This dissertation examines a cycle of Hollywood films that spans over a decade, and which engages with and privileges a historical and geopolitical framework to address America's encounters and confrontations with the Middle East. At one level, these films map the 9/11 terrorist attacks onto various sites and histories that signify a contentious relationship between the Middle East and the United States (including Islamic fundamentalism, the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq, the Arab-Israeli conflict, or the struggle over oil). In doing so they incorporate and absorb elements from other media (the Internet, television, journalism) to augment and authorize film's signifying capacities. At another level, and in tension with this dispersal, these post-9/11 films regulate and manage these histories through the generic and narrative mechanisms of the action, conspiracy or combat film. If these films privilege a discourse of investigation and expertise that postulates scientific neutrality, and even a technologized view of the Middle East, they alternately mobilize trauma and victimization discourse to delineate, prioritize and redeem the American male body. In addition, the construction of the Middle East in post-9/11 Hollywood cinema in terms of space (vis-à-vis the emphasis on cartography, geography, and surveillance technologies) and time (real time, instantaneity, pastness), plays a central role in the strategies and practices that have contributed to the production of knowledge about the region since 9/11. Focusing primarily on post-9/11 American intelligence and military narratives, this study explores what is at stake in the cinematic struggle to accommodate, but ultimately, recast history in light of U.S.-Middle East relations.

By recontextualizing spatiality, it is arguable that the meaning of &lsquo / space&rsquo / as a term varies from the most local to the global geographies. &lsquo / Space&rsquo / as a term for this thesis does not only mean the architectural spaces, but also the social spaces. This thesis aims to define and investigate the dynamics of &lsquo / Thirdspace&rsquo / as a key term and to locate it in the specifities of urban within the area of resistance and transgression. &lsquo / Thirdspace&rsquo / is illustrated as a wider sphere of participation forpolitical resistance. As a space, it is the new meeting places for diverse oppositional practices, for multiple communities of resistance. It is a space that is both center and the margin, which enables the radical social action everywhere in the world, from local to the global. The theoretical framework for understanding the tools of our critical approach will be provided by a comprehensive literature about &lsquo / identity politics,&rsquo / which can be defined as the theoretical base of the concept of &lsquo / Thirdspace.&rsquo / After an extensive analysis about the dynamics of &lsquo / Thirdspace&rsquo / for political resistance, it is concerned to locate the concept of &lsquo / Thirdspace&rsquo / within the material world as a case study. The case study aims to exemplify firstly the &lsquo / Istiklal Street&rsquo / as &lsquo / Thirdspace&rsquo / , secondly political position of &lsquo / Saturday&rsquo / s Mothers&rsquo / as &lsquo / thirdspace of political choice&rsquo / , and lastly to demonstrate the reciprocal relations between them within the framework of the relationship between space and politics.

Historical interconnections between Native Americans and many people of African descent in America created a group of Black Indians whose lineage continues today. Though largely unrecognized, they remain an important racially mixed group. Through analysis using qualitative feminist methodologies, this thesis examines the history and analyzes the narratives of African-Native American females regarding their racial identity and political claims of tribal citizenship. Their socialization, which includes kin keeping, extended families and the sharing of family stories, allows them to claim native ancestry because of the information usually passed down to them from mothers, grandmothers, aunts and other family members. Their culture and identity revealed that Black Indian women have particular attitudes regarding their racial identity. I conclude my investigation with the suggestion that Native and African American studies can be instrumental as an alternative method of studying American race relations and the ways race intersects with gender in the formation of identity politics.

This thesis aims to read James Baldwin¡¦s Another Country to examine why and how he uses this novel to interrogate black nationalist discourses that inform the sexist and heterosexist biases in mid-century America. I would argue that Baldwin, in writing this novel, adopts an ambivalent narrative strategy both to ostensibly compromise on the heterosexual matrix politically and culturally scripted by black activists, and to critique the black hyperbolic masculinism endorsed and performed by them as itself a tragic consequence of white racism. Whereas black nationalists carry the Black Macho agenda into practice to redeem their manliness, Baldwin suspects that the heterosexist imperative of black machismo may end up infringing the rights of gender and sexual minorities. I thus argue, in Chapter One, that Baldwin writes Another Country to negotiate an oblique response to the conundrum he feels as both an artist and a black leader. To explain how his conundrum takes shape, I attempt in Chapter Two to lay bare the hegemonic masculinist ideologies embedded in anti-racist discourses. Drawing on this historical and theoretical investigation as my interpretive scaffold, I would in the following three chapters elaborate on how the novelist exemplifies his narrative technique via his male figures in Another Country. In doing so, Baldwin can, I would propose, assert that racial justice and sexual freedom must concur to effectuate blacks¡¦ autonomy. As such, I conclude my thesis by suggesting that Baldwin never intends ¡§another country¡¨ to be an idyllic landscape wherein Eric ostensibly plays out as a ¡§sexual savior¡¨ and betters other characters¡¦ self-recognition. Another Country instead illustrates a contested site where discourses on black nationalism, black male sexuality, and black masculinity come into a productive dialogism. Another Country, that is, can be best interpreted as Baldwin¡¦s investigation into the intersection of race, gender, and sexuality in the sixties, and his consistent reformulation of individual identity as fluid, labile, and multiple.

The aim of this thesis study is to understand the significance of today&rsquo / s feminist politics in Turkey for post-identity politics. When it is considered that identity politics is being widely practiced today, whereas there is still much vagueness regarding the ways of doing post-identity politics, in order to achieve the aim of this study it becomes necessary to make a critique of identity politics and to reveal post-identitarian tendencies through this critique of identity-based political mobilization. In this study, feminist identity politics is analyzed and criticized from the perspective of Judith Butler, who is a poststructuralist feminist questioning identity and its relation to gender politics. These issues are questioned through qualitative research method and semi-structured in-depth interviews are used as the data gathering technique. Five in-depth interviews were conducted with women who consider themselves feminist. The interviews aim at providing individual narrations of the participants to be exposed to deconstruction later on through the analysis process. Therefore, participants are not asked direct and categorical questions about their ideas on specific issues / instead, they are encouraged to talk about how they perceive the gendered world around them and how they respond to it and how these ideas are transferred to the political arena. It was found that the participants perceived sex, gender and sexuality in a dualistic framework to a certain extent and this relative fluidity enables them to realize the importance of doing post-identity politics, but they do not have a tendency to transfer this to the political arena in the near future.

This study explores the hegemonic articulation of ‘feminist politics’ by the Swedish political party Feminist Initiative (Feministiskt initiativ) during 2014 national parliamentary election campaign. The analysis is carried out on two levels: the construction of the hegemonic project of feminist politics and the construction of an antagonist.      Deploying the discourse-theoretical approach by Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe as well as the theories of radical democracy and intersectionality, it is shown how a new, broad collective feminist identity is produced by deconstructing womanhood as an identifiable and unproblematic category as well as expanding the signifying chain of feminism by including new social struggles into it. As a result, the feminist subject is conceptualized in radical-democratic terms as a citizen with equal rights, rather than an essentialized female subject. Two nodal points that fix the meaning of the hegemonic project of feminist politics are identified: one is human rights, which enables the expansion of the chain of equivalence, and the other is experience of oppression, which acknowledges differences existing within the movement and prevents it from muting marginalized voices. Discrimination, being the constitutive outside, both threatens and produces the subject: on the one hand, it violates human rights that underlie feminist politics; on the other hand, it produces the experience of oppression that gives a unique feminist perspective to each member of the collective identity. The hegemonic project thus emerges as dependent on the oppressive power of discrimination. The study suggests a critical discussion on how the constitutive outside – discrimination – empties the concept of feminism by a radical expansion of its meaning.    The research furthermore explores the construction of the antagonist of the hegemonic project. Utilizing analytical concepts from the writings of Jacques Lacan and Slavoj Žižek, it is demonstrated how social structures and norms acquire agency and become the significant Other for the feminist identity. The thesis is concluded by a critical discussion on the fundamental impossibility of identification based on opposing oneself to something that can only be expressed with a signifier that ultimately lacks any signified.

As an interdisciplinary project that integrates African and African American Studies, critical race theory, and Art History, this dissertation attempts to enrich our understanding of the politics of difference in contemporary art by interrogating the formal practices of artists and the social significance of their work. The artwork discussed reflects a pattern of creative engagement with archival institutions and documents that is characteristic of contemporary artists who are concerned with questions of consumption and the body; representation and erasure; the social construction of race and space; and the relationship between history, memory, and identity. Taken together, these themes constitute a discursive landscape within contemporary art that is central to the principle question raised here—namely, how do social genres of difference and relations of power influence artistic practices of representation, curatorial display, and reception? In an attempt to both answer and reverse the direction of this question, this text presents insightful perspectives from different artists on the complex relationship between art and society. Using the politics of difference as a lens through which to examine the aforementioned themes in contemporary art, I argue that the artists under consideration are transforming the meaning of race in post-slavery societies throughout the black diaspora. Through various creative practices, these artists are shifting the terms, coordinates, and representations of difference seen in the archive in order to reimagine the language of identity in the twenty-first century. Fundamentally, their work challenges the way certain bodies are recognized—compelling us, as viewers, to reinterpret the past from alternative and critical perspectives. Moreover, by focusing on the disclosure of a black presence in western cultures through the comparative formal and historical analysis of contemporary works of art that call our attention to misrepresentation, commodification, invisibility, and displacement, this dissertation contributes to developing conversations about how contemporary artists challenge dominant narratives and representational aesthetics. Through their work, these artists expand our conception of the archive—disclosing the overlapping ways in which objects, images, words, signs, ideas, ads, bodies, and spaces register social and historical meaning through the demarcation of racialized difference. Ultimately, this project demonstrates how art can transform the way we see and represent ideas of difference, and therein, the way we see and represent ourselves. / African and African American Studies

In the midst of a violent decade where the Mexican government used force to suppress insurgent and student unrest, the Indian population avoided such a response by operating within official government parameters. The 1975 First National Congress of Indigenous Peoples of Mexico, though convened by the federal government, gave Indians an opportunity to claim a role in the complex political process of formulating a new version of national Indian policy while demanding self-determination. Through the congress, indigenous groups attempted to take the lead in shaping national programs to their needs and interests rather than merely responding to government initiatives. The congress marked a fundamental change in post-revolutionary politics, the most important restructuring and recasting of the relationship between local and regional indigenous associations and the federal government since the 1930s. Its history provides an important context for understanding more recent political disputes about indigenous autonomy and citizenship, especially in the aftermath of the Zapatista (EZLN) revolt in 1994. The 1975 Congress marked a watershed as it allowed for the advent of independent Indian organizations and proved to be momentous in the negotiation of political autonomy between indigenous groups and government officials.

This thesis aims at defining and analyzing the positions of Kemalism and Islamism about the relationship between the European Union and Turkey, with respect to identity and political reform. The study is conducted by the usage of academic literature and examples of the writings of intellectuals from both positions / in order to analyze their discourses on the issue.With respect to the political dimension of EU - Turkey relations, the problems and EU demands on democracy, human rights, minority rights - with emphasis on the Kurdish problem - and Cyprus are explained. The viewpoint and discourses of the two positions on these issues are discussed in relation to their historical attitudes towards the West and the EU.

This study interrogates whose knowledge about the self and the other is represented to Iranian students in the 2004 and in selected pre-2004 editions of elementary and guidance school textbooks by analyzing how issues of identity politics, diversity, “citizenship” and development inform the construction of Iranian national identity since the introduction of various curriculum reforms (i.e.: global education) after the Revolution of 1978-79. I draw upon antiracism and transnationalism as discourses of analysis through which the West-East dichotomy is (re)evaluated and interrogated within the context of Edward Said’s notion of Orientalism and Boroujerdi’s (1996) conceptualization of “Orientalism in reverse”. I utilize deconstruction, discourse and qualitative interpretative content analyses as methods of investigating how “race”, ethnicity, social class and gender are configured in representations of sameness and difference. I “look at style, figures of speech, settings, narrative devices, historical and social circumstances, not the correctness of the representation nor its fidelity to some great original” (Said, 1978, p. 28). I argue that the ideal citizen and Iranian national identity are constructed by references to conflicting discourses of mustāżafīn (the oppressed), jīhād-i sūzandagī (the Reconstruction Jīhād), ‘ashayir (nomadic tribes), Ummat-i Islamī (Islamic Nation/Community), Īrān-dūstī (loving Iran), the Aryan migration, velayat-e-faqih and colonialism. In their discursive formations, nationalist, anti-imperialist, Islamic, middle-class and Orientalist narratives construct a homogenized Iranian citizenry who has always been active in regional/global relations of power. The ideal citizen is represented through the invocation of two types/sets of “shifting collectivities” that identify it as “white”, male, Shi’a, Aryan-Pars, progressive, independent, pious and a leader in the Islamic world. The first set divides between Shi’a-Persians and non-Shi’a and non-Persians. The second set of binary oppositions represents the ideal citizen in relation and in opposition to the West and the East in their multiple and historical forms. These textbooks are assimilationist texts that act as “border patrolling” and “stignatizing” discourses. They are also forms of “textual genocide” that exclude the voices and histories of national and global minorities and acts of discrimination committed by Iranians against women and minority religious and ethnic groups as official knowledge about friendly/enemy insiders and outsiders.