Abstract not available.

Shakespeare's dramatic work occupies a strange and double-edged position in the Indian literary consciousness. On the one hand, it is a colonial text that the British imported to India as a tool to illustrate proper 'moral' behavior to their Indian subjects. On the other hand, it has taken on a decidedly Indian identity, an identity marked by the post-colonial conditions of hybridity, subversion, and negotiation. As a result, the Shakespeare industry as it exists in contemporary India is a multifaceted and even contradictory institution. In this dissertation, I study how Indian directors and scholars have appropriated and adapted the Shakespeare canon to suit their individual needs. In the latter part of the nineteenth century and the first half of the twentieth, the continued teaching of English literature resulted in a growing class of hybrid Indians who, by their successful absorption of English education and culture, persisted in fracturing colonial authority. In "Signs Taken for Wonders: Questions of Ambivalence and Authority Under a Tree Outside Delhi, May 1817," Homi Bhabha argues that these subjects articulate a discourse that subverts and alters the colonial status quo through intervention. Subversion and intervention articulated through forms of mimicry offer limited alternatives to colonial subjugation. I have found that Indian productions and interpretation of Shakespeare engage in such mimicry, simultaneously asserting and disrupting colonial authority. Infusing the English texts with Indian concerns both challenges colonial authority and articulates post-colonial realities. Indian appropriations of Shakespeare's drama are not new, post-colonial phenomena. During the colonial period, the plays were often used to explore cultural and political tensions. Today, Shakespeare's plays serve as vehicles to investigate the realities of post-colonial existence. Shakespeare productions, particularly those staged in English, best represent the multiple, ambiguous, hybrid, and hyphenated realities and identities of post-1947 India. The cross-culturation that marks this growing genre situates Western, canonical texts within the dual institutions of Indian theater and literary criticism. Shakespeare has, in effect, become an Indian commodity.

As a strategy of subversion and domination, recodification was deployed by the colonizer and the colonized under colonialism to reach their goals. In either case, the result was a deep impact of the other on the agents involved in recodification. In early nineteenth century, institutionalizing Persian was a product of colonial devaluation of vernacular languages, which recodified Persian as a classical language used for literature administration and law-making. As rewriting the cultural codes became a way for historiography to display the arguments and discursive models, it combined “useful” adaptations with the question of power, as we also notice in the case of the reform movement, the Arya Samaj. A return to origins of Hindu theories was an attempt by the Aryas to frustrate hegemonic models of colonialism. Recovery in this case led to an image of the Hindu woman that was at the intersection of tradition and modernity. Can new models replace colonial epistemologies? Can the nation indeed allow redefinitions to include everyone? These are among the questions that Ismat Chugtai's “Lihaaf” brings up. The heterogeneous nature of the nation may challenge patriarchal scripts only to be rewritten in re-positioned scripts that attempt to redefine the nation in dominant voices. Through the act of recodification, marginal positions intersect with hegemony where both are changed and marginality never takes center stage.

No description available.

This dissertation tracks the creation and implementation of India's 2006 Forest Rights Act or FRA, a landmark law that for the first time grants land rights to the millions who live without them in the country's forests. I follow the law in relation to the forest rights movement that has been central in lobbying for, drafting, and implementing it in order to examine both how the movement has shaped the law's meaning as well as how contests and alliances over the law's text and meaning have transformed the many movements citing and using the law. Drawing on ethnographic and archival research, I track the law from contests over its drafting in New Delhi to contests over its meaning in Ramnagar, a North Indian village. Ramnagar was settled by landless forest dwellers organized by forest rights activists, and its continued but still precarious existence is premised on a claim to land through the Act. I show that the meaning of the FRA was contested at every stage through collective action oriented around what Bakhtin (1982) terms `chronotopes,' the joint depiction of time, place, and characters in language. By diagnosing contemporary injustice through a depiction of the past and pointing to a just future to be brought about through the action of a collective, political movements and identifications form around and act through chronotopes. The movements enacting the Forest Rights Act have critically seized upon what one bureaucrat involved in its drafting called its `word traps,' words or phrases in the text with apparently uncontroversial literal meanings that in fact allow the law to be read through the political chronotopes of political parties or movements. By attending to the relationship between the legal text, its chronotopic deployment, and collective action, my project provides new ways to understand laws in political practice and language in political practice. / Anthropology

<p>Piracy around the Malay Peninsula during the 19th century was extraordinarily prevalent and resulted in the death and loss of liberty for an untold number of people. This essay examines the connections between the piracy of this era and the political economies of the Straits Settlements and the Malay states in the region. Malays pirates often had the support of local rulers who required the goods and slaves brought back by pirates to reinforce their own political and socio-economic positions. The piratical system supported by the rulers was a component of the overall Malay economic system known as kerajaan economics, which helped maintain the status quo for Malay states. This system came under threat once Great Britain and the Netherlands worked to suppress piracy in the region and helped persuade the Malay elite to phase out state-sanctioned piracy. Some people living in Malaya took advantage of the characteristics of British and Malay political economies to engage in acts of piracy regardless of the policies of the British and Malay governments. This study of piracy enables us to understand better the experiences of people of various backgrounds living in 19th-century Malaya, along with how piracy influenced their worldviews.

<p> Science, Technology, Engineering, Mathematics (STEM) education programs are currently being introduced and expanded across &ldquo;developing&rdquo; nations. STEM programs often conflict with hegemonic gender norms, for example by targeting girls and women in male dominated societies. However, given the cultural complexity of STEM for girls, implementing educators are rarely asked their point of view on programs from abroad. This study explored the perceptions of educators in Nepal who participated in the Girls Get STEM Skills (GGSS) program, a program funded through the U.S. Department of State for 2015/2016. The 8-month program reached 254 girls across three government schools and included the donation of 30 laptops. In August, 2016, the researcher conducted one-on-one interviews and focus groups with 18 participants at GGSS school sites in Pokhara, Nepal. Qualitative data was gathered on educators&rsquo; perceptions of teacher roles, Nepal as a developing nation, gender imbalance in STEM, and the GGSS curriculum. The study argues that educators viewed educational topics through the lens of bikas, the Nepali word for development. This suggests that the principal impact of STEM programs&mdash;as part of larger development initiatives&mdash;may be the creation and reinforcement of new social meanings rather than the tangible impacts of the projects themselves. </p>

This dissertation is a study of how Buddhism informed development projects as they were emerging in Bodhgaya, located in the Indian state Bihar. Bihar had a national reputation for being corrupt, prone to outbreaks of violence, and for having high rates of illiteracy, poverty, and child mortality. It was thus positioned as a place in dire need of development. In recent years, particularly since the Mahabodhi Temple, the temple marking the site of Buddha's Enlightenment 2500 years ago, was designated as a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 2002, the Bihar state government has sought to intensify international tourism to Bodhgaya as a means to ameliorate Bihar's underdevelopment. Drawing on sixteen months of ethnographic research with Bihari and foreign NGO workers, villagers, streetvendors, foreign Buddhists, and others, this study explores the two varieties of development in Bodhgaya most often discussed and publicized -- large-scale projects pursued by the government and grassroots projects pursued by Non-Governmental Organizations (NGOs). / The foremost government project, the City Development Plan for Bodhgaya, was an urban renewal and development plan that envisioned transforming Bodhgaya into something of a Buddhist theme park over a fifty year period, and was developed by a committee of non-local Indian businessmen, government officials from the central and state governments, foreign development experts, and Buddhist monks and ambassadors from Thailand, Myanmar, Tibet, Japan, and Sri Lanka. During my research period the pursuit of this project involved the forced removal of villages, the destruction by paramilitary and police of homes and long-standing local businesses, and the removal of street vendors, all of which were met by vigorous protests. As a counterpoint to the government-led development projects, this study explores how Buddhist practice informed the shape of grassroots development projects pursued through the more than 500 NGOs registered in the Bodhgaya area. I pay particular attention to how conflicts and miscommunications between foreign donors and Bihari NGO staff were constitutive of NGOs as both sites through which Buddhists could pursue socially engaged practice and Biharis could pursue work in a part of India where currency is increasingly needed but wage earning occupations are scarce. / So as to illuminate how contemporary power relations in Bodhgaya relate to the ongoing emergence of geographically disperse networks of exchange, this study approaches these varieties of development as a part of the history of Buddhism and the ongoing emergence today of a "Buddhist world," one that has spread, diversified, and been forged and reforged for more than 2000 years. At a moment when much international media attention is given to Islam and Christianity, this perspective, drawing inspiration from postcolonial approaches to history, views Buddhism as a global force of non-European origin mobilizing hundreds of thousands of people, informing international and national policy, and compelling state interventions to facilitate the movement of capital. Through this Buddhist worlding process, a process I approach as an assemblage of historically contingent cultural practices and relations, international connections are forged as national boundaries and local sovereignties are varyingly contested and affirmed in the pursuit and production of desires for such things as modernity and varieties of mobility. In particular, I consider the role of NGO development projects in constituting the form that Buddhist social engagement has taken in Bodhgaya while also being the product of Buddhist desires to pursue social forms of spiritual practice. Further, this theoretical approach helps me to consider the government led tourism project not simply as the inevitable outcome of neoliberal capitalism, hut as a cultural project constituted by a diverse array of cultural processes.

Bangladesh has been part of the globalized readymade garment (RMG) industry since the early 1980s. In 2008-09 there were 4,825 RMG factories in Bangladesh employing 3.1 million people. This workforce included 2.38 million women and is an illustration of a globalization process termed the feminization of labour. Bangladesh's RMG industry has flourished because its workers are among the lowest paid garment workers in the world. / This dissertation is a longitudinal case study of labour unions and labour movements in the RMG industry in Bangladesh between 1980 and 2009. The research and analysis are informed by insights from classical Marxist theory, world-systems theory, and Ronaldo Munck's influential "globalization and labour" thesis. / In the early years of the RMG industry there was relatively little resistance by the workers to their abject exploitation. The reasons that workers failed to resist included the harsh tactics of factory owners who would terminate, sue or arrange to have local leaders assaulted by paid thugs or the state police; the failure of civil society organizations, with the exception of a few leftist unions, to support the workers' struggles; and the fact that the garment workers were 'first generation' rural migrants to the city who lacked any knowledge of workers' rights. / In May 2006 there was a massive protest by RMG workers that secured a significant increase in the minimum wage and the first tripartite agreement in the industry's history. This victory for workers was partially undermined by unions that work collaboratively with the employers' association. Nevertheless the May 2006 upsurge changed the terrain of struggle as evidenced by the 2007 concession that legalized labour unions organizing in the export producing zones. My conclusion is that until the state changes its elite-centered policy, until the owners change their feudal mindset and abide by the labour laws and ILO conventions, and until international labour organizations are free from any hidden, protectionist agendas, militant labour movements are the only way that Bangladesh's RMG workers will be able to successfully pursue their demands.

<p> For the last several years, Americans have fallen behind in the area of mathematics when compared to their peers in industrialized countries around the world. Singapore, on the other hand, was at the top of the world rankings in mathematics in the last four Trends in International Math and Science Study (TIMSS) assessments taken by fourth and eighth graders every four years. This project focused on the impact of the Singapore Math program on two cohorts of students by utilizing their Missouri Assessment Program (MAP) scores from the mathematics subtest. The first cohort, A, was comprised of students who were in third, fourth, and fifth grade during the first years of the implementation of the Singapore Math program in 2007, 2008, 2009, and compared with students in Cohort B who were exposed to the math program since first grade, as intended by the publisher. The students of Cohort B were in third, fourth, and fifth grade in 2010, 2011, and 2012, respectively. Data were also analyzed to see if the program had a correlation with a decrease in gender, ethnic, or socioeconomic (SES) achievement gaps when compared to Cohort B. Three tests were given in order to triangulate the results of the MAP test: difference in means by way of a <i>z</i>-test for a difference in means, a comparison of students scoring proficient and advanced through the utilization of a z-test for difference in proportions, and an <i>F</i>-test for difference in variance in MAP scores. </p><p> Results of the study yielded mixed results. While there was not a significant statistical difference in achievement between Cohort A and B in third, fourth, or fifth grade, there was evidence to support that the subgroups that were included in the study (female students, Black students, and students with Free and Reduced Lunch status) performed commensurately with their peers in Cohort B.</p>