This dissertation studies representations of diaspora, sexuality and gender, and affect in Shani Mootoo's Cereus Blooms at Night (1996), Wayson Choy's The Jade Peony (1995), Shyam Selvadurai's Funny Boy (1994), and Dionne Brand's In Another Place, Not Here (1996). There is a notable absence of explicitly named sexual and gender identities in these novels. I argue that this absence is a function of diasporic doubleness: the identities are lost in the trauma of relocation and ongoing cultural translation; they have never been inscribed in collective memories about originary lands or have been inscribed only negatively; or they cannot be concretized in language because, under the disorienting conditions of diasporic mobility, nothing that matters is ever concrete. Mootoo, Choy, Selvadurai, and Brand choose against assigning distinct sexual or gender identities to their characters in part because they refuse to reproduce the social, legaL psychologicaL and medical categories through which discursive power flows. This suspension of naming, however, is not only a matter of counter-discursive opposition. Considered in the context of collective displacement, this suspension also produces an opportunity for queer diasporans to strengthen communal bonds across the fragmentary prejudices and differences that are internal to diasporas. By focusing on emergent experiences of sex-gender desire, Mootoo, Choy, Selvadurai, and Brand create room for affiliation between characters-queer and not-who might otherwise remain separated by the power and politics that flow through language. Whereas Western cultures are philosophically founded on binary separations of mind and body, human and animal, civilization and chaos, and thinking and feeling, affect theorists recognize that humans are first and foremost feeling entities, and that sensation is an integral part of any human experience. The key tenant of affect theory, that the economy of the physical body is a rich resource of agency, motivation, and hope, enables me to find common ground between the quite different interests of diaspora theory and queer theory in literary-cultural analysis. / Thesis / Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)

This thesis focuses on the aesthetics of the sense of touch – haptic aesthetics – in contemporary Canadian diasporic literature. My reading of diasporic embodiment will discuss three contemporary novels, Anne Michaels’s Fugitive Pieces (1996), Dionne Brand’s What We All Long For (2005), and David Chariandy’s Soucouyant (2007), for what these novels suggest about the incoherent nature of cultural boundaries and the alternative possibilities for embodiment and community formation through an analysis of the sense of touch. Set in the urban and suburban spaces of Toronto, Ontario, these narratives represent diasporic bodies and experiences less through concrete acts of social, historical, or biomedical identification, and more so through creative tactile and affective gestures of agency and community. I explore the ways in which diasporic subjects in these novels negotiate their biomedical, sociocultural, and geographic positions through haptic metaphoric processes of what I call “skin diving.” / Graduate / 0401 / 0352 / 0422 / nbirchbayley@gmail.com

Fundação Carlos Chagas Filho de Amparo a Pesquisa do Estado do Rio de Janeiro / Este estudo tem como proposta pensar questões acerca das narrativas, das identidades e das produções de conhecimentos na afro-diáspora, tendo como foco os processos que se dão na prática cultural do jongo. Compreendo que as populações afrodiaspóricas historicamente sofreram e sofrem com as violências cometidas pelo empreendimento colonial. O colonialismo instaurou regimes de verdades propagando perspectiva única sobre a história. Assim, a narrativa que prevalece sobre as populações negras é as que os representam sobre a condição de subalternidade. Ao elegermos o jongo- prática cultural significada pelas populações afrodiaspóricas em diferentes tempos/espaços cotidianos- e ao nos colocarmos em um lugar de escuta atenta, visibilizamos outras narrativas, imagens e conhecimentos que confrontam e desestabilizam a perspectiva hegemônica divulgada pelo colonialismo. Este trabalho propõe pensar o jongo não como historicamente foi representado pelas tradições colonialista, mas busca ampliar a compressão sobre essa cultura como outras possibilidade de pensar o mundo, outras bases explicativas e epistemológicas. / This work has the proposal to think about issues of narratives, identities and knowledge production in afro-diaspora, focusing on the processes inside of Jongos cultural practice .I understand that African diasporics populations historically have suffered and are suffering from the violence committed by the colonial enterprise. Colonialism established schemes introduced unique insight into the story. Thus, the narrative predominant is the representation of black population on the condition of subalternity. To define the Jongo cultural practice that had meant by African diasporics populations in different space/time- and put ourselves in place of great attention listening, we can observation other narratives, images and knowledge that confront and destabilize the hegemonic perspective has spread by colonialism. This study proposes think jongo not as historically been represented by the colonial traditions, but seeks to increase the compression on this culture as other possibility of thinking about the world, other explanatory and epistemological bases.

Fundação Carlos Chagas Filho de Amparo a Pesquisa do Estado do Rio de Janeiro / Este estudo tem como proposta pensar questões acerca das narrativas, das identidades e das produções de conhecimentos na afro-diáspora, tendo como foco os processos que se dão na prática cultural do jongo. Compreendo que as populações afrodiaspóricas historicamente sofreram e sofrem com as violências cometidas pelo empreendimento colonial. O colonialismo instaurou regimes de verdades propagando perspectiva única sobre a história. Assim, a narrativa que prevalece sobre as populações negras é as que os representam sobre a condição de subalternidade. Ao elegermos o jongo- prática cultural significada pelas populações afrodiaspóricas em diferentes tempos/espaços cotidianos- e ao nos colocarmos em um lugar de escuta atenta, visibilizamos outras narrativas, imagens e conhecimentos que confrontam e desestabilizam a perspectiva hegemônica divulgada pelo colonialismo. Este trabalho propõe pensar o jongo não como historicamente foi representado pelas tradições colonialista, mas busca ampliar a compressão sobre essa cultura como outras possibilidade de pensar o mundo, outras bases explicativas e epistemológicas. / This work has the proposal to think about issues of narratives, identities and knowledge production in afro-diaspora, focusing on the processes inside of Jongos cultural practice .I understand that African diasporics populations historically have suffered and are suffering from the violence committed by the colonial enterprise. Colonialism established schemes introduced unique insight into the story. Thus, the narrative predominant is the representation of black population on the condition of subalternity. To define the Jongo cultural practice that had meant by African diasporics populations in different space/time- and put ourselves in place of great attention listening, we can observation other narratives, images and knowledge that confront and destabilize the hegemonic perspective has spread by colonialism. This study proposes think jongo not as historically been represented by the colonial traditions, but seeks to increase the compression on this culture as other possibility of thinking about the world, other explanatory and epistemological bases.

This dissertation examines the intersection between diasporic subjectivities and scientific knowledge production in the works of Shani Mootoo, Madeleine Thien, Larissa Lai, and Rita Wong. I read these authors as participating in a burgeoning scene of diasporic Canadian writing that draws on concepts and tropes derived from the life sciences to think through a broad constellation of issues relating to contemporary diasporic experience, from the role of biogenetic discourses in the diasporic search for ancestry, to the embodied dimensions of diasporic memory and trauma, to the role of diaspora communities in the decolonial struggle against the emergent forms of “biopower” that contemporary bioscience has enabled. As the first study to address this burgeoning topic in diasporic Canadian literature, this dissertation asks: Why are diasporic Canadian authors taking up bioscience as a key topos for the exploration of contemporary diasporic experiences? How is this engagement with the life sciences re-shaping current conversations about diasporic kinship, memory, and embodiment, and about the role of diasporic communities in contemporary struggles for environmental justice? Complicating frameworks that understand bioscience only as an instrument of what Foucault calls “biopower,” I argue that the works of Mootoo, Thien, Lai and Wong prompt us to rethink the ways in which queer, feminist, anti-racist, and environmental struggles might constructively interface with the life sciences to challenge emergent forms of biological essentialism and biopolitical control. I demonstrate that, by using bioscientific tropes to highlight the complex and open-ended life processes that shape the human body and the wider environment, these authors construct epistemologies that attend to the global networks of biopower through which neoimperialism operates while also acknowledging the interconnected ways in which living organisms and material substances destabilize these global flows. I argue that, in so doing, these authors position diasporic knowledge production as a crucial locus for the rethinking of relations between politics and ecology, and between humanist and scientific ways of knowing, that science studies scholars like Donna Haraway and Bruno Latour and decolonial critics like Boaventura de Sousa Santos have identified as a central to contemporary struggles for environmental justice. Each chapter explores the work of one diasporic Canadian author in relation to a single, historically specific site of scientific knowledge production. Chapter one examines how Mootoo’s Cereus Blooms at Night combines notions of gothic excess with a materialist emphasis on the material agencies that inhere through bodies and environments in order to disrupt the gendered and racial discourses propagated by imperial botany. Chapter two explores how Thien’s novels Certainty and Dogs at the Perimeter draw on current debates around the neurobiology of memory and emotion to grapple, on one hand, with the fragmentation induced through diasporic trauma and, on the other, with the uncertainty of global risk culture. Chapter three examines how Lai’s Salt Fish Girl disrupts popular and scientific discourses concerning the genetic basis of diasporic ancestry to advance a model of kinship that is rooted not in a shared ethnic heritage, but in a shared immersion in a complex web of interactions that includes genetic, evolutionary, and environmental forces. Finally, chapter four examines how Rita Wong’s forage mobilizes contemporary debates around the spread of genetically modified organisms to stage a productive encounter between diasporic, Indigenous, and scientific knowledges. I argue that, in the process of engaging with these various scientific debates, these writers stage trenchant critiques of the colonial legacies and neo-imperial investments of contemporary bioscientific culture while also modeling more fruitful, ethical, and hopeful ways of engaging with scientific knowledge.

This dissertation revisits a piece of forgotten history of Chinese cinema from 1930s to 1950s when Chinese filmmakers formed a cross-border, Pacific Rim network of cinematic exchanges among various Chinese diasporic communities. Through a transnational and diasporic lens, it explores new relationships between Chinese filmmakers, traditional stage culture, language differences, Chinese ethnicity, and politics. It argues that Chinese cinema, from its early age, was the product of transnational movements of capital, people, and ideas among the Chinese diaspora. The global links among various Chinese communities initiated and sustained the development of Chinese cinema. / 博士(アメリカ研究) / Doctor of Philosophy in American Studies / 同志社大学 / Doshisha University

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Since the 1979 revolution the Iranian popular culture, specifically the popular music, has turned into a peculiar landscape complicated by politics, regulations, technology and the border-crossing of resources. The Islamic Republic’s initial ban on popular music caused a massive exodus of artists and producers out of the country and eventually to Los Angeles. There, the popular music industry’s resources and talents reunited and resumed their production. At the same time, inside Iran, the absence of a popular culture (Iranian or otherwise) created a vacuum in the public sphere that the government-endorsed mystic art-house cinema and traditional music could not fill. The Iranian public turned to its now-exiled pop artists and despite the ban, the cassettes and videotapes of the Los Angeles productions flooded the black markets. Thereafter, when describing music, the terms diasporic and popular became synonymous for Iranians. The present study examines the relevance of the Iranian diasporic popular culture to the construction of the Iranian youth identity and identifies global satellite age trends from within the diaspora that subvert or revise the hegemonic order of Tehrangeles popular culture. / text

Philosophiae Doctor - PhD / This study examines temporal entanglement in three novels by Jamaican-born author Nalo Hopkinson. The novels are: Brown Girl in the Ring (1998), Midnight Robber (2000), and The Salt Roads (2004). The study pays particular attention to Hopkinson's use of narrative temporalities, which are shape by creolisation. I argue that Hopkinson creatively theorises black women's subjectivities in relation to (post) colonial politics of domination. Specifically, creolised temporalities are presented as a response to predatory Western modernity. Her innovative diasporic science fiction displays common preoccupations associated with Caribbean women writers, such as belonging and exile, and the continued violence enacted by the legacy of colonialism and slavery. A central emphasis of the study is an analysis of how Hopkinson not only employs a past gaze, as the majority of both Caribbean and postcolonial writing does to recover the subaltern subject, but also how she uses the future to reclaim and reconstruct a sense of selfhood and agency, specifically with regards to black women. Linked to the future is her engagement with notions of technological and social betterment and progress as exemplified by her emphasis on the use of technology as a tool of empire. By writing science fiction, Hopkinson is able to delve into the nebulous nexus of technology, empire, slavery, capitalism and modernity. And, by employing a temporality shaped by creolisation, she is able to collapse discrete historical time-frames, tracing obscured connections between the nodes of this nexus from its beginnings on the plantation, the birthplace of creolisation and, as some have argued, of modernity itself.

This study documents the attitudes and perspectives toward Japanese language education of seven “newly-arrived” Japanese immigrants, jp. Shin-issei, who are raising bilingual or multilingual children in New Orleans, Louisiana. The participants of this study consisted of six mothers and one father who speak Japanese to their children at home and act as teachers of this language at the Japanese Weekend School of New Orleans, jp. Nyū Orinzu Nihongo Hoshūkō, a supplementary language school. Grounded in ethnographic fieldwork and interviews, this thesis has two interrelated objectives: One is to analyze parents’ attitudes toward Japanese language maintenance and show that although the home remains the crucial site for language education, the Japanese School of New Orleans represents a relevant site for the maintenance of the Japanese language and the indoctrination of Japanese cultural values. The second is to explore how these parents connect the process of teaching at and attending the school to a sentiment of diasporic nationalism. This study calls for a renewed ethnographic focus on often ignored —or known by few— immigrant communities in Louisiana by recognizing the presence of Japanese immigrants in this area, their constant efforts to maintain ties and connections to their home country, and their motivations to do so.