Thesis (Ph.D.)--Tufts University, 2002. / Adviser: Lee Edelman. Submitted to the Dept. of English. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 197-212). Access restricted to members of the Tufts University community. Also available via the World Wide Web;

Thesis (Ph.D.)--Tufts University, 2003. / Adviser: Lee Edelman. Submitted to the Dept. of English Literature. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 205-213). Access restricted to members of the Tufts University community. Also available via the World Wide Web;

Thesis--Bonn. / In Periodical Room.

Thesis (M.A.)--University of Montana, 2007. / Title from title screen. Description based on contents viewed Oct. 17, 2007. Includes bibliographical references (p. 81-84).

This treatise will focus on a critical examination of Gavin Hood’s South African Oscar-winning film, Tsotsi (2006), in the interest of exploring how the mass media creates a problematic configuration of the subject, in virtue of its valorization of the continued discursive colonization of Africans (identified broadly in geographical rather than racial terms). That is, within the narrative of the film, the protagonist, after engaging in a crime spree, gives himself over to the state authorities and emotively confesses to his transgressions. Importantly, this dramatic confession is represented as a triumph of the human spirit – in the form of an autonomous rehabilitation on the part of the criminal. However, if one understands the protagonist as a subject constituted by what Foucault terms the discursive regimes of disciplinary/bio-power, what emerges into conspicuity is that the protagonist’s actions rather than being the result of his growing maturity and concomitant augmenting ‘humanity’ are the consequence of a set of discursive imperatives which render him docile and prostrate. Arguably, what this serves to represent, and, indeed, propagate, is more of a superimposition of Western cultural discourses on African subjects, and less of a negotiation with such discourses by such subjects. The treatise aims to provide a theoretical solution to the negation of alternative modes of being by disciplinary/bio-power imperatives inextricable from neo-liberal subjectivity. However, in its attempts to encourage cultural negotiation between North and South, the treatise will avoid simplistic, ‘orthodox’, Marxist solutions and will instead critically contend with the theory of Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe, and their perspectives on how radical democracy can be achieved.

published_or_final_version / abstract / English / Master / Master of Philosophy

Dissertation (DLitt)--University of Stellenbosch, 2007. / Bibliography. Also available via the Internet.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Missouri-Columbia, 2004. / Typescript. Vita. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 265-279). Also available on the Internet.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Missouri-Columbia, 2004. / Typescript. Vita. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 265-279). Also available on the Internet.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of California, Riverside, 2009. / Includes abstract. Available via ProQuest Digital Dissertations. Title from first page of PDF file (viewed March 23, 2010). Includes bibliographical references (p. 193-202). Also issued in print.