The thesis aims to contribute to the question of the origins of efficient institutional arrangements, which are regarded essential for economic development and long-term economic growth. In Africa most institutional frameworks were established under colonial rule and then persisted to a large extent. In this sense colonialism offers a "natural experiment" - a phase in which European institutions were transferred to African countries. The thesis investigates the influence of colonial rule on the institutional development of two countries and former British colonies: Botswana and Nigeria. It applies a theoretical model of institutional legitimacy based on the theoretic work of Douglass North and Oliver Williamson. The case studies' findings highlight the persistence of pre-colonial informal institutions grounded in cultural norms and beliefs of the local populations. In addition, pre-existing levels of urbanisation, constraints on political power and integration in colonial labour markets have been factors which influenced the transfer of European institutions. (author's abstract)

The purpose of my Thesis is to further develop an artistic practice that involves a thoughtful, drawn out engagement with culture, utilizing immediacy, temporality and improvisation through the formal manipulation of different mediums. My research focuses on these ideas as a continual thread that runs through my work of the past twenty years and gives conceptual unity to the range of stylistic experiments that have come with my growth as an artist. The end result is collage, painting, video and installation that utilizes both the literal and parabolical tearing, cutting and pasting of elements together as analogies within a defined field. The defined field being both the formal area of the work, as well as the conceptual representation of my individual consciousness as expressed through my process. Moving between abstraction and representation allows me to sample my thoughts and present them through a methodology that is consistent with the cognitive interplay of abstract and representative thought.

Over the last forty years, the self-determination claims of Indigenous peoples in Canada have increasingly been cast in the language of “recognition”: recognition of Indigenous cultural distinctiveness, recognition of an Indigenous right to land and self-government, recognition of the right to benefit from the development of Indigenous territories and resources, and so on. In addition, the last fifteen years have witnessed a proliferation of scholarship which has sought to flesh-out the ethical, legal and political questions that these claims tend to raise. Subsequently, “recognition” has now come to occupy a central place in our efforts to comprehend what is at stake in contestations over identity and difference in liberal settler-polities more generally. The purpose of this dissertation is twofold. First, I want to challenge the now commonplace assumption that the colonial relationship between Indigenous peoples and Canada can be reconciled via such a politics of recognition. Second, I want to explore glimpses of an alternative politics. More specifically, drawing critically from Indigenous and non-Indigenous intellectual and activist traditions, I will explore a politics of self-recognition that is less oriented around attaining an affirmative form of recognition from Indigenous peoples’ master-other (the liberal settler-state and society), and more about critically revaluating, reconstructing and redeploying Indigenous cultural forms in ways that seek to prefigure alternatives to the colonial social relations that continue to facilitate the dispossession of Indigenous lands and self-determining authority.

This thesis opens discussion on American alien invasion films of the 90s as a self-critique, a reaction to being an imperial power at the end of the Cold War. The alien menace in these films is not the "other" but rather the U.S. itself being the colonizer or conqueror looking to expand its sphere of influence. Furthermore, it discusses how Presidential rhetoric in the films play a role in this postcolonial reading. Specific works studied are: Independence Day (1996), Mars Attacks! (1996), Babylon 5: In the Beginning (1998), and The Puppet Masters (1994).

Violence against Native women in Canada is widespread and has deeply systemic and colonial roots. This paper will attempt to show the role that dominant representations of culture, race, and gender have in allowing this violence to continue by eclipsing many different narratives and ways of expressing cultural and individual identities. Violence in the mainstream media will be explored and analyzed drawing on concepts from critical theories, Aboriginal epistemological frameworks, and anti-racist, disability, and Afro-centric feminisms to build a framework on which to analyze the meanings of the representations. After exploring violent and colonial discourse, the discussion will turn to art. Self and cultural representation and expression by Native women can act as important forms of resistance to the tools of colonial oppression. The artwork of Rebecca Belmore and Shelley Niro are powerful examples of addressing and exploring issues of identity, culture, resistance, and survival for Aboriginal women.

This work brings an anti-colonial reading to the production and maintenance of racial logic in Cuban schooling, through conversations with, and surveys of Cuban teachers, as well as through analysis of secondary and primary documents. The study undertaken seeks to contribute to the limited existent research on race relations in Cuba, with a research focus on the Cuban educational context. Teasing and staking out a middle ground between the blinding and often hollow pro-Cuba fanaticism and the deafening anti -Cuban rhetoric from the left and right respectively, this project seeks a more nuanced, complete and dialogical understanding of race and race relations in Cuba, with a specific focus on the educational context. With this in mind, the learning objectives of this study are to investigate the following: 1) What role does racism play in Cuba currently and historically? 2) What is the role of education in the life of race and racism on the island? 3) What new questions and insights emerge from the Cuban example that might be of use to integrated anti-racism, anti-colonialism and class-oriented scholarship and activism? On a more specific level, the guiding research objectives of the study are to investigate the following: 1) How do teachers support and/or challenge dominant ideas of race and racism, and to what degree to do they construct their own meanings on these topics? 2) How do teachers understand the relevance of race and racism for teaching and learning? 3) How and why do teachers address race and racism in the classroom? The data reveal a complex process of meaning making by teachers who are at once produced by and producers of dominant race discourse on the island. Teachers are the front line race workers of the racial project, doing much of the heavy lifting in the ongoing struggle against racism, but are at the same time custodians of an approach to race relations which has on the whole failed to eliminate racism. This work investigates and explicates this apparent contradiction inherent in teachers’ work and discourse on the island, revealing a flawed and complex form of Cuban anti-racism.

After the change of their country’s political and international statuses, post-colonial and respectively post-communist individuals and collectives develop feelings of alienation and estrangement that do not involve physical dislocation. Eventually, they start imagining their national community as a collective of individuals who share this state. Paraphrasing Benedict Anderson’s definition of the nation as an “imagined community,” this study identifies this process as “imagined exile,” an act that temporarily compensates for the absence of a metanarrative of the nation during the post-colonial and post-communist transitions. This dissertation analyzes and compares ten English Canadian and Romanian plays, written between 1976 and 2004, and argues that they function as expressions and agents of post-colonial and respectively post-communist imagined exile, helping their readers and audiences overcome the identity crisis and regain the feeling of belonging to a national community. Chapter 1 explores the development of major theoretical concepts, such as nation, national identity, national identity crisis, post-colonialism, and post-communism. Chapter 2 and Chapter 3 analyze dramatic rewritings of historical events, in “1837: The Farmers’ Revolt” by the theatre Passe Muraille with Rick Salutin as dramaturge, and “A Cold” by Marin Sorescu, and of past political leaders, in “Sir John, Eh!” by Jim Garrard and “A Day from the Life of Nicolae Ceausescu” by Denis Dinulescu. Chapter 4 examines the expression of the individual and collective identity crises in “Sled” by Judith Thompson and “The Future Is Rubbish” by Vlad Zografi. Chapter 5 explores the treatment of physical and cultural borders and borderlands in Kelly Rebar’s “Bordertown Café”, Guillermo Verdecchia’s “Fronteras Americanas”, Petre Barbu’s “God Bless America”, and Saviana Stanescu’s “Waxing West”. The concluding chapter briefly discusses the concept of imagined exile in relation to other investigations of post-colonial and post-communist dramas and reviews some of the latest perspectives of national identity, reassessing this study from a diachronic perspective.

Violence against Native women in Canada is widespread and has deeply systemic and colonial roots. This paper will attempt to show the role that dominant representations of culture, race, and gender have in allowing this violence to continue by eclipsing many different narratives and ways of expressing cultural and individual identities. Violence in the mainstream media will be explored and analyzed drawing on concepts from critical theories, Aboriginal epistemological frameworks, and anti-racist, disability, and Afro-centric feminisms to build a framework on which to analyze the meanings of the representations. After exploring violent and colonial discourse, the discussion will turn to art. Self and cultural representation and expression by Native women can act as important forms of resistance to the tools of colonial oppression. The artwork of Rebecca Belmore and Shelley Niro are powerful examples of addressing and exploring issues of identity, culture, resistance, and survival for Aboriginal women.

Social work imagines itself as a site of goodness and justice. My thesis illustrates the ways in which commitments to the profession’s social justice-oriented ideals are ruptured when racialized social workers name the operation of racism within everyday sites of professional practice. I show how colonial and imperial constructions of helping (moral superiority and goodness) continue to shape the hegemonic scripts about the role and practices of social work, reinscribing white dominance in social work knowledge production. Historically, racialized bodies have been constituted as Others, subjects to be regulated, controlled and ‘saved’ within the colonial project. I examine the dilemmas that emerge when racialized Others become the helpers and attempt to perform a normative identity that is constructed through white dominance. In this study, I provide a detailed analysis of twenty-three semi-structured interviews with racialized social workers. I trace the production of the profession’s values and notions of good practice within their narratives. I specifically explore the moments in which ‘good’ practice and commitments to the values of the profession break down in everyday work with clients and co-workers. Racist encounters with clients appear as overwhelming occurrences within workers’ narratives, and a complex paradox is revealed: the discursive arrangements within social work that constitute good, social justice-oriented practice, are the very same discourses that disavow the operation of racism. Within these moments workers are left questioning whether or not they can be ‘good social workers’ because the act of naming racism appears to be incompatible with their commitments to the values that shape what is recognized as good social work practice. The narratives presented in this thesis point to the trespasses, erasures and individualizing discourses that secure whiteness at the exact moments in which race is made invisible. I contend that, when workers name racism, their very presence is destabilizing to a social work profession that needs to construct an image of itself as a site of goodness. Social work must examine the colonial continuities that construct contemporary practices, and to make visible the ways in which hegemonic scripts shaping justice and goodness reinstall whiteness and collude with racism.

This dissertation examines the discursive production of mudang, also known as shamans, during the late Chosŏn Dynasty (eighteenth to nineteenth-centuries) and during the Japanese colonial period in Korea (1910-1945). The many discursive sites on mudang articulated various types of difference, often based on gender and urban/rural divides. This dissertation explores four bodies of work: eighteenth to nineteenth-century neo-Confucian reformist essays, late nineteenth-century western surveys of Korea, early twentieth-century newspapers and journals, and early ethnographic studies. The mudang was used throughout this period to reinforce gendered distinctions, prescribe spatial hierarchies, and promote capitalist modernity. In particular, institutional developments in shamanism studies under colonial rule, coupled with an expanded print media critique against mudang, signalled the needs and desires to pronounce a distinct indigenous identity under foreign rule. Chapter One traces three pre-colonial discursive developments, Russian research on Siberian shamanism under Catherine the Great, neo-Confucian writings on "mudang," and Claude Charles Dallet’s late nineteenth-century survey of Korean indigenous practices. Chapter Two examines the last decade of the nineteenth-century, studying the simultaneous emergence of Isabella Bird Bishop’s expanded discussion on Korean shamanism alongside early Korean newspapers’ social criticisms of mudang. Chapter Three looks at Korean newspapers and journals as the source and product of an urban discourse from 1920-1940. Chapter Four examines the same print media to consider why mudang were contrasted from women as ethical household consumers and scientific homemakers. Chapter Five looks at Ch’oe Nam-sŏn and Yi Nŭng-hwa’s 1927 treatises on Korean shamanism as a celebration of ethnic identity which became a form of intervention in an environment where Korean shamanism was used to justify colonial rule.