With its focus on immigration to the United States and development of American identity, Bharati Mukherjee’s fiction eludes literary categorization. It engages with the various contexts of multiculturalism, postcolonialism, and globalization, yet Mukherjee adamantly positions herself as an American author writing American literature. In this essay, I investigate the intersections between Mukherjee’s focus on the American character, culture, and people and developing theories and critical debates on globalization. Through Mukherjee’s works, we can see American identity in a state of flux, made possible by the immigrant and the relationships established between the transnational individual and America. Mukherjee’s immigrant characters challenge and expose American mythology from the American Dream of individual achievement to the canonical literature of Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter, rewriting them to show how foundational the immigrant is to American culture. I trace Mukherjee’s redefinition of the American character in and through three successive novels – Wife, Jasmine, and The Holder of the World. In Wife, Mukherjee challenges America’s adoption of multiculturalism because she considers it a means of essentializing ethnicity and both maintaining and enhancing difference. This multiculturalism, as part of America’s assumed principles of acceptance, alienates the protagonist Dimple from her immigrant community and the larger American culture, resulting in her violent attempts to force her Americanization. Jasmine continues to work against multiculturalism by explicitly inserting the immigrant into the American mythos, reshaping the Western literary canon to include the transnational individual and to assert the immigrant foundations of American ideology. Mukherjee expands her focus in Holder of the World as her protagonist Hannah travels to England, India, and the bourgeoning United States, rewriting The Scarlet Letter to suggest that globalizing forces have been present throughout American cultural history, not just at the end of the 20th century when critical debates began to flourish. Through analysis of these novels, I argue that Mukherjee’s reformulation of American character reasserts American ideals by including and developing with the rise of globalization theory.

Abstract

Ethnic media are powerful, and yet overlooked, spaces that immigrants and ethnic minorities establish to address issues that are not discussed in the dominant host society media. With the international migration of over five million people each year from majority to minority world nations, the emergence of ethnic media in countries around the world has increased significantly; however, relatively little is understood about the ways in which these spaces are used by immigrants and ethnic minorities. This thesis adds to a relatively new area of study in sociology, international development, and alternative media studies and investigates the ways in which Spanish-language ethnic media acts as a ‘Third Space’ where Hispanics disseminate, negotiate, (re)construct, and (re)articulate new notions of hybrid Hispanic-Canadian identity, an identity that operates against, and engages with, multiple-forms of difference and exclusion within Canada. A qualitative discourse analysis of 18 articles from Spanish-language ethnic media source El Correo Canadiense reveals the ways in which Hispanics in Canada negotiate hybridized identity by using ethnic media as a space to create a discourse that acts counter-hegemonically to Canadian mass-media. The findings also reveal the ways in which Hispanics are aiming to engage Canadians in the process of de- and re-constructing preconceived notions of what it means to “be Hispanic” in a transnational context. / Thesis (Master, Sociology) -- Queen's University, 2010-08-03 14:10:08.16

<p>This thesis is an exploration of the historical, socio-cultural, economic, and political settings in which identities are negotiated and performed among Cameroonian immigrants in Cape Town. Focusing on language as localized practices and different interaction regimes, the thesis investigates how Cameroonian immigrants maintain and reconfigure the Anglophone/Francophone identity options in novel and hybrid ways. In addition, the study examines how ideologies favouring different languages are reproduced and challenged in translocal and transnational discourses. Guided by the poststructuralist theories the thesis explores the stance that reality is socially constructed, based on symbolic and material structural limitations that are challenged and maintained in interaction. That is, whatever we do or believe in, is supported by some historical or cultural frames of meanings in our lived world, which often gives room to some manoeuvre to do things in a new way. The study adopts a multiplex interpretive approach to data collection. This entails a qualitative sociolinguistic approach where interviews, discussion and observations at different socio-economic places namely / meetings, workplaces, homes, restaurants, drinking spots and many sites from all over Cape Town, were explored. The study suggests that Cameroonians have a multiplicity of identity options, which are manifested and negotiated performatively through language, dress code, song, food, business, and other practices that comprise their lifestyles. These identities are translocal and transnational in nature, and tend to blend South African, Cameroonian, and even American traits. It is also suggests that the different identity options which they manifest are highly mobile, enabling Cameroonians to fit into South African social structures as well as the Cameroonian ways of doing things.&nbsp / Additionally, the multiplicity of identities that Cameroonians manifest, blur the fault-line between Anglophone/Francophone identities. It is evident from the study that hybridity and the reconstruction practices are not only confined to languages. Hybridity also extends to discourse orders especially in terms of how meetings are conducted. The Cameroonian meetings captured through the activities of Mifi Association and CANOWACAT are characterised by &lsquo / disorder of discourse&rsquo / in which both formal and informal versions of English and French are used&nbsp / separately or as amalgams alongside CPE and their national languages, not only in side talks, but also when contributing to the meeting proceedings. Ultimately, the study concludes that&nbsp / Cameroonians are social actors making up an indispensable part of the social interaction in the Cape Town Diaspora. Just as they influence the languages, the entrepreneurial practices, and&nbsp / spaces in which they interact, the Cameroonian immigrants are also transformed. The major contribution of the study is that it adds to the recent debates about the nature of multilingualism&nbsp / and identities in late modern society. It emphasises that languages and identities are fluid, complex, and unstable. The distinction or boundaries between the various languages in multilingual practices are also not as clear-cut. This leads to a reframing of voice and actor hood as meaning is constructed across translocal and transnational contexts and domains in a networked&nbsp / world transformed by the mobility of endless flows of information, goods, ideas, and people. Thus, the study contributes to those arguing for a paradigm shift in sociolinguistic theory in which&nbsp / language is not a property of groups, nor is it an autonomous and bounded system fixed in time and space. Thus, identities, languages and the spaces of interaction are not fixed systems / &nbsp / identities, languages, and spaces are dynamic and in a state of flux. This in turn questions the notions of multilingualism and language itself, as well as the veracity of concepts such as&nbsp / &nbsp / &nbsp / code-switching, speech community, language variation, as the search for a sociolinguistic framework that can deal with phenomena predicated by motion, instability, and uncertainty, continues. <br /> &nbsp / </p>

<p>This thesis is an exploration of the historical, socio-cultural, economic, and political settings in which identities are negotiated and performed among Cameroonian immigrants in Cape Town. Focusing on language as localized practices and different interaction regimes, the thesis investigates how Cameroonian immigrants maintain and reconfigure the Anglophone/Francophone identity options in novel and hybrid ways. In addition, the study examines how ideologies favouring different languages are reproduced and challenged in translocal and transnational discourses. Guided by the poststructuralist theories the thesis explores the stance that reality is socially constructed, based on symbolic and material structural limitations that are challenged and maintained in interaction. That is, whatever we do or believe in, is supported by some historical or cultural&nbsp / frames of meanings in our lived world, which often gives room to some manoeuvre to do things in a new way. The study adopts a multiplex interpretive approach to data&nbsp / collection. This entails a qualitative sociolinguistic approach where interviews, discussion and observations at different socio-economic places namely / meetings, workplaces,&nbsp / homes, restaurants, drinking spots and many sites from all over Cape Town, were explored. The study suggests that Cameroonians have a multiplicity of identity options, which are manifested and negotiated performatively through language, dress code, song, food, business, and other practices that comprise their lifestyles. These identities are&nbsp / translocal and transnational in nature, and tend to blend South African, Cameroonian, and even American traits. It is also suggests that the different identity options which they manifest are highly mobile, enabling Cameroonians to fit into South African social structures as well as the Negotiation of Identities and Language Practices Cameroonian ways of doing things. Additionally, the multiplicity of identities that Cameroonians manifest, blur the fault-line between Anglophone/Francophone identities. It is evident from the study that hybridity and the reconstruction practices are not only confined to languages. Hybridity also extends to discourse orders especially in terms of how meetings are conducted. The Cameroonian meetings captured through the activities of Mifi Association and CANOWACAT are characterised by &lsquo / disorder of discourse&rsquo / in which both formal and informal versions of English and French are used separately or as amalgams alongside CPE and their national languages, not only in side talks, but also when contributing to the meeting proceedings. Ultimately, the study concludes that Cameroonians are social actors making up an indispensable part of the social interaction in the Cape Town Diaspora. Just as they influence the languages, the entrepreneurial practices, and spaces in which they interact, the Cameroonian immigrants are also transformed. The major&nbsp / contribution of the study is that it adds to the recent debates about the nature of multilingualism and identities in late modern society. It emphasises that languages and identities are fluid, complex, and unstable. The distinction or boundaries between the various languages in multilingual practices are also not as clear-cut. This leads to a reframing of voice and actor hood as meaning is constructed across translocal and transnational contexts and domains in a networked world transformed by the mobility of endless flows ofinformation, goods, ideas, and people. Thus, the study contributes to those arguing for a paradigm shift in sociolinguistic theory in which language is not a property of groups, nor is it an autonomous and bounded system fixed in time and space. Thus, identities, languages and the spaces of interaction are not fixed systems / identities, languages, and spaces are dynamic and in a state of flux. This in turn questions the notions of multilingualism and language itself, as well as the veracity of concepts such as code-switching,&nbsp / speech community, language variation, as the search for a sociolinguistic framework that can deal with phenomena predicated by motion, instability, and uncertainty, continues.</p>

Palliative care for non-dominant ethnocultural groups is problematized in the palliative care literature, which often presents essentialist conceptions of cultural beliefs on death and dying. Death is often portrayed as a taboo topic within the Chinese community, and thus, the assumption is that dying at home may not be the preferred option. Beyond these stereotypical representations, little is known about what it is like for Chinese immigrants with terminal cancer to receive palliative home care. Home is a complex site where cultural “difference” becomes contextually salient when home care providers introduce palliative care. More is potentially at stake than the violation of a taboo, as Chinese immigrant care recipients, their family caregivers, and home care providers negotiate changes to the existing routines of the home. The purpose of this study was to examine how meanings of home condition negotiations of care between Chinese immigrants with terminal cancer receiving palliative home care, family caregivers, and home care providers. Postcolonial theory provided a critical lens for this focused ethnographic study of palliative home care for Chinese Canadian immigrants. The analysis drew on postcolonial concepts such as Othering, subjugation, and hybridity. The methods included interviews with 11 key informants, and observational visits and interviews were conducted in 4 cases of Chinese immigrant care recipients, their family caregivers, and home care nurses. Two major findings emerged: 1) colonization and distancing and 2) negotiating hybridity. The meaning of home was deeply altered as palliative home care occupied care recipients’ and family caregivers’ everyday lives and represented a form of micro-colonization - the home was metaphorically invaded. The ambivalent relationship between care recipients and home care providers was characterized by a mutuality of need, but care recipients used distancing as a way to resist colonization. Palliative care presented its own unique cultural influence, which was imbued with meanings, beliefs, and practices. For care recipients, the meaning of dying at home was fluid, situational, and contextually informed. Subsequently, differences were created and highlighted in the confrontation between the meaning of palliative care for home care providers and the meaning of dying at home for care recipients. It was in the meeting, blending, clashing, and grappling of differences where participants had to negotiate and generate new, hybrid meanings and practices so that particularized, personal approaches to dying could be achieved. The findings capture the realities and complexities of palliative home care, and highlight the sophisticated and evolving ways providers come to know and care for care recipients and families in their homes. Although culture was prominently featured in participant narratives, the pragmatics of dying at home were more pressing than was adherence to essentialized cultural beliefs of death and dying. A key implication is the need to move away from simplistic conceptualizations of culture to a critical approach that will enable providers to understand and find comfort in working with the fluid, dynamic, and contextually-driven nature of culture and dying at home.

Palliative care for non-dominant ethnocultural groups is problematized in the palliative care literature, which often presents essentialist conceptions of cultural beliefs on death and dying. Death is often portrayed as a taboo topic within the Chinese community, and thus, the assumption is that dying at home may not be the preferred option. Beyond these stereotypical representations, little is known about what it is like for Chinese immigrants with terminal cancer to receive palliative home care. Home is a complex site where cultural “difference” becomes contextually salient when home care providers introduce palliative care. More is potentially at stake than the violation of a taboo, as Chinese immigrant care recipients, their family caregivers, and home care providers negotiate changes to the existing routines of the home. The purpose of this study was to examine how meanings of home condition negotiations of care between Chinese immigrants with terminal cancer receiving palliative home care, family caregivers, and home care providers. Postcolonial theory provided a critical lens for this focused ethnographic study of palliative home care for Chinese Canadian immigrants. The analysis drew on postcolonial concepts such as Othering, subjugation, and hybridity. The methods included interviews with 11 key informants, and observational visits and interviews were conducted in 4 cases of Chinese immigrant care recipients, their family caregivers, and home care nurses. Two major findings emerged: 1) colonization and distancing and 2) negotiating hybridity. The meaning of home was deeply altered as palliative home care occupied care recipients’ and family caregivers’ everyday lives and represented a form of micro-colonization - the home was metaphorically invaded. The ambivalent relationship between care recipients and home care providers was characterized by a mutuality of need, but care recipients used distancing as a way to resist colonization. Palliative care presented its own unique cultural influence, which was imbued with meanings, beliefs, and practices. For care recipients, the meaning of dying at home was fluid, situational, and contextually informed. Subsequently, differences were created and highlighted in the confrontation between the meaning of palliative care for home care providers and the meaning of dying at home for care recipients. It was in the meeting, blending, clashing, and grappling of differences where participants had to negotiate and generate new, hybrid meanings and practices so that particularized, personal approaches to dying could be achieved. The findings capture the realities and complexities of palliative home care, and highlight the sophisticated and evolving ways providers come to know and care for care recipients and families in their homes. Although culture was prominently featured in participant narratives, the pragmatics of dying at home were more pressing than was adherence to essentialized cultural beliefs of death and dying. A key implication is the need to move away from simplistic conceptualizations of culture to a critical approach that will enable providers to understand and find comfort in working with the fluid, dynamic, and contextually-driven nature of culture and dying at home.

This thesis presents a theoretically informed social history of the New Zealand Needle Exchange Programme (NEP) which has operated since 1988. Close attention is paid to how this 'harm reduction' programme demonstrates a pattern of 'peer-professional' hybridity - a form of quasiprofessionalism developed by injecting drug user (IDU) peers who began operating private needle exchanges funded by both illicit clients and state agencies. In this hybrid mechanism, the personal distrust required to pursue 'criminal' motivations has been connected, through the vulnerable yet influential intermediaries of peers and syringes, to the trust required to 'empower' the health of marginalised IDU communities. This research has drawn on immersed participant experience and on accounts from archival documents, supported by interviews. A reworking of actor-network methodologies has provided a core analytical approach to tracing the critical moments and boundary-shifts in the development and realignments of the NEP's hybrid heterogeneous assemblages. The assembling and reassembling has entangled policy goals, technologies, historical reviews, stigma, laws, logics, logistic systems, narratives, organisations, sterile and bloody syringes, monitoring systems, and professional occupations. IDU, health policy officials, peerprofessionals, managers, politicians, HIV/AIDS community organisers, and medical professionals have prevented HIV transmission by altering key strategic connections and alignments within this active network, while pursuing their public-private interests. The peer-professionals have publicly represented IDU, have advocated professionally for inclusive rather than exclusive public health provisions, while guaranteeing that the monitoring of syringes by state agencies would not harm IDU. The difficulties in shaping and stabilising the NEP have illustrated the 'messy reality' of its institutional and policy environment, yet have also led to highly successful and sustainable health promotion work.

This thesis contributes to the literature on the French Catholic Marist mission in New Zealand by providing the first critical in-depth biography of one of the early French missionaries, Antoine Marie Garin (1810-1889). It emphasises the importance of the Marists’ position as outsiders in nineteenth-century New Zealand society. As neither ‘colonising’ British settlers, nor ‘colonised’ Maori, the Marists were in a special position to view events unfolding in the mid-nineteenth century, when New Zealand was changing from a Maori-dominated to a predominantly Pakeha-dominated world. The records which the Marists kept of their experiences, including diaries, letters, memoirs and annals, have the potential to provide a significant contribution to New Zealand historiography, and remain relatively untapped. As a biographical study, this thesis uses the framework of Garin’s life story to add insight to the intercultural dynamic in nineteenth-century New Zealand. The thesis begins with an exposé of the theory used to examine the intercultural dimension in Garin’s experience. Garin’s life in New Zealand was a tale of cross-cultural encounter occurring within two cultural-social paradigms: the Maori-Pakeha paradigm, and the Catholic-Protestant settler paradigm. With respect to the Maori-Pakeha paradigm, it is argued that Homi K. Bhabha’s theory of hybridity provides an innovative framework within which to study early interaction between Maori and Pakeha. The concept of hybridity stresses the interdependence of coloniser and colonised, thereby recognising the existence of agency on both sides, and avoiding the binary opposition of ‘Maori’ and ‘Pakeha’ that continues to mark contemporary New Zealand society. Another postcolonial theory, that of diaspora, is used to illuminate Garin’s experience in settler communities. It is argued that religion can be the basis for a diaspora, and that the Catholics in nineteenth-century New Zealand had a diasporic consciousness because of their creation of separate Catholic institutions, and their connections to the wider Catholic world. Part Two of the thesis consists of the biography proper. It is framed as a cultural biography: a biography that seeks to illuminate not only the subject’s life, but also national history. Garin was a grassroots Catholic missionary, who, through talent, perseverance and a little luck, made a notable impact on New Zealand society, in particular in the area of Catholic education. However, even more important to his story was his ability to build bridges between cultures, and create communities of Maori and settler Catholics. Arguably, Garin’s greatest legacy is the diary that he kept while a missionary to Maori. This documents the everyday border crossing that was taking place between the Maori of Mangakahia and Garin himself in the hybrid society of 1840s’ New Zealand.

This thesis is an exploration of the historical, socio-cultural, economic, and political settings in which identities are negotiated and performed among Cameroonian immigrants in Cape Town. Focusing on language as localized practices and different interaction regimes, the thesis investigates how Cameroonian immigrants maintain and reconfigure the Anglophone/Francophone identity options in novel and hybrid ways. In addition, the study examines how ideologies favouring different languages are reproduced and challenged in translocal and transnational discourses.Guided by the poststructuralist theories the thesis explores the stance that reality is socially constructed, based on symbolic and material structural limitations that are challenged and maintained in interaction. That is, whatever we do or believe in, is supported by some historical or cultural frames of meanings in our lived world, which often gives room to some manoeuvre to do things in a new way.The study adopts a multiplex interpretive approach to data collection. This entails a qualitative sociolinguistic approach where interviews, discussion and observations at different socio-economic places namely; meetings, workplaces, homes,restaurants, drinking spots and many sites from all over Cape Town, were explored.The study suggests that Cameroonians have a multiplicity of identity options, which are manifested and negotiated performatively through language, dress code, song, food, business, and other practices that comprise their lifestyles. These identities are translocal and transnational in nature, and tend to blend South African, Cameroonian, and even American traits. It is also suggests that the different identity options which they manifest are highly mobile, enabling Cameroonians to fit into South African social structures as well as the Cameroonian ways of doing things. Additionally, the multiplicity of identities that Cameroonians manifest, blur the fault-line between Anglophone/Francophone identities.It is evident from the study that hybridity and the reconstruction practices are not only confined to languages. Hybridity also extends to discourse orders especially in terms of how meetings are conducted. The Cameroonian meetings captured through the activities of Mifi Association and CANOWACAT are characterised by ‘disorder of discourse’ in which both formal and informal versions of English and French are used separately or as amalgams alongside CPE and their national languages, not only in side talks, but also when contributing to the meeting proceedings.Ultimately, the study concludes that Cameroonians are social actors making up an indispensable part of the social interaction in the Cape Town Diaspora. Just as they influence the languages, the entrepreneurial practices, and spaces in which they interact, the Cameroonian immigrants are also transformed.The major contribution of the study is that it adds to the recent debates about the nature of multilingualism and identities in late modern society. It emphasises that languages and identities are fluid, complex, and unstable. The distinction or boundaries between the various languages in multilingual practices are also not as clear-cut. This leads to a reframing of voice and actor hood as meaning is constructed across translocal and transnational contexts and domains in a networked world transformed by the mobility of endless flows of information, goods, ideas, and people. Thus, the study contributes to those arguing for a paradigm shift in sociolinguistic theory in which language is not a property of groups, nor is it an autonomous and bounded system fixed in time and space. Thus, identities, languages and the spaces of interaction are not fixed systems; identities, languages, and spaces are dynamic and in a state of flux. This in turn questions the notions of multilingualism and language itself, as well as the veracity of concepts such as code-switching, speech community, language variation, as the search for a sociolinguistic framework that can deal with phenomena predicated by motion, instability, and uncertainty, continues. / Philosophiae Doctor - PhD