts. This disciplining is further explored through an ancillary reading of how medical apparatus and infrastructure, such as hospitals, ambulances, and especially doctors, are represented in this group of novels, as it is often in conjunction with the medical establishment that disabled characters are subjected to (neo) colonial violence. In the first chapter, which takes the form of a critical introduction, I discuss the terms of my argument within the development of disability studies, and position myself within the debates and concerns of literary disability studies in particular. I consider the antecedents and development of what is now called the cultural model of disability, and discuss how literary disability scholarship, which began its development with a focus on Western texts and contexts, has begun to extend its range of inquiry to become global in scope. I consider examples of the interplay of contemporary Indian history with biopolitical ideals and the paradigm of normalcy as it has been articulated by Lennard Davis and his intellectual predecessors including Canguillheim and Foucault. In the second chapter, which is entitled "The Medical and the Monstrous: Disability in Salman Rushdie's Midnight's Children, Shame, and The Moor's Last Sigh," I consider how the disabled body is created as an object of competition in an ideological agon between a violent, globalized modernity and a sometimes-idealized fictive past. While Rushdie often represents the disabled body in a very simplified and rather bigoted register, he also to some extent engages with the more complex potentialities of disability to represent the failure of the state. The normalizing perpetration of a Westernized medical apparatus against disabled people becomes the proof and of political disintegration and the dissolution of hope for the emergent nation, whether in Rushdie's fictional version of India or Pakistan. In the third chapter, "Disability and the Realization of Metaphor in Rohinton Mistry's Such a Long Journey and A Fine Balance," I consider Rohinton Mistry's disability representations in relation to his engagement with the tradition of European realism. While Mistry attempts to re-locate the normal type articulated by the European novel, and subverts the conventions of European fiction even as he employs them, he still depends upon a largely uncontested tradition of disability representation. While he re-locates the norm in many demographic respects, he does not fully manage to rescue disability from an ancillary and symbolic role in the fiction. Mistry uses disabled characters symbolically to imagine political upheaval from a disadvantaged and sometimes from a subaltern position, creating in disabled characters their symbolic correlates. In my fourth chapter, "Collective Disability and the Dis-located Norm in Indra Sinha's Animal's People," I consider the ways in which this novel effaces paradigms of normalcy by imagining an environment in which disability is the unifying commonality of community life. While Mistry and Rushdie ultimately write disability as narrative anomaly in the ways described by Mitchell and Snyder, Sinha inverts the paradigm of the anomalous body in his fictional representation of the Bhopal disaster. The failure of the Indian state to protect its citizenry results in collective disability identification, while those able-bodied individuals who might be treated as normal in another fiction become suspicious outsiders. In my fifth chapter, "Unaccommodating Fictions: Disability, Authorship, and the Politics of Failure in Firdaus Kanga's Trying to Grow," I consider the ways in which gay, disabled, Parsi writer Firdaus Kanga represents failure and dependency as character weakness. Kanga validates neoliberal competition by re-imagining the potential for economic and social attainment as properties of mind at the exclusion of the body, and, in so doing, inaugurates an adaption of paradigms of normalcy. Kanga's imaginary valorises the economically competitive individual, but simply removes the constraint of bodily normalcy from this ideal marketable man. For Kanga, economic freedom from parental, societal, or governmental intervention is edifying, as masculinity is achieved through uninhibited competition. In my conclusion, "Good Doctors and Bad Doctors in Rushdie, Mistry, Sinha, and Kanga," I consider the representation of the clinic and of physicians in addition to the representation of disabled people in the novels included in this thesis. Doctors and medical apparatus become symbolic correlates for different political impositions and political strategies, often representing the abuses and failures of government or of public policy. I will frame my discussion within Foucault's concept of the clinic, and will consider the ways in which traditional and Western medicine take on symbolic meaning in these fictions of India.

Doctor Literarum - DLit / In this dissertation the author argued for a postcolonial reading of the sublime that takes into account the racial and gendered underpinnings of Immanuel Kant's and Edmund Burke's classic theories. The thesis used the understanding of the sublime as a lens for an analysis of the cultural politics of landscape in a range of late imperial and early modern texts about Africa. A re-reading of Henry Morton Stanley's central African exploration narratives, John Buchan's African fiction and political writing, and later texts such as Alan Paton's fiction, autobiographies and travel writing, together with an analysis of colonial mountaineering discourse, suggest that non-metropolitan discourses of the sublime, far from being an outmoded rhetoric, could manage and contain the contradictions inherent in the aesthetic appreciation and appropriation of contested colonial landscapes. / South Africa

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No description available.

Thesis (PhD)--Stellenbosch University, 2013. / ENGLISH ABSTRACT: Remembrance and Genocide in the Contemporary German historical Africa-Novel In view of the role that literature plays in the remembrance of the Holocaust and in consideration of postcolonial approaches to interpreting the present in relation to the past, this study investigates the questions of remembrance and genocide in the contemporary German historical novel set in Africa. For this purpose, five historical novels will be analyzed. Three of them portray the colonial extermination of the Herero and Nama in German South-West Africa (1904-1907). These are: Gerhard Seyfried’s Herero (2003), Jürgen Leskien’s Einsam in Südwest (1991) and Uwe Timm’s Morenga (1978). The other two novels, Lukas Bärfuss’ Hundert Tage (2008) and Hans Christoph Buch’s Kain und Abel in Afrika (2001) deal with the Rwanda genocide of 1994 and its aftermath. Except for Jürgen Leskien’s Einsam in Südwest, the other novels have been analyzed before, but not from the perspective of ‘literary witnessing to genocide’, as this study will show. Using theoretical approaches of cultural and social memory studies as conceptualized by Jan and Aleida Assmann and adapted by other theorists, the study aims to assess the capacity of the novels as sites of memory. The textual analysis separately explores the question of genocide and that of remembrance and then links the two in a threefold manner. Firstly, it will be shown that genocide results in a myriad of memory constellations which correspond to the different participants’ need to come to terms with their actions and situations e.g. trauma on the part of the victims, guilt on the part of the aggressors and bystanders etc. Secondly, in this study the two genocides in Rwanda and Namibia open up the question of their relation to the Holocaust. It will be shown how the three genocides could be connected by investigating structural aspects, continuities and participants’ constellations. Generally, the fictionalized history this study explores is written from the perspective of guilt and trauma memory. The third aspect of this study will take into consideration recent debates about the German memory culture, including discussions about colonial history, focussed on the institutionalized atrocities committed against inhabitants of colonized territories in Southwest Africa and their claim for compensation. These discussions bring into focus the need to come to terms with an unresolved past, and the possible role of literature in this regard. By analyzing the selected novels, this study will explore the above considerations against the interpretations of historical occurrences as (re)constructed in the narrations. This study’s point of departure is that the historical Africa-Novel functions as an archive of memories of historical events that inspired their writing. The texts will be analysed as performing memory, incorporating memory, interpreting memory and revitalising historical consciousness. / AFRIKAANSE OPSOMMING: Herinnering en Volksmoord in die kontemporêre Duitse historiese Afrika-roman In die lig van die rol wat letterkunde speel in die herinnering aan die Holocaust en met inagneming van postkoloniale benaderings tot die interpretasie van die hede in verhouding tot die verlede, stel hierdie studie ondersoek in na die vrae rondom herinnering en volksmoord in die kontemporêre Duitse historiese roman wat in Afrika afspeel. Vir hierdie doel sal vyf historiese romans geanaliseer word. Drie daarvan beeld die koloniale uitdelging van die Herero en die Nama in Duits-Suidwes-Afrika (1904-1907) uit. Hierdie romans is Gerhard Seyfried se Herero (2003), Jürgen Leskien se Einsam in Südwest (1991) en Uwe Timm se Morenga (1978). Die ander twee romans, Lukas Bärfuss se Hundert Tage (2008) en Hans Christoph Buch se Kain und Abel in Afrika (2001) handel oor die 1994 Rwanda volksmoord en die nasleep daarvan. Met die uitsondering van Jürgen Leskien se Einsam in Südwest is al die ander romans reeds voorheen geanaliseer, maar nie vanuit die perspektief van ‘letterkunde as getuie tot volksmoord’ nie, soos wat in hierdie studie aangetoon sal word. Deur die toepassing van kulturele en sosiale herinneringstudies soos gekonseptualiseer deur Jan en Aleida Assmann en aangepas deur ander teoretici, is dit die doel van hierdie studie om vas te stel tot watter mate hierdie romans optree as plekke van herinnering. Die tekstuele analise ondersoek die kwessies van volksmoord en herinnering afsonderlik en voeg dit dan saam op ’n drievoudige manier. Eerstens sal daar getoon word dat volksmoord lei tot tallose herinneringskonstellasies wat ooreenstem met die verskillende deelnemers se behoefte om hulle te berus by hulle aksies en situasies, byvoorbeeld trauma aan die kant van die slagoffers en skuld aan die kant van die aanvallers en omstanders, ens. Tweedens, in hierdie studie oor die volksmoorde in Rwanda en Namibië, kom die vraag na die Joodse volkslagting na vore. Daar sal getoon word hoe hierdie drie volksmoorde verbind kan word deur ondersoek in te stel na strukturele aspekte, kontinuïteit en deelnemers se konstellasies. Die gefiksionaliseerde geskiedenis wat in hierdie studie ondersoek word is oor die algemeen geskryf vanuit die perspektief van skuld- en traumaherinnering. Die derde aspek van hierdie studie neem onlangse debat in ag wat handel oor die Duitse herinneringskultuur. Dit sluit in besprekings oor koloniale geskiedenis wat fokus op die geïnstitusionaliseerde gruweldade gepleeg teen inwoners van gekoloniseerde grondgebiede in Suidwes-Afrika en hulle eis vir vergoeding. Hierdie besprekings neem die behoefte om die onopgeloste verlede te aanvaar onder die loep, asook die moontlike rol wat letterkunde kan speel in hierdie verband. Deur die analise van die gekose romans sal hierdie studie bogenoemde oorwegings ondersoek in die lig van verskillende interpretasies van historiese gebeure soos ge(re)konstrueer in die vertellings. Die vertrekpunt van hierdie studie is dat die historiese Afrika-roman funksioneer as ‘n argief vir herinneringe aan die historiese gebeure wat die skryf daarvan geïnspireer het. Die tekste sal geanaliseer word as uitvoering van herinnering, inkorporasie van herinnering, interpretasie van herinnering en die proses om nuwe lewe te blaas in historiese bewustheid.