Thesis (Ph. D.)--Harvard University, 2005. / "May 2005." Includes bibliographical references (leaves 531-548).

No description available.

Thesis (M.A.)--University of Florida, 2006. / Title from title page of source document. Document formatted into pages; contains 174 pages. Includes vita. Includes bibliographical references.

What do the Madagascan Poinciana tree, the South American Bougainvillea bush, and the Australian Casuarina pine have in common with 300,000 people of primarily West African descent? Firstly, they all contribute to making the Bahamas what it is—paradise. Secondly, they are all well-adjusted aliens; bright, buoyant, beautiful immigrants so well entrenched in Bahamian land, soil, and ways that one might assume they had been in the country for thousands of years. This is preferable. Witness the jaunty effervescence of the tourism jingle 'It's Better in the Bahamas'. As a nation whose livelihood is dependant on the appearance of bliss, it is clearly beneficial to perpetuate the concept of cheery, carefree natives—be they brown of skin or red of flower. Bahamians, it may be said, are like rows of crimson royal Poinciana arching to canopy across a Nassau avenue, like gardens brimming full with peach and fuchsia Bougainvillea, like lines of shore-shading Casuarinas; resplendent beings magnificently entrenched in the land. Gardening explores the identities of these allegedly well-adjusted aliens, both human and botanic. This means celebrating the Poinciana's fiery summertime blooms. This means dipping into the dirt exposed when said Poinciana is toppled, post-hurricane, its root system too weakly joined to the land's thin and rocky soil to withstand strong storm winds. If Bahamian people are like the plants that surround them, what are we to take from the Casuarina pine, an invasive import currently colonizing the island coastlines? And what from the national tree, Lignum Vitae, now virtually unknown? Gardening, through poetry and short fiction, explores the beauty and madness of what are currently considered Bahamian people and plants. This exploration is both explicit and indirect; some pieces ponder the significance of intermittently beautiful and fragile lives. Others seek to capture the incongruity of identity, classification, and everyday life in a land where the concept of indigenity is an enormous fraud.

In this investigation I discuss power relations between agricultural frontier colonists and the Nicaraguan State, within a framework of neoliberal environmental policies. In so doing, I analyze the origins of this relationship, construction and nature of the State, mestizos-peasants-colonists identity, migration to the agricultural frontier, and the space under contention. Under the pressure of the World Bank, the State has passed several environmental and indigenous rights protection laws. This legal framework involves evicting the colonists from indigenous territories and natural reserves. It has been a decade since the framework was passed, but the government has not fulfilled this duty. This fact raises question about the capabilities of the colonists to remain within those places and the willingness of the government to enforce the law. Between 2009 and 2014, I did ethnographic work and collected geographic information in Mayangna Sauni Bas and Mayangna Sauni Bu indigenous territories, located in the northwest region of Nicaragua. My findings reveal that the colonists are engaged in micropolitics relations with local mestizo power groups. These relations grant protagonism to the colonists to negotiate with the government those measures that they regard as unfair. I reached two main conclusions: the State has marginalized and racialized the colonists, and contradictory interests among the power groups that form the State contribute to these micropolitics relations. This dissertation argues the need to focus agricultural frontier studies in more inclusive and integral ways. Colonists have played the double role of being victimizers of indigenous people and their environmental resources, and victims of ambitions and discrimination from the State. The experiences that colonists, and peasants in general, have acquired through generations under abuses and violence are shaping their own knowledge and political standpoint. / text

Thesis (Ph. D. in History)--Vanderbilt University, Aug. 2006. / Vita Includes bibliographical references.

Thesis (Ph. D. in Spanish)--Vanderbilt University, Aug. 2008. / Title from title screen. Includes bibliographical references.

Thesis (Ph. D. in History)--Vanderbilt University, Aug. 2006. / Title from title screen. Includes bibliographical references.

MA, Faculty of Arts, University of the Witwatersrand, 1995

Thesis (Ph.D.)--University of Wisconsin--Madison, 2008. / Includes bibliographical references (p. 305-317). Also available on the Internet.