The Early Work of Eleanor Dark offers a thorough explanation of the poetry and short stories of Australian author Eleanor Dark (1901-1985). Included in this study are critical chapters on each of her first three novels--Slow Dawning (1932), Prelude to Christopher (1934), and Return to Coolami (1936). References to her later novels and essays are used to establish the continuity of the study. / The primary purpose of this dissertation is to map Eleanor Dark's development vis-a-vis her socio-historical context and to lay the groundwork for a post-doctoral project involving her complete career. From this perspective, her philosophical connections with her father--poet and labor politician Dowell Philip O'Reilly (1865-1923)--and her husband--author and physician Eric Payten Dark (1889-1987)--assume considerable importance. Her characters are seen as vehicles for a socially progressive viewpoint underscored by strong feminist/utopian commitments. Her technique is classified as innovative; however, the less glamorous patterns of her writing are also considered. / Source: Dissertation Abstracts International, Volume: 56-08, Section: A, page: 3123. / Major Professor: Hunt Hawkins. / Thesis (Ph.D.)--The Florida State University, 1995.

The years 1978 and 1979 were critical in shaping mainland China's foreign policy towards Cambodia during the 1980s up until the international peace treaty of 1991. For China, this involved utilizing Cambodian forces to halt the spread of Vietnamese hegemony in Southeast Asia while countering an increased Soviet presence on its southern periphery. Unfortunately, China's policy of supporting both Prince Sihanouk politically and the Khmer Rouge militarily was instrumental in reestablishing the Khmer Rouge as the most powerful faction in Cambodia's uncertain future. Therefore, the Khmer Rouge became something of a Chinese enigma, nurtured by Beijing to fight the Vietnamese but completely free from PRC control or responsibility.

This dissertation explores the ways contemporary environmental politics in India combine older Leftist agendas with important new critiques of the role of science and technology in societal development. The primary case study is Bhopal, where micro-level issues of health care, vocational rehabilitation and housing are addressed alongside macro-level issues of international law, technology transfer and trade liberalization. The Bhopal material is situated within broader patterns of opposition through comparison with the resistance strategies of other victimized areas. Theoretically, this dissertation is an analysis of the rhetorical strategies used by Indian environmental activists in their attempts to respond to and shape contemporary politics. Each section is both an example of a specific rhetorical strategy and an analysis of the kind of information which can be carried through the specified writing form. Threaded throughout the dissertation is an accounting of how questions about writing occur not only when confronted with the task of scholarly representation but also throughout the work of political activism, particularly when it is working within an emerging discourse such as that of environmentalism. Also emphasized is the connection between rhetorics, the contexts in which they are produced and their effects on social change.

When the people of a given society contemplate the outside world, they do so with inherited but constantly changing values, assumptions, preoccupations, and aspirations. Who they are, one might say, largely determines what they perceive. For a variety of reasons, the Chinese have long had a fascination with the United States--a country which has not only been an active participant in Chinese affairs for well over a century, but which has also served as an idea and an example. Naturally, China's direct and indirect experiences with America, together with the vast cultural and political differences that still separate the two countries, have shaped Chinese perceptions. In China's search for a new political, social and economic order, America, as both a world power and as a concept, has played a major role. This dissertation examines the way images of America were transmitted to China in the twentieth century, and how these images were debated and represented (or misrepresented) by three main social groups of Chinese--the Chinese state, Chinese intellectuals, and the Chinese masses. Although America has unquestionably played a part in shaping modern China, the Chinese, for various reasons and in different ways, have constructed their own distinctive "America."

An ethnography of representation combining the following elements: (a) The American Baptist Mission to the Karen people of Burma; (b) The emergence of Karen nationalism as a consequence of the former, demonstrating the centrality of the phenomenon of "writing," introduced by the missionaries, in this process; (c) The colonial milieux in Burma, as evoked by the diverse documentary voices of American Baptists, British colonialists, and Karen Christians; (d) Ethnic politics, from the Karen rebellion after Burma's independence through the current democratic challenge posed by a coalition of Burma's largest ethnic groups, including Burman; (e) The fieldwork process; research and writing; ethnography; exoticism and primitivism; and the construction of this text itself. An ethnography of the Karen National Union, a predominantly Christian insurgent army in Burma, is constructed. Through an assemblage of texts, some of which have been translated into English for this project, the origins, construction, and articulation of organized Karen nationalism and cultural representation is depicted. The role of writing, print-technology, and the circulation of texts is demonstrated to be central to the foregoing processes in the Karen case. An anthropology of religion and an ethnography of the politics of ethnicity explicates the transitions from conversion to ethnic nationalism to ethnic separatism to democratic opposition. An evocative pastiche of discourses both reflects and contends with the impossibility of objective representation, with regard to both the subject and the process of research, which are thematically analogous: They both begin and end in religion and politics--Christianity and revolution. Diverse discursive styles and voices display the contested nature of knowledge while simultaneously participating in the experiment of re-construction. An academic, analytical style, for example, contributes to an understanding of the dynamics of the emergence of ethnic nationalism and notions of identity among Karen Christians in Burma, while the inclusion of Karen stories provides the reader with meaningful complementary ethnographic grounding. These juxtapositions simulate and stimulate the always inherent tension between daily life and retrospection; between action and reconstruction; between experience and representation; between living and writing.

Critics and analysts of religious politics in India have described Hindu nationalism variously over the years: as fascist, fundamentalist, right-wing, jingoist, extremist, and ethnicist. The already large corpus of writing on the ideology and activities of the Hindu nationalists continues still to describe the serious threat of communal thinking to the secular/liberal character of the modern Indian state. What is missing from this discourse, however, is an interrogation of the very concepts on which both critiques of communal politics and defenses of secular-liberalism are based. What does it mean to understand 'fundamentalism' as the cultural 'other' of such liberal virtues as secularism and tolerance? What are the implications of constituting ethnicist movements not merely as obstacles, but as threats to the project of modernity? This dissertation examines first the dominant phraseology of such Indian intellectual critiques, arguing that narratives of ethnicism and extremism are created not only from within, by ethno-nationalist ideologues, but also from without, paradoxically by the very liberal discourses that describe communal threats to secular modernity. Second, by tracing the evolution of feminist activism in Hyderabad, I trace also the processes by which liberal discourses of difference and diversity come to structure activist praxis, making ethnicity the dominant descriptor of social reality, and instituting a 'culture of ethnicism' that implicates both activist-intellectual and ethnicist. Working thus within the frameworks of secular liberalism, and bound by a pre-constituted opposition to political expressions of religiosity, the Indian activist/intellectual community does not have the tools by which to understand the phenomenon of Hindu ethnicism. Finally, this dissertation suggests that Hindu religious ethnicism needs to be seen essentially as a challenge to the prevailing secular order that separates religious belief from the modern, the rational, the scientific, regarding it (at worst) as a pre-modern affliction, or (at best) as an individual, private expression of identity. Hindu ethnicist belief represents a rationality unto itself, I argue: a (religious) critique of the liberal logic of secularism; a religious ideology of tolerance and governance; a rationality of and for modernity that we can afford to ignore only at our own ultimate peril.

During the revolutionary period the Soviets came into political and cultural conflict with Russia's Muslims. Despite indications that the majority of Muslims desired political unification based on their Islamic heritage, the Party divided them into separate "nationalities" along narrow ethnic lines, incorporated most into the RSFSR, and attempted to uproot traditional Islamic institutions and customs under the aegis of class war. Resistance took the form of pan-Muslim nationalism, a reformist political conception with roots in the Near East. This conflict not only aborted the export of revolution to the Islamic world, contributing to the passing of the revolutionary era in Russia, but aided Stalin's rise to power. Soviet policy succeeded politically, defining the terms of interaction between Russians and Soviet Muslims for the next 70 years, but failed culturally in 1921-22, when the Party was forced to suspend its "war on Islam" as the price of political control.

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The history, culture and ethnic diversity of the Republic of the Indonesia make it a highly complex country. With an area as vast as the whole Europe, at the crossroads of the Indian and Pacific oceans, having abundant natural resources, a dynamic population which is the fourth in the world, Indonesia also benefits from a very resistant economy. / Economic take off is supported by a strong political regime that has been led by President Suharto for thirty years now. Foreign investors are attracted by this new, very magnetic and promising market. Faced with a high demand for investments approvals, the government is liberalizing regulations dealing with direct and portfolio investments. / In 1995, Indonesia was the first host country for foreign investments, before the Chinese People's Republic, which amounted to 39.9 billions of dollars.

This thesis shows that the doctrine of Active Defence has been the overriding concern of the PLA since 1950 and not any form of People’s War. Active Defence is based on three basic principles: no provocation of other nations; no bases anywhere on foreign soil; and no seizure of territory. The PLA’s articulated doctrine in the 1950s was to ‘Protect the North and Defend the South’. In the 1960s this changed to ‘Lure the Enemy Deep into the Country’ in order to crush him with ‘People’s War’. In the 1970s, this became ‘Prepare to Fight Early and Fight Big’. By using examples of the PLA in battle this thesis shows how the doctrine changed in light of failures in battle. The post-Mao reorganisation of the PLA to rectify these faults turned it into a modern military force, building on this legacy by transforming itself into a hardened and networked military. The PLA has now reached a stage of its history where it can fully implement its operational art that took root in the theories espoused in the 1920s and 1930s through the Soviet model, and tried to be implemented in the 1950s and 1960s only to be thwarted by the Cultural Revolution. The People’s Liberation Army’s operational art, this thesis demonstrates, has now come of age.