M.A. / Please refer to full text to view abstract

South African history is rooted in racial identities, inequalities and injustices, which the post-apartheid government has sought to address for twenty years since 1994. The transition to a post-apartheid society though has been a difficult one with the social structure and everyday life still marked by the racial past. Though racial classifications on an official basis no longer exist, racial identities continue to pervade the country. Of particular significance to this thesis are black identities including the possibility of black inferiority, which I examine in relation to black post-graduate university students in contemporary South Africa, specifically at Rhodes University. In examining this topic, I draw extensively on the work of Frantz Fanon, who wrote about both colonial society and the emerging post-colonial experience. Fanon was a young black intellectual whose work was in part based on his own experiences of being a once-colonised black person in a world which he perceived as being dominated by whiteness. In his work he expresses his own perceptions of whiteness and how the black identity has come to be shaped by and around this dominant white foundation. Fanon extensively discussed the lives of black intellectuals and elites, and demonstrated how the black identity becomes shaped by and around the world of whiteness. In doing so, he raised a range of themes, such as black inferiority, mimicry and double consciousness. I draw upon the work of Fanon in a critically sympathetic manner to delve into the experiences of black postgraduate students as they negotiate their way through a university setting dominated by a white institutional culture. I bring to the fore the argument that the racial identities of these students is not fixed and sutured but, rather, is marked by considerable fluidity and ambiguity such that black identity must be understood not just as a state of being but also as a process of becoming.

The primary aim of this project is to examine selected works by John Steinbeck, a significant American writer. Through a close contextual and textual analysis of Steinbeck’s Dustbowl Trilogy, which consists of the novels In Dubious Battle, Of Mice and Men, and The Grapes of Wrath, this project will interrogate Steinbeck’s contribution to the silencing of women and their inferior placement in their society and determine the extent to which Steinbeck promotes patriarchal ideology through his literature. A close examination of the modernist era in which these novels were written will provide the method of interrogating Steinbeck’s portrayal of women’s situation during the Depression and determine whether it is a reflection of the reality of women’s situation at that time given the political and environmental factors of the 1930s. The theories of various feminist critics, including Simone de Beauvoir, Judith Butler, Gayle Rubin, Luce Irigaray, Sherry Ortner, and Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar will be explored in order to elucidate the author’s treatment of the female characters and determine the extent to which patriarchal ideology is embedded in his writing. A brief examination of some of his contemporaries, namely F. Scott Fitzgerald, William Faulkner and Ernest Hemingway, will reveal the general treatment of women in male authored modernist literature and determine the extent to which Steinbeck’s female subjugation is representative.

Pierre Elliott Trudeau's ideas on liberal democracy and political philosophy are relevant to Canadian life. He is a modern liberal democrat with a vision of the 'Good' society - what he terms the Just Society. The values of a Just Society are numerous, but perhaps, the most important are freedom, equality, and tolerance. These values are core to his theory and are often revealed in his battle against nationalism. Trudeau is radically opposed to notions of ethnic nationalism, such as French Canadian and Aboriginal nationalism, but he supports a type of civic nationalism within a federal, pluralistic system. In his dislike for nationalism, Trudeau is similar to Lord Acton, who has had a major influence on his work. Trudeau also shows thought similar to John Locke, J.S. Mill, I. Berlin, de Tocqueville, Publius, and John Rawls. / Arts, Faculty of / Political Science, Department of / Graduate

M.A.

Although most Americans view Sam Houston as a military leader and practical politician with little understanding of intellectual issues, he actually possessed a complex moral and political philosophy which he elaborated and demonstrated during a fifty-year public career. He based his philosophy on a mixture of Christian idealism and pragmatic realism, with duty, honor, and strict morality serving to restrain his love of reality, reason, and physical pleasures. The dual nature of his moral beliefs extended into his politics, which mixed Jeffersonian republicanism, individual rights, and limited government, with Jacksonian democracy, the needs of society, and the will of the people. Throughout most of his career he kept those conflicting sets of ideals successfully in balance, with only the turmoil of the 1850s leading him into extreme positions.

This thesis argues that a socially conservative tendency informed much of George Orwell's commentary between 1934 and 1943, and that the same tendency reflected a general European trend. The main sources of this thesis are a large selection of George Orwell's works and a smaller selection of works by Frantz Fanon, Jose Ortega y Gasset, and Antonio Gramsci. This thesis relies upon Orwell's involvement in the Spanish Civil War between 1936 and 1937 and his embrace of nationalism in 1940 as major organizational points of reference. This thesis concludes that Orwell's commentary was an example of a general European conservative reaction against Marxist-Leninist thought.

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