No description available.

No description available.

“Culinary Scapes” analyzes culinary cultural production produced and consumed by South Asians in various “national” sites: India, Pakistan, Sri Lanka, Britain, Canada and the United States. It juxtaposes contemporary South Asian cultural production to identify the potentials as well as limitations of thinking through culinary practices to understand how South Asian subjects inhabit multiple identitarian locations made possible by particularized relationships to food and culinarity. This juxtaposition of texts reveals that food is implicated in vital ways in a number of cultural, political and economic debates that both produce and contest ideas about gendered national culinary identity. The dissertation uncouples the seamless link between “food” and “nation” in a range of South Asian contexts to argue that food and nation and gender are not naturally linked, but instead are rendered isomorphic within the popular imagination for politically motivated reasons. The first chapter offers a schematic overview of culinarity in different disciplinary locations. It ends with an exploration of the politics of food production in Ketan Mehta's Mirch Masala (Spices ). Chapter II analyzes how the rhetoric of cookbooks, including those by Kala Primlani and Madhur Jaffrey, discipline middle class “housewives” in India and the United States into performing versions of Indianness, upholding the values of middle class Hindu India. Chapter III explores how queer desire—routed through culinarity—emerges against the backdrop of the classed and sexualized domestic sphere in Romesh Gunesekera's Reef and Deepa Mehta's Fire. Chapter IV examines how food is embedded in discourses about authenticity and citizenship within diasporic contexts, comparing Shani Mootoo's “Out on Main Street” with Sara Suleri's Meatless Days . Chapter V asks what it means to think “beyond the nation” analyzing the gendered, culinary television and cookbook performances of Padma Lakshmi and Raji Jallepalli as well as the writings of Geeta Kothari. It asks how fusion cuisine can be read against U.S. racial discourses of assimilation and otherness. The final chapter reflects on the politico-economic implications of thinking about food and nation in isomorphic terms by reading Nisha Ganatra's Chutney Popcorn alongside debates over basmati rice patenting in South Asia.

This dissertation is about the formations of the king as knowledge of the political in early eighteenth-century Brahmaputra Valley, in present day northeast India. Here, I identify three areas as the sites of the political: courtly-monastic politics, pleasure, and law. Each chapter of the dissertation presents a contemporary iteration of the king that contributed to the understanding of the political in early eighteenth-century Brahmaputra Valley. In doing so, I propose an understanding of kingship founded in the person of the king. Drawing on expressive literature, epigraphs, and visual sources written in the first few decades of the eighteenth century in the court of the Tungkhungia kings of Brahmaputra Valley and the Vaiṣṇava monasteries in the region, I argue that the person (and the body) of the king was the site of the political in the courtly-monastic spaces. This understanding of a personalised kingship in the courtly-monastic spaces was in dialogue with transregional political imaginations of kingship, both imperial Mughal and subimperial Rajput of early modern South Asia. In the dissertation, I bring together sources in Assamese, Persian, Sanskrit, and Tai-Ahom towards revealing the ways in which a distinct local articulation of the king in areas of politics, pleasure, and law was located within translocal and transregional networks of learning stretching across the regions lying to the western and southern borders of the territories of the Tungkhungia kings. Through a conceptualisation of early eighteenth-century Brahmaputra Valley as a “contact zone” between Mughal-Rajput, Tai-Ahom, and Burmese cultural forms that clashed and grappled in the wake of Brahman arrival in the court of the Tungkhungia kings I historicise the multiple iterations of the king towards understanding the intellectual conditions that emerged as foundations of a new political imagination. Moving away from cultural histories of kingship in early modern South Asia where studies of cultural productions have remained the lens for analysis of kingship; in this dissertation I look at the formations of the king within specific areas of intellectual inquiry towards writing a history of the multiple iterations of the king, across institutions, in early eighteenth-century Brahmaputra Valley. The dissertation, thus, intervenes in the study of kingship in early modern South Asia and the World, demonstrating the centrality of the person of the king, in contemporary understandings of the political, rather than the “body politic” that is immutable and imperishable. The dissertation, thus, with its focus on early eighteenth-century Brahmaputra Valley, brings to light theories of the political emerging from the margins of imperial histories of early modern South Asia and the World.

Earlier scholars have made some unsubstantiated comments about similarities between Chinese Yuan and English Renaissance theaters. The present comparative study explores the significant similarities and differences between these two theaters. The two theaters are shown to be strikingly similar in the theatrical conventions they employ. We see similarities between these two theaters in crucial aspects. Both were open theaters with a bare stage surrounded by the audience on at least three sides. Both stages lacked scenery and used portable properties transported by stage hands. Audience were equally noisy. The players, clad in magnificent costumes, were flexible and skillful in acting, singing, dancing, and tumbling. They spoke, chanted, or sang in both prose and verse forms. They also followed similar procedures in their presentation. These areas of similarity required players of both theaters to act with a theatricality or stylization. In this study, I have applied the approaches taken by the scholars of English Renaissance theater to the study of Chinese Yuan theater. This has enabled me to explore some areas that scholars on Yuan theater have not touched. This synchronic comparison of two theatrical conventions bearing no traces of mutual influence also shows that, given similar historic, economic and social soils, people in different civilizations will bring similar flowers to bloom.

This dissertation examines how modern literature in China, Japan, Korea, and Taiwan in the late-nineteenth to the early-twentieth centuries was practiced within contexts of these countries' deeply interrelated literary traditions. Premodern East Asian literatures developed out of a millennia-long history of dynamic intra-regional cultural communication, particularly mediated by classical Chinese, the shared traditional literary language of the region. Despite this transnational history, modern East Asian literatures have thus far been examined predominantly as distinct national processes. Challenging this conventional approach, my dissertation focuses on the translational and intertextual relationships among literary works from China, Japan, Korea, and Taiwan, and argues that these countries' writers and critics, while transculturating modern Western aesthetics, actively engaged with the East Asian cultural tradition in heterogeneous ways in their creations of modern literature. I claim that this transnational tradition was fundamentally involved in the formation of national literary identities, and that it enabled East Asian literati to envision alternative forms of modern civilization beyond national particularity. The dissertation is divided into three parts according to the region's changing linguistic conditions. Part I, "Proto-Nationalisms in Exile, 1880s-1910s," studies the Chinese literatus Liang Qichao's interrupted translation and adaptations of a Japanese political novel by the ex-samurai writer Shiba Shiro and the Korean translation and adaptations of Liang Qichao's political literature by the historian Sin Ch'aeho. While these writers created in transitional pre-vernacular styles directly deriving from classical Chinese, authors examined in Part II, "Modernism as Self-Criticism, 1900s-1930s," wrote in newly invented literary vernaculars. This part considers the critical essays and the modernist aesthetics of fiction by Lu Xun, Yi Kwangsu, and Natsume Soseki, founding figures of modern national literature in China, Korea, and Japan, respectively. Part III, "Transcolonial Resistances, 1930s-40s," addresses the wartime period, when the Japanese Empire exploited the regional civilizational tradition to fabricate the rhetoric of the legitimacy of its colonial rule. This part especially explores the semicolonial Chinese writer Zhou Zuoren, and the colonial Korean and Taiwanese writers Kim Saryang and Long Yingzong, who leveraged that same civilizational tradition and the critiques thereof, in order to deconstruct Japanese cultural imperialism outside of nationalist discourses. / East Asian Languages and Civilizations

The children born into the Canadian-Chinese community following the repeal of the Canadian Chinese Immigration Act (1923) were the first Chinese-Canadians to be born with full citizenship rights. After decades of isolation and segregation, the 1946 Canadian Citizenship Act transformed the limited citizenship of Chinese immigrants to full citizenship. Whether the parents of these children were Canadian or had just arrived, they could offer their children little guidance as Canadian citizens. The participants in the study are Canadian-born women, descendants from the four counties of Sun Wui, Hoi Ping, Toi San, and Yin Ping of the Pearl Delta District of Guangdong, China. Their region, dialect, class, gender, age, and ethnicity unite them. There were few Canadian-born Chinese from the time of the repeal until 1967 when Canada changed its immigration policy to a more equitable point system not based on race. This is an interdisciplinary study incorporating an anthropological interviewing methodology, an examination of Chinese-Canadian history and of Asian women in Hollywood films, and how these portrayals have impacted the contemporary societal perceptions of Chinese women. I have discussed Asian psychology, feminist, cultural, and film studies and how they relate to identity development. I examined the markers used by the participants to fashion their identity, looking at the themes of beauty, behaviour, language, culture, values, and expectations. I used oral history and narrative methodology through in-depth interviews to examine how the historical, economic, political, and socio-cultural contexts have influenced this generation of Canadian-born women of Chinese descent as they developed their identity in Canada. / Graduate / 0377 / 0326 / 0334 / gwongsne@uvic.ca

Embedded in the socio-political milieu of the country Anglophone Pakistani fiction provides a critical perspective on some of the important contemporary issues facing the country like feminism, class struggle, misuse of religious discourse, sectarianism, terrorism and the fragmentation of the Pakistani society. By contextualizing the works of four Pakistani fiction writers, Sara Suleri, Kamila Shamsie, Mohsin Hamid and Mohammed Hanif, in the theoretical paradigms of modernism, postmodernism and postcolonialism, this research identifies salient facets and characteristics of Pakistani Anglophone fiction produced during the last three decades. This thesis argues that Pakistani Anglophone fiction is Janus-faced in nature. On the one hand it specifically deconstructs various indigenous issues which are destabilizing Pakistani society and politics, while on the other hand it challenges the discursive construction of Pakistan as a terrorist country through international discourse. By doing so, these writers not only adopt the role of political commentators and interveners but also create a counter-narrative to Western hegemonic discourse and represent a case for a liberal and democratic Pakistan. Moreover the textual analysis of this fiction indicates a shift from traditional postcolonial literature. Instead of contextualizing their work in the colonial experience of the British Raj or its aftermath, these writers dissociate themselves from it and use this dissociation as a narrative strategy to hold the political and military leadership accountable for the socio-political chaos in Pakistan. The thesis argues that this characteristic of Anglophone Pakistani fiction indicates the emergence of a new phase, ‘Paracolonialism’ or ‘Paracolonial fiction’ which rejects the influence of colonialism on the socio-economic and political crisis of Third World countries and deconstructs various factors which led to their post-independence unstable economy and social fragmentation.

abstract: This dissertation investigates how Yuan zaju drama reshaped Chinese culture by bridging the gap between an inherently oral tradition of popular performance and the written tradition of literati, when traditional Chinese political, social, cultural structures underwent remarkable transformation under alien rule in the Yuan. It focuses on texts dated from the thirteenth to the fifteenth century by literati writers about playwrights and performers that have been treated by most scholars merely as sources of bio-bibliographical information. I interpret them, however, as cultural artifacts that reveal how Yuan drama caused a shift in the mentality of the elite. My study demonstrates that Yuan drama stimulated literati thought, redefined literati self-identity, and introduced a new significance to the act of writing and the function of text. Moreover, the emergence of a great number of successful female performers challenged the gendered roles of women that had been standardized by the traditional Confucian patriarchal system. This careful uncovering of overlooked materials contributes to a better understanding of the social and cultural world of early modern China. / Dissertation/Thesis / Doctoral Dissertation East Asian Languages and Civilizations 2019

Poems Easily Written in a Hard Life is an English-language translation of Yun Dongju’s 40 poems. This work of literary translation is proceeded by a translator’s preface which seeks to situate the work in its specific social and linguistic context and to render the translator’s work visible.