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The Caodai religion of Vietnam has often been labeled as a peasant-driven, politico-religious sect due to its anti-colonial activities during the first half of the 1940s. This paper conducts an historical analysis of Caodaism’s formative years (1926-1941) to show that the religion was in fact primarily managed by Cochinchinese (South Vietnamese) elites who appropriated many of the governance and economic models introduced by the French colonial government. Combining their knowledge of Western bureaucratic systems with Asian religious traditions into a form of hybridity that exhibited both cultures, these elites founded the religion of Caodaism. The paper uses the concept of hybridity to look at how other aspects embody the negotiation and reappropriation of ideas by Caodaists. These include the concept of salvation, the religion’s spirit pantheon, Caodaism’s most famous Western convert (Gabriel Gobron), and the Caodai community in Tay Ninh province. I argue that these hybrid forms allowed Caodaists to overcome a sense of cultural inferiority by establishing cultural parity with the West. Furthermore, I look at the recent developments within Caodaist communities that have formed in the wake of the 1975 Vietnamese Diaspora. I first examine the influence of restrictive state policies on Caodaists in the homeland and compare it with the experiences of diasporic Vietnamese in rebuilding their religion outside of Vietnam. I find that these diasporic communities are caught between two poles in their attempts to revive the religion. Some overseas Caodaists feel that it is necessary to preserve the tradition by supporting mainland Caodaism from the outside. Others find it more suitable to begin reinventing the religion to cater to diasporic needs and challenges. This tension, I argue, also constitutes a type of hybridity in which individuals must delegate between these two approaches to decide the future of their religion. / text

This research is concerned with the problems and possibilities of combining diverse forms of peacebuilding in the same peacebuilding space. It analyses patterns of interaction between various forms of peacebuilding using a framework of hybridity. Within debates on peacebuilding hybridities, frictional encounters are situated between international peacebuilders and 'locals' who are predominantly conceptualised as domestic, indigenous and globally Southern. While enhancing understandings of local/international interactions, this conceptualisation excludes constituencies of locals who occupy global spaces - those in diaspora. Diaspora activists have been shown to ambivalently shape other processes of homeland change as either mediators or meddlers due to the opportunities and limitations arising from being in diaspora. In spite of this, an in-depth understanding of the roles of diaspora in hybrid peacebuilding debates is lacking. When diaspora activists have been analysed in relation to peacebuilding, it has been primarily outside of the framework of hybridity which - due to its roots in postcolonial theory - extolls resistance to international peacebuilding as having enormous peacebuilding potential. As such, diaspora who resist international peacebuilding processes have been consistently cast as peace-wreckers which belies the tolerance for resistance so central to hybrid analyses. In light of the potential for diaspora, and particularly those in opposition to formal peacebuilding, to transform, assuage or exacerbate patterns of interaction between locals and internationals, this research centralises diaspora opposition activism in a hybrid analysis of a peacebuilding space. It does this through a single case study of UK Sudanese activists and their contributions to Sudanese peacebuilding. Sudanese peacebuilding is characterised by its diversity: it combines international peace agreements, elite dialogues, top-down transitional justice with local-level community reconciliation and bottom-up political change movements. It therefore provides an exemplary case of a peacebuilding space in which multiple forms of peacebuilding with diverse, and often contradictory aims, coalesce and contend with one another. The study examines how Sudanese activists resident in the UK shape the patterns of interaction within Sudanese peacebuilding, and asks how various aspects of 'being in diaspora' make those contributions possible. In doing so, this research contributes to understandings of how, why and with what effects diverse actors, ideas and processes combine during peacebuilding.

Hybridity is the result when visual form, color or tools interact. While not every combination of multiple elements result in success, I believe creativity, intuition and serendipity determines the successful hybridity. This is the documentation of my journey to develop a personal definition of successful hybridity in graphic design.

In the two novels, The God of Small Things by Arundhati Roy and Midnight’s Children by Salman Rushdie, characters show that their preconceptions and encounter with the Westerners play a big role in how they view Westerners and/or Indians who have adapted to or grown up with the Western lifestyle. Due to Roy’s family being a group of “Anglophiles” and liking the British, they see Sophie Mol being half-Indian as positive. Padma, Saleem’s partner in Rushdie’s novel, on the other hand, is less familiar with the British and therefore has problems accepting that Saleem is half-English. This difference between how the two families view the half-breeds, Sophie Mol and Saleem, can also be connected to the long history of colonialism, where Roy’s family has been trained to like the British, whilst Padma was born after India’s independence and was not trained to like the former colonists. Similarly, Chacko is being more accepted for his adaptation to English ways by his family than Aadam is by his family. However, Chacko is not accepted by the English, where he feels that he belongs, which makes both Chacko and Aadam feel “rootless” in their home culture. It is through these preconceptions and different encounters that characters view and believe that there is a difference in behaviour between the Indian and Western women, and that Westerners have a need to have higher status than the Indians. This essay shows that Indians have different views depending on their knowledge, lack of knowledge, interest or lack of faith in the West.

Colonial powers exert dominance over their subject countries in multiple registers, for example, education and spatial constructions, which foster the colonised other‘s identification with the colonial power centre. Racial and local cultures of subject nations are thus systematically distorted and the transmission of memory through material culture is obscured. Focusing on contemporary Taiwan, this research examines how architectural and ideological strategies were employed by the dominant authorities to consolidate the power centre and explores possible means for shaping Taiwanese spatial subjectivity in the historical aftermath of such situations. The research examines the Formosans‘ ambiguous identification with local cultures and marginal spatial propositions, as well as discussing the inculcation of the 'great Chinese ideology‘ by analysing the teaching materials used in modern Taiwanese primary education. Reviewing aspects of contemporary post-colonial theory, the research explores the spatial implications of Taiwanese post-colonial textual narratives and argues for them as a potential source for the construction of contemporary spatial conditions, as these novels are shaped by an awareness of the importance of local cultures and the voices of marginalised people. The thesis thus suggests that a re-thinking of Taiwan‘s public spaces can be stimulated by spatial metaphors in textual narratives that associate peoples‘ memories of political and local events with spatial images that were previously suppressed. To explore the potential for the generation of space through reference to literary works, this research studies the ‗narrative architecture‘ experiments of the 1970s and 80s and goes on to propose a series of representational media for the construction of spatial narrations in Taiwan. Multiple spatial propositions concerning the island‘s post-colonial condition can be suggested by the visualisation of spatial metaphors that are embedded in Taiwanese textual narratives. At the end of the thesis, two proposals for post-colonial spatial narration are put forward, which transform the spatial propositions latent in the devices developed through a new juxtaposition with existing urban contexts. The intention of the research is to indicate a new urban spatial strategy for Taiwan, one that can allow its people to grasp the multiple layers of their conflicted spatial history while at the same time responding to the ongoing spatial confrontation between the power centre and the voices in the margins.

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This dissertation examines the politics of representation within the novel of the Third World. Drawing on the scholarship of Edward Said, Gayatri Spivak, Homi Bhabha, and Fredric Jameson, I situate Salman Rushdie and Orhan Pamuk within literary attempts at national representation and narratives of westernization. The main question that the study raises is: what are the literary results of migration, cultural or religious conversion within the increasingly diversifying metropolitan centers? I find that such double consciousness of the migrant artist provides an exilic writing that instigates two types of perspectives: satirical and melancholic. I argue that both authors narrativize a similar process of confronting the western cultural legacy, but differ in their reflection on their national and Islamic backgrounds.

Magister Artium - MA / A key aim of this study is to shed light on the representation of coloured women with reference to racial passing, using fictive characters depicted in Sarah Gertrude Millin’s (1924) God's Stepchildren, Zoë Wicomb's (2006) Playing in the Light, and Pat Stamatélos's (2005) Kroes, as presented by these three racially distinct female South African authors. Since I propose that literature provides a link between a subjective history and the under-represented narratives from the margins, I use literature to reimagine these. I analyse the ways in which the authors present 'hybrid' identities within their characters in different ways, and provide an explanation and contextual basis for the exploration of the theme of 'passing for and as white' within South Africa's complex history. I provide a sociological explanation of the act of racial passing in South Africa with reference to the United States by incorporating Nella Larsen's (1929) Passing. Since the analyses will concentrate on coloured females within the texts, gendered identity and female sexuality and stereotypes will be the focus. I look at the act and agent of passing, the role of raced and gendered performance in giving meaning to social identities, and the way in which the female body is constructed in racial terms in order to confer identity. Tracing the historical origins of coloured identity and coloured female identity, I interrogate this colonial, post-colonial, apartheid and post-apartheid history by employing a feminist lens. A combination of postcolonial feminist discourse analysis, sociological inquiry and feminist narrative analysis are therefore the methods I use to achieve my research aims. Chapter 1: The concepts of 'coloured', 'coloured identity', and 'passing' are introduced. I provide a historical overview of the origins of 'colouredness' in the South African context to examine the historical, ideological and social implications of the subject matter under discussion. Chapter 2: Set over a period between the years 1821 to 1921 God's Stepchildren deals with a family spanning four generations, bound by 'tainted' blood. I focus on the character Elmira who represents the third generation of the initial 'miscegenation'. I look at the effect the racist social milieu has on the author’s representation of coloured women and how this translates into apparently insurmountable beliefs that stereotypes equal nature. Chapter 3: Playing in the Light confronts racial passing through an unwitting passer and her intentionally passing parents. I analyse how Wicomb presents the protagonist's struggle to relocate her identity in contemporary South African society. I compare the attitudes toward race presented by the characters, especially across the two generations of passing women in the novel in order to demonstrate a progression in attitudes toward passing. Chapter 4: Kroes, published in 2005, is partially biographical. The novel is set in urban Cape Town and Johannesburg of the late 1950s to 1970. The protagonist, and central passing figure, narrates the story in the first person using Cape vernacular Afrikaans. I look at the way in which women are influenced by internalised inferiority, and how arbitrary skin pigmentation is deemed to decide their fate. Chapter 5: I draw together the common themes found in the three works of fiction, and draw inferences from my findings about the representation of coloured women.

Master of Arts / In the southwest corner of China, the confluence of cultural diversity and national integration have produced a new kind of voice in the Chinese language: an ethnic voice. Speaking fluently in the Chinese nation’s language and culturally beyond its Han foundations, minority ethnic writers or shaoshu minzu in China are inciting a challenge to the traditional conceptions of Chineseness. In the PRC, the re-imagining of the boundaries between ethnicity, nation, and the globe is being produced in ethnic voices that resist the monopolizing narratives of the CCP and the Han cultural center. Furthermore, in the West where the antiquated conception of China as a monolithic Other is still often employed, the existence of these ethnic voices of difference demands a (re)cognition of its multifaceted and interwoven ethnic, political, and social composition. Three ethnic poets from the southwest are examined in this thesis: Woeser (Tibetan), He Xiaozhu (Miao), and Jimu Langge (Yi). They represent the trajectory of ethnic voice in China along the paradigms of local/ethnic vision, national culture, and global connections. By being both within and outside the Chinese nation and culture, they express a hybrid struggle that exists within the collision of ethnic minority cultures and the Han cultural center. Like the hybridity of postcolonial literature, this is a collision that cannot be reduced to it parts, yet also privileges the glocal impetus of ethnically centered vision. The poets’ voices speak the voice of difference within China, the Chinese language, and Chineseness throughout the world.