This dissertation explores John Ashbery's interactions with several generations of English poets, during a period which ranges from the late 1940s to the present day. It seeks to support two principle propositions: that Ashbery's engagements with contemporaneous English poets had a decisive influence on his poetic development; and that Ashbery's own poetic and critical work can be employed to revise our understanding of mid-to-late 20th century English poetry. The dissertation demonstrates that Ashbery's relationships with four English poets - W.H. Auden, F.T. Prince, Lee Harwood and Mark Ford - occurred at significant junctures in, and altered the course of, his poetic development. Ashbery's critical and poetic engagements with these poets, when read together, are shown to constitute an idiosyncratic but coherent re-reading of the English poetry of the past and present. The dissertation addresses the ways in which each poet theorises the difficulties posed, and opportunities afforded, by perceived changes in Anglo-American poetic relations at different points during the 20th century. Chapter one re-evaluates Ashbery's relationship with Auden. It traces the legacy of Auden's coterie poetics in The Orators for Ashbery and Frank O'Hara, offers a revisionary reading of The Vermont Notebook as a strident response to Auden's late-career conservativism, and reads in depth Ashbery's unpublished, highly ambivalent elegy for him, "If I had My Way, Dear". Chapter Two attends to the extensive correspondence between Ashbery and Prince, argues that Prince's work provided a model for Ashbery's "encrypted" early lyrics addressing his homosexuality, and reads "Clepsydra" as an early elaboration of Ashbery's conception of a reciprocal influential model. Chapter Three examines Lee Harwood's "imitations" of Ashbery, and considers the latter's first critical formation of an English "other tradition" through his association of Harwood with the work of John Clare. Chapter Four portrays Ashbery's relationship with Mark Ford as a successful enactment of reciprocal influence, a form of engagement which allows Ashbery a means to "shake off his own influence" and to retain his status as a "major minor writer".

Esta tese estuda o movimento social contra o livre comercio nas Américas, num esforço de defini-lo como tal, identificando seus limites e suas diversas e complexas dinâmicas de ação dentro do campo transnacional. A abordagem do objeto - como estudo de caso - é feita, primeiramente, a partir de sua reconstrução histórica, através de métodos qualitativos de análise de fontes primárias documentais, entrevistas em profundidade, bem como a própria observação participante do autor. Intencionalmente, apenas num segundo momento dá-se o dialogo com o corpus teórico dos movimentos sociais e a literatura recente sobre a ação coletiva na arena transnacional. Produto dessa discussão é a construção de um arcabouço analítico que termina por fazer dos conceitos de identidade social e estratégia/ação coletiva as peças centrais da definição de movimento social. Em um terceiro e último momento, o conceito é utilizado para retornar ao objeto e dar conta de sua complexidade. / This thesis studies the social movement against the free trade in the Américas. Its an effort to define it identifying its limits and diverse and complex dynamics within the field of transnational collective action. The approach of the object - as a case study - is made, firstly, through its historical reconstruction, based on qualitative methods such as in-depth interviews, archival studies and participant observation. Intentionally, only in a second moment is presented a dialogue with the social movement\'s theoretical corpus and with recent literature on collective action in the transnational arena. The outcome of this discussion is an analytic framework that puts the concepts of social identity and collective strategy/action as both key pieces of the broader definition of social movement. At a third and final moment, this concept is used to return to the object and explain its complexity.

L'objectif de ce travail doctoral sera de préciser le rôle des associations de migrants dans la circulation de normes et de pratiques politiques entre la France et le Sénégal. on se penchera plus particulièrement sur la façon dont les migrants convertissent les ressources économiques, acquises durant leur migration en France (notamment par le canal associatif), en capitaux symboliques, réinvestis ensuite dans la sphère politique de leur pays d'origine à leur retour. l'analyse des pratiques et discours des migrants de retour permettant précisément d'étudier l'incidence des trajectoires migratoires sur les stratégies politiques déployées par ces citoyens ‘transnationaux'. / How do monetary flows and flows of ideas interrelate as they circulate between new York, Dakar, and Paris ? This thesis shows how economic sociology can encompass and further conclusions relevant to the migration-development nexus. An economic sociological approach reveals that migrants' financial remittances perform a transnational relational work (Zelizer 2005) crtical to the maintenance of reciprocal exchanges across continents. Bringing together studies of economic and social remittances, this project shed light on the mechanisms through which migrants' transfers occur and affect political institutions in home countries. I combine two transnational datasets collected in France, Senegal, and the United States (in 2011-2012) to propose a structural model an inclusive epistemological framework to account for the channels through which the mobility of real and ideational assets affects sending societies

This thesis examines the politics of black identity in African American literature during what has come to be known as the ‘age of three worlds’. Across four chapters, I analyse texts by Ralph Ellison, Richard Wright, James Baldwin, and Lorraine Hansberry, exploring the way in which their writing plays out within and against the geopolitical exigencies of the Cold War and contemporaneous discourses of Civil Rights and black (inter)nationalism. In doing so, I explore the contrasting ways in which each of them displaces the binary logic that is typically seen as defining the 1950s, as a means of reconstituting both American and African American identity. Rejecting either/or identities, they all decentre prevailing notions of national and cultural identity by juxtaposing them with alternative spaces and temporalities, the result of which is a dual perspective that is simultaneously local and transnational. By extricating themselves, whether physically or intellectually, from a monolithic discursive framework, Ellison, Wright, Baldwin, and Hansberry recast the idea of double consciousness famously articulated by W. E. B. Du Bois in The Souls of Black Folk (1903). Instead of being a self-negating non-identity that serves as the psychological corollary to African Americans’ marginalised status, ‘two-ness’ is transmuted into a privileged vantage point that allows them to both intervene on the world historical stage as empowered modern subjects and renegotiate their relationship with the United States. What this two-ness amounts to, I argue, is a kind of dissonance. ‘Dissonance’, Duke Ellington claimed in 1941, names black people’s ‘way of life in America. We are something apart, yet an integral part’. The principle of introducing a ‘wrong’ note into a piece of music in order to generate new modalities of expression found in jazz is transposed into a social and literary context by the writers examined in this thesis. Each of them embodies and mobilises the socially grounded sense of being apart and a part alluded to by Ellington as a means of defamilarising normative notions of race, gender, and sexuality as they pertain to American-ness. In their place, they posit alternative forms of knowledge and politicised identity that reconstitute what it means to be both black and American in the middle of the twentieth century.

It is becoming increasingly common for current-day migrants to build transnational connections transcending national borders. Amongst recent immigrants from Taiwan to Canada, an "astronaut" type of family arrangement has emerged. In the "astronaut" families, either one or both parents continue working in Taiwan to maximize the financial resources of the family, while the children reside in Canada. These children affected by transnational migration between Canada and Taiwan no longer experience a radical break from their place of origin—Taiwan. Instead, both the settlement society and their ethnic origin have continually informed the processes of these children's home-making and identity development. Based on eleven individual interviews conducted in Greater Vancouver regional district of British Columbia, Canada between June and September, 2001, this study explores the impact of transnational family arrangements on children's lives, and children's.senses of home and identity. Findings suggest that the families of the children interviewed undergo a reconfiguration of the traditional family structure, a reconfiguration based on the establishment of various transnational connections linking family in Taiwan and family in Vancouver. The new transnational family structure is operating within new forms of interdependence between family members and within changing family relationships. The transnational family arrangement has affected how the children define "home" and where they consider to be "home". The children's senses of home are influenced by the interaction between their quotidian experiences in Vancouver and their transnational connections with Taiwan. In terms of identity, the children interviewed reveal a persistence of Taiwanese identity over time and at the same time a fluctuation in the intensity of their Taiwanese identity. The main factors affecting the children's senses of identity are: cross-cultural contacts they have experienced in Vancouver, the significant flow of people and cultural items from Taiwan to Vancouver, and the primordial attachment to their place of origin. The children have learned to negotiate within "astronaut" families. They have become new kinds of "transnational" people—those who can situate themselves somewhere between being Taiwanese and being Canadian and yet, be both. / Education, Faculty of / Educational Studies (EDST), Department of / Graduate

The church is facing a season of challenge in Western Europe and America, areas where once the church was strong and influential. We find, however, that the affluent suburbs in Cape Town are themselves not exempt from the challenge western culture is bringing to the church. Though there are signs of growth in some Christian sectors to inspire hope, there remains a great responsibility on the leaders of the local church today to engage this challenge. A responsibility rests on church leaders to hold firmly to the timeless message of the scriptures, and lightly to the forms of church that no longer engage a culture increasingly unimpressed with the face of modern Christianity. Within this thesis, we will attempt to outline a tenet of the western church’s ecclesiology that has been diluted in many places; this weakness has impacted the church’s ability to engage its community, as well the form and shape of the activities of the local church. Through investigating Jesus’ intention for the local church, we will shown that the church is not defined by the form of its activities, but by people’s response to the demands of the kingdom. We will show that focusing on the church’s response to the demands of the kingdom is able to be a uniting and strengthening force in the church in this season of cultural challenge. The demands of the kingdom are, therefore, to set the agenda for local church leaders, and free those leaders to redesign the form of the church’s activities to engage the local community in culturally appropriate ways. Copyright / Dissertation (MA(Theol))--University of Pretoria, 2012. / Practical Theology / unrestricted

This work deals with transnational ties of reemigrated Volhynian Czechs and ethnic return migration of descendants of non-reemigrated Volhynian Czechs. Dissertation was founded on fieldwork in West Ukraine and in the Czech Republic. Researches of reemigrated Volhynian Czechs were studied in terms of integration or adaptation into the Czech (Czechoslovak) society, but this work, in first part, critically shows immigration narrative of Czech (Czechoslovak) social sciences; there were also transnational ties to Ukraine to which reemigrated Volhynian Czech refers as a meaningful. Next part of this work deals with ethnic return migration of descendants of non-reemigrated Volhynian Czechs. Descendants of compatriots have with Ukrainian ethnic consciousness, but Czech state allows them short-term and long-term stays in the Czech Republic thanks to ancestors, so that they are attracted with Czech surroundings, express wishes to migrate into the Czech Republic and they even could obtain permanent residency more easily due to Czech ancestors. Czech state facilitates migration flow from West Ukraine to the Czech Republic according to presume "closeness" of descendants of compatriots to Czech nation. Common reference of Czech social sciences and Czech state is nationalism which products social reality....

This thesis explores the politics of representing the assemblage of ancient manuscripts known as the Dead Sea Scrolls to popular audiences in Israel, the occupied West Bank, and the United States. I demonstrate that these objects of national heritage are circulated along transnational routes to maintain the legitimacy of nationalist discourse abroad. Three sites—the Shrine of the Book at the Israel Museum in Jerusalem, Qumran National Park in the West Bank, and a travelling exhibit presented at the Boston Museum of Science—are examined for textual narrative, spatial arrangement, and visitor behavior. Analysis of these observations illuminates two recurring motifs common to all three sites: the restoration of an ancient ethno-national landscape (“land of Israel”) in the contemporary landscape of Palestine/Israel and the important legacy of ancient Jewish society in contemporary Israel and “the West.” These motifs and the way they are presented through a framing of cultural heritage can be associated with a larger nationalist discourse maintained by Israeli state authorities and mainstream media that perpetuates a linking of western liberal and Zionist ideologies. I contend that the transnational circulation of this nationalist heritage narrative works to legitimize—at a global scale—an ongoing Israeli program of occupation and settlement in Palestinian territory subsumed under the biblical/Zionist frame of the “land of Israel.” While making preliminary suggestions toward critical interventions, I also suggest that the analysis of transnational encounters with nationalist heritage merits deeper ethnographic investigation towards understanding its impact on individuals’ political (in)action towards the Israel/Palestine conflict.

Utilisant un cadre théorique hybride, mêlant travaux de géographie, notamment culturelle, et approche littéraire et stylistique, ce travail de thèse interroge les diverses spatialités mccanniennes et leur écriture, mais aussi les implications éthiques et esthétiques de cette articulation. Il étudie la manière dont la représentation de ces spatialités pousse l’écriture à chercher son équilibre, alors qu’elle s’inscrit dans des espaces diégétiques et narratifs caractérisés par l’entre-deux et l’hybridité. Ces deux notions sont placées au cœur d’un corpus mu par un élan irréductible et kaléidoscopique, définissable comme une quête d’équilibre et dont éthique et esthétique constituent les facettes les plus essentielles.Sont donc observées les formes et modalités des spatialités mccanniennes, la relation que les personnages entretiennent avec elles, ainsi que leur inscription dans un contexte contemporain. L’écriture de l’entre-deux et de l’hybridité, sources potentielles d’équilibre comme de déséquilibre, est également analysée. On voit enfin comment ces états intermédiaires sont propices à un élan impliquant la création de lignes dynamiques constituant un mouvement vers l’Autre. Cet élan interroge bien souvent la relation avec l’Art et avec l’Autre, ainsi que l’équilibre parfois problématique entre esthétique et éthique. Les possibles contradictions entre ces deux derniers pôles sont examinées, de même que le potentiel créatif, voire démocratique des échanges permis par leur dialogue. / This thesis uses a hybrid theoretical approach mixing cultural geography as well as literature and stylistics in order to study the various spatialities that can be found in Colum McCann’s fictional work. It focuses on the writing of space, place and landscape, as well as on its ethical and aesthetical aspects. It analyses the way representing these spatialities forces the texts to try and find some sense of balance while the realities they describe and the world they were written in are characterised by in-betweenness and hybridity. These notions are at the core of this corpus, which is defined by an impetus that is both irrepressible and kaleidoscopic and that can be defined as a quest for balance in which ethics and aesthetics play a most essential role.The forms those spatialities can take, the bond the characters have created or create with them as well as the way they are inscribed in the contemporary world are analysed. This study also examines the writing of in-betweenness and hybridity, which can be factors of both balance and imbalance. This intermediarity encourages the development of an impulse which means creating dynamic trajectories towards the Other. This impetus interrogates relationships to Art and Otherness, as well as the (im)balance between aesthetics and ethics. It is therefore particularly relevant to scrutinize the latent contradictions between these two poles but also the creative, sometimes even democratic potential of their interactions.

This dissertation based on a fieldwork conducted among Czech Jewish youth during a ten-days educational touristic program Taglit-Birthright explores production of transnational space of mutual belonging. The transnational belonging to Jewish collective is produced through particular physical space of Israel through practice of tourism in collective constructed by the programme as a collective of common origin based on "blood ties". I examine participants' tourist bodily experience, performances, emotions and attitudes as a site of production and reproduction of transnational space using a concept of embodiment as ways in which the individual grasps the world around him/her and makes sense of it in ways that engage both body and mind. Transnational space created throughout the programme becomes socially constructed emotional category of "ahavat Israel", "love for Israel" that might conceal its political implications. Keywords: Transnationalism, diaspora, tourism, embodiment, Jewish youth, Taglit-Birthright, Czech Republic, Israel