Using archaeological and ethnohistorical data, this dissertation examines the character of the relationship between the Late Postclassic (ca. AD 1250-1520) frontier center of Totogal, located in the western Tuxtla Mountains (Toztlan) of southern Veracruz, Mexico, and the expanding Aztec Empire. Traditional models of imperialism examine frontiers from a core perspective that limits the autonomy and agency of groups in the path of expansion. Recent ethnographic, ethnohistoric, and archaeological studies of other boundaries, however, suggest that considerable room for negotiation exists within the space of interactions, whether asymmetrical amounts of power characterize the home bases of those groups. I argue that elites at Totogal, using imperial symbols and markers of their own high status, sponsored feasts and rituals for the non-elite public, during which they brokered the potentially conflicting interests of the Aztecs and the tribute paying population of the Tuxtlas. The invitation of the public to feasts and rituals that combined imperial and local elite symbols (and possibly green obsidian), naturalized the relationship between local elites and imperial representatives with non-elite occupants of Totogal and nearby settlements by establishing a reciprocal system of gifting whereby food and drink, served in the context of elaborate religious and commensal rituals, provided a benefit to the Tuxteco public which, along with other exotic highland goods, was viewed as an acceptable exchange for the local tribute items that the empire desired. This study is an important application of current anthropological perspectives on boundaries, borders, and frontiers to the Aztec Empire. It is also a critical examination of the types of strategies individuals and groups living in boundary regions can enact in situations of contact and change. While studies of modern groups in boundary regions have addressed identity construction and manipulation, and other dynamic social, political, and cultural processes that take place, they do not typically or systematically examine how the negotiations that are enacted in boundary zones are materialized—how changing identities are represented symbolically through the use of particular products or consumption patterns. It is in this area that archaeological perspectives on boundary zone interactions can make important contributions to the modern world.

The contact of two different cultures in the colonization process produces a zone of cultural mingling that resembles Victor Turner's concept of "liminality" referring to states or persons that elude classification. This study considers the repercussions of colonization on the lives of women characters in novels about four different "post-colonial" contexts--Native American, Jamaican, Irish and Mexican American. These novels reflect both the unique historical circumstances of each context and common themes that occur due to colonization and transcend the specific cultures such as the mourning of personal and collective loss, liminal states of consciousness and mingling of cultures. The introductory chapter examines the particular historical contexts of each novel and the theories of Abdul JanMohamed and Frantz Fanon on colonization. This study also applies the work of Victor Turner, Mary Douglas, Julia Kristeva, Gloria Anzaldua, Homi Bhaba and others to an examination of the subversive cultural formations that evolve through the boundary dissolution of colonization. Chapter two considers Louise Erdrich's novel Tracks in which the decimation of the Anishinabe people is the context for the three primary characters who have experienced personal and collective loss and respond by resisting or adapting to colonization. Chapter three examines Erna Brodber's Myal and the impact of the manichean colonial ideology on a Jamaican woman who is literally half-black and half-white. Chapter four addresses Julia O'Faolain's No Country for Young Men, a novel about two women, one who lived through the early twentieth century movement for Irish independence and the other who is her great niece, that have both been silenced and sexually controlled by colonialism and Irish Catholicism. The fifth and final chapter examines Lucha Corpi's Delia's Song about a young Chicana activist who has suffered losses on several levels and recovers by writing an autobiographical novel that weaves the personal and political issues of her life. All four novels are concerned with the liminal states of consciousness in these women characters and their efforts to both find love and tell their stories, thus counteracting the colonizer's version of history.

In Kuwait, the English language is increasingly gaining importance signifying globalisation and internationalisation of the local culture and linguistic environment. Alongside the positive effects of the wide-spread usage of English there are negative tendencies which emerge onto the scene. This thesis is concerned with the educational aspects of such influences where it explored trainee teachers’ conceptualisations of English as an international / global language, and examined the implications of current views of English for teacher preparation in light of the most recent methodological trends such as global English delivery, expansion of teacher knowledge base, the introduction of linguistic rights and instructional policies to educational stakeholders, and the merging of language and culture in English language teaching. Through questionnaires and in-depth interviews the study found that the relationship between the local and global in Kuwait is a complex issue with social, educational and political implications. Multiple functions for English and its status within the local context were voiced and consequently alternative futures for Standard Arabic as the main source and medium of local literacy and language of academia against the background of rapid Anglicisation emerged. The results may attract the attention of Kuwait’s educational theorists and practitioners, and the hopeful outcome would be to inspire teachers to engage in critical thinking and challenge their realities; and encourage Kuwait’s educational policy makers to find a balance between the source and target languages/cultures, as well as bring to the foreground local expertise and knowledge.

This paper argues against the common historical belief that the British East India Company’s actions benefited the British Public. While many recent historical works argue that the Company had detrimental effects on India, the common consensus believes that the Company’s actions while pillaging India benefited Britain through economic treasures and access to luxuries. In the first section of the text, the author describes the British East India Company’s corruption, propaganda, and lobbying efforts to enrich individual members of the Company and protect personal and corporate profits. The next section describes the Company’s impact on Britain and argues that the Company was an overwhelmingly negative investment for the British taxpayer. The author compares the East India Company’s historic actions and impacts on Britain to the impact of modern big corporations on their own nations. The text concludes with an argument that the popular narrative, which holds that large corporations’ interests coincide with that of the nation’s public interest, is both inherently mistaken and fraught with danger. The author argues against a zero-sum worldview and for a corporate sector with checks and balances.

This thesis relies on the works of Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak and Seyla Benhabib in the field of Postcolonialism. Guided by their theoretical insights it is aiming at providing an understanding of how postcolonial structures within the International Humanitarian Aid discourse takes form and discuss strategies for communication that would be deemed justified in this context. Through a field research in Lebanon, focusing on the Lebanese Red Cross and their methods used for communication, it provides a scrutiny of the theoretical insights of Spivak and Benhabib, in order to see how plausible they are when discussing the way Global Humanitarian Organizations operate in todays’ world. In the conclusive discussion, the study exposes the importance for these organizations to let go of their essentialist way of looking at the subaltern, continuously depriving her of her subject position. In a context of asymmetrical power relations, there is a need for these organizations to ”learn to learn from below”. The people of the Western world need to unlearn Western privilege to enable themselves to relate to people and communities outside of their own paradigm and thus create presuppositions for an ethical communication.

U.S. military camptown prostitution in South Korea was a system ridden with entangled structures of race, ethnicity, class, gender, and sexuality. This thesis aims to elucidate the ways in which racial ideologies, in conjunction with gendered nationalist ideologies, materialized in the spaces of military base communities. I contend that camptowns were hybrid spaces where the meaning and representation of race were constantly in flux, where the very definitions of race and gender were contested, affirmed, and redefined through ongoing negotiations on the part of relevant actors. The reading of camptown prostitutes and American GIs as sexualized and racialized bodies will provide a nuanced understanding of the power dynamics unique to camptown communities. The first part of this study consists of a discussion of Korean ethnic nationalism and its complementary relation to U.S. racial ideologies. Denied of an ethnonational identity, camptown prostitutes denationalized themselves by rejecting Korean patriarchy and resorting to White American masculinity to craft a new self-identity. Another component of this thesis involves American GIs and their racialized self-identities. Recognizing American soldiers as products of a specific political and social context, I argue that military camptowns were largely conceived as spaces of normalized abnormality that provided a ripe opportunity to challenge existing social, economic, racial, and sexual norms.

(i): The first part of this thesis questions the concept of ‘minority’, and the way it has been used to analyze French imperial policy in Syria (‘divide and rule’). Chapter 1 traces the concept’s emergence, showing that it is not self-evidently valid but rather depends on a set of wider social and political circumstances related to the existence of modern nation-states: the minorities of modern Syria cannot be mapped directly back onto the Ottoman millets or religious communities. Chapter 2 examines the term’s application in Syria between the wars: French imperial policy emphasised divisions in Syrian society, but the term ‘minority’ was only systematically attached to these divisions from the 1930s. The concept’s spread in Syria reflects its growing importance in international public discourse worldwide, as the nation-state became the standard state form after World War One. The second part of the thesis uses case studies of particular themes to show how the emergence of minorities illuminates processes of state-formation that have shaped the modern world. Chapters 3 and 4, on the question of ‘separatism’ and the definition of modern Syria’s northern border, examine the spread of effective state authority across a ‘national’ territory. This process bound culturally-divergent populations more tightly into the fabric of a centrally-controlled state, thereby constituting them as ‘minorities’. Chapter 5 examines the debate about a Franco-Syrian treaty leading to Syrian independence, showing that this made the recently-established body of international law on ‘minorities’ in newly-independent states applicable to Syria: the term only became widespread in Syria at this time. Chapter 6 looks at French efforts to reform personal status law in the later 1930s, when the restructuring, on religious lines, of the institutional relationship between the Syrian state and its population created a new uniformity within communities at the national level (one condition for their developing the sense of being ‘minorities’). It also sparked opposition from groups now claiming to represent the ‘majority’. Other Syrians, though, understood their society in different terms.

This study concerns a comparison and contrast of two development approaches to determine their applicability in dealing with the global problem of unequal development. Chapter I introduces the purpose and the significance of the study, and the selection of one representative model for each approach. They are W. W. Rostow's model and Samir Amin's model. Chapter II elucidates Rostow's model. Chapter III explains Amin's model. Chapter IV presents a comparison and contrast of the two models both methodologically and conceptually. Chapter V contains the conclusion that Rostow' s model cannot be a universal development model due to its methodological shortcomings, whereas Amin's model should be accepted for its analysis in explaining the reasons' for today's unequal development on a world scale.

The formation of state borders is often told through the history of war and diplomacy. What is neglected is the tale of how borders of seemingly peaceful and long-extant places were set. In drawing Egypt’s borders, nineteenth-century cartographers were drawing upon a well of knowledge that stretched back into antiquity. Relying on the works of Greco-Roman writers and the Bible itself, cartographers and explorers used the authority of these works to make sense of unfamiliar lands, regardless of any current circumstances. The border with Palestine was determined through the usage of the Old Testament, while classical scholars like Herodotus and Ptolemy set the southern border at the Cataracts. The ancient cartography of Rome was overlaid upon the Egypt of Muhammad Ali. Given the increasing importance Egypt had to the burgeoning British Empire of the nineteenth century, how did this mesh with the influences informing cartographical representations of Egypt? This study argues that the imagined spaces created by Western cartographers informed the trajectory of Britain’s eventual conquest of Egypt. While receding as geopolitical concerns took hold, the classical and biblical influences were nonetheless part of a larger trend of Orientalism that colored the way Westerners interacted with and treated the people of Egypt and the East. By examining the maps and the terminology employed by nineteenth century scholars on Egypt’s geography, a pattern emerges that highlights how much classical and biblical texts had on the Western imagination of Egypt as the modern terms eventually superseded them.

This thesis presents an ethnography of public discourse in postcolonial, decolonial, queer, and multimedia contexts, as part of a critical analysis of imperialism in the digital age. In mixing experiences with theory and social practice, I draw on the work of activists who have already begun to mold these theories into everyday practice, paying particular attention to Occupy Wall Street, the Zapatistas of Mexico, and Southerners on New Ground (SONG)—a regionally focused non-profit organization based in the southern United States. I develop techno-seduction as a term to deconstruct the lure of technological determinism promoting static interpretations of democracy, consensus, and participation, and to describe the impact these interpretations have on intrapersonal and group identity formation.