Thesis (MInternationalStudies)--University of South Australia, 2007.

Thesis (MInternationalStudies)--University of South Australia, 2007.

The relentless political pressure the Ethiopian government put on Ethiopian journalists, political dissidents and opposition activists drove hundreds of them out of their country. However, after leaving their country, the journalists and the opposition activists remain engaged in the politics of their country of origin through the media outlets they establish in diaspora. Ethiopian Satellite Television (ESAT) and Oromia Media Network (OMN) are two media platforms that have emerged in the United States under such conditions. This dissertation chronicles the rise of ESAT and OMN and their far reaching political influence in Ethiopia. Using mixed method research, it provides their detailed profiles that range from their inception, to their impact on the Ethiopian public sphere and the Ethiopian government’s response to them, to their reporting of political events in Ethiopia. This research makes the case that ESAT and OMN, through the instrumentality of a transnational public sphere have altered the Ethiopian political dynamics during the last five years. Particularly, ESAT and OMN use Facebook and Twitter as a backbone to gather information and foster relationships with news sources inside Ethiopia; they also transmit uncensored information back to Ethiopia via satellite television. In response to their communication activities, the Ethiopian government seeks to undermine the links that ESAT and OMN have in the country by routinely blocking the internet, requesting Facebook and Twitter to take down their content and jamming their satellite transmissions. The Ethiopian government also responds to the reporting of ESAT and OMN by changing its policy positions on domestic political issues. This illustrates that Ethiopian political exiles remain key players of Ethiopian political dynamics in ways that thoroughly exemplify trans-local reciprocity. It also shows that ESAT and OMN might very well be a prototype of a diaspora community media that keeps grievances alive and magnifies ideological differences they brought with them to the United States. / 2021-01-11

This thesis examines the production and reception of French opera in New Orleans in the first half of the nineteenth century, through a focus on the city’s principal French-language theatre from 1819 to 1859, the Théâtre d’Orléans. Building on the small body of existing scholarship concerning the theatre’s history and repertoire, here I draw upon a greatly expanded range of sources—including court cases, sheet music, and novels—in order to understand more about the ways in which operatic culture shaped and was shaped by city life in this period. New Orleans’s operatic life relied on transatlantic networks of people and materials in order to thrive, and this thesis explores the city’s place within growing global operatic systems in the nineteenth century. The five chapters each reflect on different aspects of operatic translocation and its significance for New Orleans. The first two argue for the centrality of human agency to the development of transatlantic networks of production and performance by examining the management of the theatre and the international movement of singers in turn. Chapter 3 investigates the impact of French grand opéra on New Orleans, arguing that the genre provided a focus for the negotiation of local, national, and international identities among opposing critical (and linguistic) factions within the city, while also providing an impetus for the development of a material culture of opera. Chapter 4 explores opera-inspired composition in New Orleans through a focus on popular sheet music for the piano, in order to problematise our expectations of ‘local creativity’. Finally, Chapter 5 examines travel writing from both sides of the Atlantic in which the Théâtre d’Orléans features, arguing that the ‘idea’ of opera—including the imagined experience of Parisian opera-going— played an important role in articulating the authors’ perceptions of inter-cultural encounter in New Orleans. This thesis, therefore, seeks to unpick the processes involved in transatlantic opera from a number of angles. I resituate New Orleans, arguing that the city was not simply on the musical periphery, but that it was instead an integral part of an increasingly connected operatic world, which nonetheless sustained its own individual theatrical culture. This work, therefore, helps us both to challenge and expand ingrained ideas about French centralisation, North American cultural development, and cultural transfer up to the mid-nineteenth century.

This study helps us understand the complexities of transnational abandonment, and transnational abandonment in the context of Saudi heritage in particular. Based on a textual analysis of narratives on a blog by individuals abandoned by their Saudi fathers, my findings suggest that they discursively construct their identity in three ways: a) by negotiating their illegitimate status as perceived by many Saudis, and the validity of their search; b) by making sense of the absence of father and the cultural knowledge of the paternal side, while negotiating the inevitable presence of the father in many other ways and their ethnic difference; c) by navigating the tensions of continuing with the search and anticipating the consequences. These themes highlight how conditions of father absence, particularly where the father has a national origin different from one's own has dynamic and conflicting implications socially and culturally, and for production of identities for their children. In sum, this study challenges uncritical celebration of multiculturalism in the US, and broadens the understanding of the complexities of hybrid identities.

M.A. / The essential nature of global politics has changed profoundly over the course of the past twenty years, becoming significantly more complex. The international system has evolved in such a way as to often render traditional, materially-determined theoretical approaches to International Relations ill-equipped to compellingly account for action. Increasingly, ideational concerns play a vital role as mobilising influences, causing actors to behave in an unprecedented manner. One of the phenomena most emblematic of this trend towards increased complexity and the rise of the power of ideas is that of contemporary transnational terrorism. Ideologically-motivated and often seemingly irrational, new terrorism confounds mainstream theoretical understandings of anticipated action and reaction and constitutes a particularly salient area of study, as security scholars grapple with effective means of counteraction. This exploratory study attempts to pave the way towards an appropriate understanding of contemporary transnational terrorism by utilising a theoretical perspective specifically tailored towards embracing the complexities of global political reality and championing the critical importance of ideational determinants of action, viz. constructivism. Constructivism is utilised as a basis to understand the intangible ideational mechanics informing the activities of the most significant contemporary transnational terrorist group, Al Qaeda, thereby simultaneously highlighting the value and appropriateness of constructivist enquiry compared to its outmoded theoretical peers and providing insight into more effective future counter-terrorist policy. The primary prescriptive finding of the investigation is that the key to combating Al Qaeda and, indeed, contemporary transnational terrorist groups in general, involves, through some intervention, heightening the perceived discordance between the espoused group norms which attract membership and actual group action. Such discordance has been seen in practice – in the case of Al Qaeda in Iraq – to cripple the efficacy and power of terrorist group functioning. Such an approach requires a comprehensive understanding of a terrorist organisation's worldview, coupled with a campaign of carefully directed public diplomacy tactics.

The histories of nationalism and temperance in India were closely intertwined from their very inceptions. While the former is the topic of frequent study, the latter has rarely been examined--in fact, Indian temperance is often taken as an axiom. My dissertation argues that the Indian temperance movement, like the nation, was a timely innovation. It explains the specific history of why and how temperance activism came to be an important facet of the struggle for Indian independence. It will also show how this close relationship played out globally, when Indians exported nationalist sentiments abroad and when the cause of Indian self-rule became an unavoidable question in temperance journals and at temperance meetings in Britain and the United States. Both scholarly and popular works of history assume that alcoholic beverages were introduced into India by the British. I demonstrate that some Indians consumed alcoholic beverages on a large scale well before high colonialism, but that British rulers made drinking an issue for the first time when, in the 19th century, they introduced a new tax policy favoring the use of European-style liquors over those that had traditionally been produced in India. This resulted in a large protest movement in which thousands of drinking Indians refused to purchase Indian-made alcoholic beverages until the taxes on them were reduced. Early nationalists acknowledged that many Indians were drinkers and blamed their turn from milder to stronger forms of liquor on colonial administrators who determined alcohol policy. Yet within 50 years, assumptions had changed radically. Where Indian nationalists and temperance activists, often the very same people, had once championed access to less-costly alcohol for the drinking classes, they now argued that Indians had always been an abstemious "race" and fought for the total prohibition of all alcohol sales, making temperance compulsory for all Indians. This dissertation will provide a new and important frame for analysis of the Indian nationalist movement. By focusing on a single, yet important, strand within the larger nationalist movement, this dissertation reveals conflicts among nationalists and among those associated with the colonial state. Finally, this dissertation moves temperance from a mere footnote to its proper place as one of the key mass movements of the period, a discourse that influenced both Indian nationalism and the rhetorical content of global temperance activism. My work is predicated on the assumption that ideas and movements move across cultural and national boundaries. Thus while India remains the focus, this dissertation demonstrates that domestic political issues occur in, and are significantly influenced by, a global context.

This dissertation examines the United States' interactions with Japan between 1945 and 1965 to demonstrate how global processes have transformed American culture at home, as well as exporting it abroad. Through U.S. political, military and economic involvement - including postwar occupation, subsequent maintenance of military bases, and the opening of markets to Japanese exports - Americans gained unprecedented exposure to Japan and its culture. At the same time, Cold War pressure to engage other "free world" nations provided impetus to try and understand foreign cultures, like Japan's. While Americans across the economic spectrum took an interest in their new ally, it was members of the middle and upper classes who most typically embraced the Japanese arts of flower arranging, bonsai, filmmaking, architecture, and landscape gardening, and the philosophy of Zen Buddhism. Many argued that Japanese culture reflected tastes and beliefs that they valued, including understatedness, an appreciation of nature, and a desire for serenity; they described these qualities using the borrowed term "shibui." In knowledgeable circles, the word became shorthand for a particular type of Japan-based aesthetic that embraced the design principles of modernism (clean lines, efficient use of space), while in other ways running counter to industrial modernity. For example ikebana flower arrangements were praised for their minimalism, and the fact that practicing the art was supposed to provide respite from the harried pace of the 20th century life. An appreciation for Japanese culture, or the use of Japan-inspired aesthetics in the way a person decorated or dressed, came to signify a certain kind of modernist refinement in postwar U.S. society. Consequently many suburbanites found shortcuts toward incorporating Japanese culture into their lives which enabled them to appear more stylish and cosmopolitan, without altering their lifestyle significantly. However, there were some components of Japanese culture that shibui enthusiasts conveniently ignored, and other uses to which it could be put, as demonstrated by Godzilla movies and Beat Zen. Taken together, each case study presented here reveals processes of transmission and translation in an often-overlooked direction, as well as uncovering previously neglected connections between U.S. policies abroad and the shifting layers of class and social identity formation at home.

Thesis advisor: Kalpana Seshadri / The novel is generally read through a Western lens that privileges both individual subjectivity and the nation-state. My dissertation acts as an intervention into the critical tradition that sees the novel as a genre preoccupied with the individual, the nation-state, and the rights and responsibilities of citizenship through which the two relate to each other. This tradition includes seminal theorists Ian Watt, Fredric Jameson, and Benedict Anderson as well as contemporary critics such as Pascale Casanova and Joseph Slaughter. Transnational Communities challenges this accepted framework for understanding the novel genre through an examination of novels which decenter the categories of individual and nation-state and argues that in this moment of unprecedented globalization, the novel’s ability to imagine new forms of community is an increasingly relevant social function. / Thesis (PhD) — Boston College, 2019. / Submitted to: Boston College. Graduate School of Arts and Sciences. / Discipline: English.

This dissertation revisits a piece of forgotten history of Chinese cinema from 1930s to 1950s when Chinese filmmakers formed a cross-border, Pacific Rim network of cinematic exchanges among various Chinese diasporic communities. Through a transnational and diasporic lens, it explores new relationships between Chinese filmmakers, traditional stage culture, language differences, Chinese ethnicity, and politics. It argues that Chinese cinema, from its early age, was the product of transnational movements of capital, people, and ideas among the Chinese diaspora. The global links among various Chinese communities initiated and sustained the development of Chinese cinema. / 博士(アメリカ研究) / Doctor of Philosophy in American Studies / 同志社大学 / Doshisha University