Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness is, admittedly, a text with many racist, imperialist and sexist subtexts. A feminist literary analysis, however, can extract women's empowerment and agency. This thesis takes a closer look at the Mistress (also known as the African woman) and the Intended, two women with vastly different racial and class backgrounds who, in their own ways, demonstrate resistance. This thesis analyzes Mr. Kurtz's often ignored sketch in oils, arguing that the sketch itself demonstrates the colonial mentality of difference and the disruption of that difference. It then explores both the Mistress and the Intended in detail, positing that while the Mistress uses the colonizers' fear of the wilderness and its silence to her advantage, the Intended takes control over her own domestic circumstance. Overall, this author asserts that the Mistress and the Intended, while often dismissed, are noteworthy, important, and influential characters in Heart of Darkness. / by Kathryn Marie Smith. / Thesis (M.A.)--Florida Atlantic University, 2009. / Includes bibliography. / Electronic reproduction. Boca Raton, Fla., 2009. Mode of access: World Wide Web.

[pt] Esta tese pretente examinar a expansão internacional de empresas brasileiras e as políticas públicas relacionadas a essa expansão, problematizando a relação entre capital e Estado na atuação internacional do Brasil. Empresas multinacionais têm um papel importante no desenvolvimento capitalista, contribuindo historicamente para a transformação de Estados em potências hegemônicas. Os Estados, por sua vez, financiam e estruturam o campo jurídico e político para que as empresas atuem no plano interno e externo. No Brasil, no período recente, o apoio a empresas com capacidade de competir globalmente tem sido central para a estratégia de desenvolvimento, assim como para seu novo papel como país emergente na ordem mundial. O interesse nacional mescla-se, em muitos casos, com os interesses privados das multinacionais brasileiras no exterior. Impactos negativos sobre comunidades locais, trabalhadores e o meio-ambiente mostram, entretanto, que a ascensão internacional dessas empresas não é somente consenso (em torno do aumento da competitividade do país no cenário internacional), mas também conflito dentro e fora do Brasil. Aspectos sociais, ambientais e trabalhistas vem sendo sistematicamente excluídos das principais análises e reflexões sobre o papel do Estado no apoio à internacionalização das empresas brasileiras. Iniciaremos esse trabalho apresentando diferentes perspectivas sobre as tendências atuais de mudança na ordem mundial, procurando situar o debate sobre a ascensão dos BRICS no campo teórico das Relações Internacionais. Logo, apresentamos alguns dos principais estudos sobre empresas multinacionais de países em desenvolvimento, analisando seus reflexos sobre a discussão em torno da internacionalização de empresas brasileiras. Verificamos que a expansão internacional dessas empresas está estreitamente relacionada à busca do país pela diversificação de relações político-comerciais, com a ampliação e o aprofundamento das relações com outros países e regiões do Sul, que formam, por sua vez, as bases a partir das quais o Brasil busca ter maior participação e incidência nas instituições e fóruns multilaterais. Apontamos que a atual fase de internacionalização de empresas brasileiras é decorrente tanto da formação de monopólios no mercado doméstico, quanto de políticas públicas proativas, que buscam a melhor inserção do país no âmbito da competição capitalista global. Dentre as políticas públicas e institucionais, destacamos o papel da política externa e a política de crédito, que foi reforçada, de forma significativa, através de mudanças ocorridas no BNDES a partir de 2003. Procuramos demonstrar, assim, que o projeto econômico (a expansão das empresas e grupos multinacionais com sede no Brasil) está integrado ao projeto político (o de ser uma potência). Partindo dessas análises empíricas, refletimos sobre o campo teórico, aprofundando a leitura sobre os conceitos de imperialismo e hegemonia, e o debate sobre a relação capital-Estado. Traçamos um caminho do empírico para o teórico, para averiguar de que maneira as reflexões existentes sobre hegemonia e imperialismo são apropriadas, ou necessitam ser reformuladas e renovadas diante das novas dinâmicas nesta fase atual do capitalismo. Buscamos compreender, portanto, qual o lugar e o papel do Brasil (assim como dos demais países emergentes) na estrutura global de reprodução expandida do capital. / [en] The thesis aims to investigate the internationalization of Brazilian companies and public policies related to this process , questioning the relationship between capital and state in the context of Brazil s international relations during the Lula administration. Multinational companies play an important role in capitalist development, contributing to the historical transformation of states in hegemonic powers. States, in their turn, structure and finance the legal and political framework – both domesticaly and internationally - inside which companies act. In Brazil, in recent years, support for companies capable of competing globally has been central to the development strategy, as well to the its role as an emerging country in the world order. The so-called national interest is often mixed with private interests of Brazilian multinationals operating abroad. Negative impacts on local communities, workers and on the environment have shown, however, that the internationalization of Brazilian companies is not only about consensus (regarding the country s increasing competitiveness in the international arena), but also about conflict, both inside and outside Brazil. Social, environmental and labor aspects have systematically been excluded from chief analysis and reflections on the role of the State in supporting the internationalization of Brazilian companies. This thesis starts by presenting different perspectives on the current trends and changes in the world order, situating the debate about the rise of the BRICS in theory of International Relations. Then, we present some of the main studies on multinational enterprises of developing countries, analysing their reflections on the discussion about the internationalization of Brazilian companies. The thesis argues that the internationalization of these companies is closely related to the Brazil s search for diversification of its political and commercial relations and to the more general process of broadening and deepening of South-South relations. There one may find the basis over which Brazil has sought for greater participation and influence inside multilateral institutions and forums. The thesis point out that the current phase of internationalization of Brazilian companies follows both the formation of monopolies in the domestic market and proactive public policies aiming to achieve better positions for the country in global capitalist competition. Considering the main public and institutional policies, the thesis highlights the role played by foreign and credit policies, reinforced by changes in BNDES since 2003. It is demonstrated, therefore, that the economic project (on the internationalization of Brazilian multinationals) is integrated to the political project (of expanding Brazilian power in the world system) . Based on empirical analysis, the thesis finishes with a theoretical reflection, going further in some readings concerning the concepts of imperialism and hegemony and in the debate on the capital-state relationship. Going from the empirics to theory, the thesis investigates whether the present literature on hegemony and imperialism are suitable or need to be adapted and renewed, in a way to reflect on the new dynamics of the current phase of capitalism. In sum, the thesis intend to problematize the place and role of Brazil (as well as by other emerging countries) in the overall structure of the expanded reproduction of capital.

Entre 1855 e 1862 o físico e fisiologista Hermann von Helmholtz dedicou-se primariamente a questões relativas à física e fisiologia acústicas, e à aplicação dos resultados obtidos à epistemologia da música e à estética musical. Ainda que tais investigações tenham sido desenvolvidas por período restrito, seus principais frutos cuja apresentação mais completa se encontra na obra de 1863 Die Lehre von den Tonempfindungen als physiologische Grundlage für die Theorie der Musik (que traduziríamos por A doutrina das sensações tonais como uma base fisiológica para a teoria da música) tiveram impacto imediato e duradouro sobre a musicologia ocidental. Em um primeiro momento, o presente trabalho objetiva analisar os antecedentes filosófico-científicos que orientaram tal empreitada, bem como a metodologia empregada na mesma; isso a fim de podermos, em um segundo momento, abordar criticamente a forma como Helmholtz aplica seus resultados ao âmbito da estética musical. Afinal, ao fixar deterministicamente causas físicas e fisiológicas para noções eurocêntricas de musicalidade, não estaria Helmholtz operando certa naturalização dos sistemas de organização tonal imperantes em sua conjuntura histórico-cultural em detrimento de sistemas oriundos de outros períodos e culturas, amiúde dotados de critérios distintos de ordenação sonora? O trabalho proposto ganha em complexidade na medida em que a musicologia de Helmholtz, particularmente em sua dimensão epistemológica, não se mostra inteiramente insensível a riscos dessa espécie. Assim, figura entre nossos objetivos avaliarmos em que medida tal musicologia, de grande rigor científico, é capaz de coexistir com sistemas musicais que escapem às diretrizes estéticas que busca naturalizar. Seríamos mesmo racionalmente compelidos a adotar, como parece tacitamente sugerir a obra de Helmholtz, uma espécie de hierarquia valorativa no que toca aos sistemas musicais de diferentes períodos e culturas? Dentre tais sistemas, seriam alguns verdadeiramente mais aptos que os demais em plasmar uma suposta musicalidade universal? Acreditamos que, por meio de investigação renovada do nó epistêmico presente na percepção musical na qual se veem entretecidas considerações de natureza física, fisiológica, psicológica e filosófica , algumas distinções possam ser esboçadas entre fatores determinantes necessários (físicos e fisiológicos e, portanto, transculturais) e contingentes (biográfico-culturais) da mesma, e o problema devidamente atacado. / In the second half of the nineteenth century, German physicist and physiologist Hermann von Helmholtz devoted himself to the investigation of questions pertaining to physical and physiological acoustics, and to the application of the results of said research to the epistemology of music and musical aesthetics. While such endeavors represent a relatively brief part of his career, the chief innovations they brought forth the most thorough presentation of which may be found in On the Sensations of Tone as a Physiological Basis for the Theory of Music (originally published in 1863) have had a lasting impact on the whole of Western musicology. An analysis of the philosophical and scientific foundations and methodological principles his investigations rested upon occupies the opening chapters of the present work. Subsequent chapters present, in addition, a critical assessment of the scientists problematic attempt to extend the reach of his results to the sphere of musical aesthetics. The following two questions are central to our efforts: by establishing material and physiological traits as an ultimate, deterministic ground for the criteria for sound classification and ordering prevalent in nineteenth-century European art music, was Helmholtz not arguing for the naturalization of the musical systems prevalent in his own historical and cultural juncture? And, should this indeed be the case, would such a naturalization not be accomplished to the detriment of musical systems employed in other cultures and/or historical periods, often based on distinct modes of classification and ordering? Ultimately, then, the central aim of the present work is to evaluate and discuss to what an extent the rigorous scientific component of a musicology such as Helmholtzs is able to coexist with musical systems that obey aesthetic principles other than the ones said musicology espouses. Are we indeed rationally compelled to adopt a value-based hierarchy in regards to the systems of different cultures and/or historical periods, as the scientists work appears to suggest? Are certain musical systems indeed more apt than others to actualize human musicality? We believe an investigation of the epistemic knot which characterizes musical perception a phenomenon in which physical, physiological, psychological and philosophical strands are intricately intertwined may allow us to advance a few preliminary distinctions between its necessary (physical and physiological, which is to say transcultural) and its contingent (cultural and biographical) determinants, and thus properly attack the problem.

"Imagining a Black Pacific" traces a literary history of political and cultural interaction between African Americans and Koreans from the late nineteenth to mid-twentieth centuries. It argues that black and Korean authors explored literary modes of antiracial solidarity against the Japanese and U.S. empires. Building on diverse archives of U.S. missionary and Korean Christian texts, State Department records, and military documents, as well as literary works, periodicals, and jazz songs, this dissertation examines the mediums and modalities of Afro-Asian aesthetic connection that invoked human freedom and liberation in transnational and multilingual contexts. Black intellectuals and Korean writers drew a parallel between the racialized U.S. and colonized Korea to contest the racial formations of the Japanese empire in an Asian cultural space until the end of the Pacific War. This cross-racial comparison challenged the imperialistic imposition of U.S. politics upon the Pacific Rim during the Cold War era. "Imagining a Black Pacific" is an interdisciplinary project that explores three facets of "Afro-Korean" connectedness: the trans-Pacific literary trajectories of W. E. B. Du Bois, Booker T. Washington, Langston Hughes, Eslanda and Paul Robeson, and J. B. Lenoir; the enduring elaborations of black radicalism by Korean writers such as Yun Chi-ho, Han Heuk-gu, and Bae In-cheol in Korea; and U.S. missionaries' intervention in cultural exchanges between African Americans and Koreans. Examining these three distinctive transcultural encounters, my work brings into focus the complicated configurations of an Afro-Asian alliance. It highlights the self-reflexive disorientation of so-called Afro-Orientalism and explores the experimental commensurabilities between U.S. racism and East Asian colonialism, facilitated by Afro-Korean critical inquiries into two forms of imperialism in Korea, namely, Japan's colonization of Korea and U.S. military intervention in Korea. While scholars have focused critical attention on the political alliance between African Americans and Asians, Korea has gone long unexplored in Afro-Asian conjunctures. By extending the scope of Afro-Asian convergences, this dissertation not only fills in Korea's absence in previous studies but also reconstructs lost legacies of black internationalism in the Pacific. In particular, it reconsiders Afro-Orientalism by exploring Koreans' deployment of African American cultural sources to engender anticolonial discourses. At the same time, it uncovers black intellectuals' investigations of racism in Asian and U.S.-Asian contexts. Afro-Korean connections, or the interplay between African Americans' antiracial sensibility and Koreans' anticolonial consciousness, made sensible the hidden forms of racism in the Japanese and U.S. empires beyond the black-white racial binary. By bridging the long-standing gulf between black and Korean cultures, this study opens up new scholarly terrain in the fields of African American literature and culture, comparative race studies, and Asian/Pacific studies.

The Japanese military administration of Southeast Asia during the Second World War was meant to rebuild the prewar colonial system in the region under strong, centralized control. Different Japanese administrators disagreed over tactics, but their shared goal was to transform the inhabitants of the region into productive members of a new imperial formation, the Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere. Shōnan, the wartime name for Singapore, was meant to be the center of this Co-Prosperity Sphere in Southeast Asia. It was the strategic fulcrum of the region, one of its most important ports, and a center of culture and learning for the wartime Japanese. Home to thousands of Japanese administrators during the war and a linguistically, ethnically, and religiously diverse local population, Shōnan was a site of active debates over the future of the Sphere. Three assumptions undergirded these discussions: that of Japanese preeminence within the Sphere, the suitability of “rule by minzoku (race)” for Southeast Asians, and the importance of maintaining colonial social hierarchies even as Japanese administrators attempted to put the region on a total war footing. These goals were at odds with each other, and Japanese rule only upended social hierarchies and exacerbated racial tensions. The unintended legacy of the wartime empire lay, not only in the new opportunities that Japanese rule afforded to Southeast Asian revolutionaries, but in the end of the politics of accommodation with imperial power practiced by prewar Asian elites. The result of Japanese rule under the Co-Prosperity Sphere was the emergence of a new, confrontational form of politics that made it impossible to return to prewar colonial practice. Even in Singapore, the bastion of British power in Southeast Asia, Japanese rule undermined the Asian foundation that Western imperialism had been built on.

This dissertation analyzes the interplay between imperial messaging or self-representation and legal activity in the Roman Empire under the Severan dynasty. I discuss the unusual historical circumstances of Septimius Severus’ rise to power and the legitimacy crises faced by him and his successors, as well as those same emperors’ control of an increasingly complex legal bureaucracy and legislative apparatus. I describe how each of the four Severan rulers—Septimius Severus, Caracalla, Elagabalus, and Severus Alexander—employed different approaches to imperial legislation and adjudication in accordance with their idiosyncratic self-presentation and messaging styles, as well as how other actors within Roman legal culture responded to Severan political dynamics in their own work. In particular, this dissertation is concerned with a particularly—and increasingly—urgent problem in Roman elite political culture; the tension between theories of imperial power that centered upon rulers’ charismatic gifts or personal fitness to rule, and a more institutional, bureaucratized vision that placed the emperor at the center of broader networks of administrative control. While these two ideas of the Principate had always coexisted, the Severan period posed new challenges as innovations in imperial succession (such as more open military selection of emperors) called earlier legitimation strategies into question. I posit that Roman law, with its stated tendency towards regularized, impersonal processes, was a language in which the Severan state could more easily portray itself as a bureaucratic institution that might merit deference without a given leader being personally fit to rule. This dissertation begins by discussing the representational strategy of Septimius Severus, who deployed traditional imperial messaging tropes in strikingly legalistic forms. I then explore how this model of law as a venue for or language of state communication might explain otherwise idiosyncratic features of the constitutio Antoniniana, an edict promulgated by Septimius Severus’ son Caracalla that granted citizenship to all free inhabitants of the Empire. I next discuss two unusual features of the corpus of rescripts issued by Severus Alexander, the last Severan emperor: specifically, the relabeling of rescripts issued by Elagabalus, Alexander’s cousin and predecessor, as products of Alexander’s reign; and the idiosyncratic frequency with which rescripts issued under Alexander’s authority cite prior imperial (and particularly Severan) precedent. Finally, I discuss how jurists responded to Severan (and particularly late Severan) political and legal culture: late Severan jurists are particularly inclined to justify their legal decisionmaking in terms of the desirable consequences of a given decision’s universal promulgation, and similarly likely to justify their opinions by citing to an impersonal ‘imperial authority’ rather than to named figures. I argue that these changes reflect both state and scholarly attempts to wrestle with increasingly unstable imperial selection processes, and to articulate a vision of Roman governance that might function in the new world of the third century C.E.

This dissertation argues that Pacific literature is haunted by a form of ecological aggression known as nuclear colonialism. The Pacific is the region of the world where Western nations tested most of their nuclear and thermonuclear weapons – an extreme form of colonial occupation that will impact both the land and the people for hundreds of thousands of years. This study analyzes Pacific works published post World War II, from Māori poet Hone Tuwhare’s 1964 collection of poetry to riMajel oral performer Kathy Jetn̄il-Kijiner’s 2017 videoart, focusing in particular on the francophone works of writers identifying as Kanak, Mā’ohi, and Ni-Vanuatu. Through a series of close-readings of this multilingual and transnational corpus, it argues that nuclear colonialism functions as a leitmotiv informing both the politics and the poetics of this anticolonial corpus, despite the fact that nuclear violence is often denounced in between the lines, through oblique and diffuse references mirroring the ubiquity of radioactivity itself.

This study examines the functions of the idealisation of Indigenous peoples around the world. It has its focus on imperial discourses (the 1850s-1945) in the German-speaking world. The research places the German-language discourses within transnational contexts of imperial image production and argues that racial idealisation served the construction of white hegemony in different political settings and ideological systems. Identifying a perceptible increase in idealised images of Indigeneity after the loss of the German colonies in 1918/19, the study explains the reasons for idealisation not as abstract expressions of European escapism within the tradition of the ‘Noble Savage’ discourse but as vested political reactions to colonial politics. Focussing on a period of heightened imperial image production from the 1850s to Nazism, the thesis outlines that images of Indigeneity derived their conceptual origin from transnational and transhistorical primitivism that became appropriated by different political currents, including colonial revisionism and Nazism. This study argues that racial idealisation and stigmatisation were both part of racist discourses of white dominance and knowledge regimes. Idealisation, the present research shows, is not an epiphenomenon or exception of racial domination in imperial discourse but a central mechanism of construing racial hierarchy. Ultimately, the study argues that Indigeneity should be considered a category similar to sexuality, gender and class that informed the construction of race. Racialised Indigeneity was a flexible construct that allowed the formation of idealisation and stigmatisation according to political necessities without altering racial hierarchies. The theoretical discussion suggests that Indigeneity in imperial discourse helped to establish such hierarchies.

Bridges, railways stations, warehouses, bandstands, fountains, shop fronts, lamps, gates and other cast-iron elements can still be found throughout Argentina. Some of these elements are impressive, others humble; some are abandoned, others are still in use. Many are part of important monuments; others are so incorporated into the urban landscape that they almost go unnoticed. When one's attention is drawn to these features, however, a company nameplate and place of origin - 'London', 'Liverpool', 'Glasgow' - is usually visible. These elements are so far from Argentina that their appearance begs several questions: why are most of the visible nameplates British? Are they the same as those found in London, Liverpool and Glasgow, or in former British colonies like India, South Africa or Australia? If so, why? Can we think of these elements as British imperial architecture in Argentina? In what context can their arrival in Argentina be understood? Who commissioned and designed them? Are there more Scottish nameplates than English, or any other? Does it matter? Did these elements act as models that were later copied or imitated by local manufacturers? Did they affect architecture and urban development in Argentina? If architecture reflects the view of a society, what do these elements reflect? Considering the wider context of British cast iron manufacturing, this dissertation asks what role Scotland's burgeoning cast iron industry played in the export of British iron products to Argentina during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. If in recent years historians have reconsidered the specific contributions of Scotland and its people to the growth and expansion of Great Britain as an imperial power, this dissertation takes this analysis into the realm of cast iron as an export industry. If British cast iron was ubiquitous throughout the developed world during this period, how do we begin to understand the Scottish cast iron industry as a major contributor to this trade? Here Argentina is used as a micro-study in an attempt to measure and understand that contribution. In addressing some of the above questions, the dissertation attempts to form a coherent analysis of the architectural, historic, cultural and economic dimensions of the phenomenon of Scottish architectural ironwork in Argentina. In so doing, the study hopes to shed light on larger questions concerning British 'informal' imperialism, considering exports of cast iron as a significant component in Britain's attempts at economic leverage and coercion in Argentina during that country's most dramatic period of development and urbanisation. The dissertation arrives at the conclusion that British cast-iron elements found in Argentina are the same or similar to elements found in Great Britain and its colonial empire because they arrived in Argentina through a process of commercial expansion that involved imperial trade routes, global networks, cooperation between British architects and engineers, as well as migration and the assistance of the pro-British elite in Argentina. It is argued that British iron in general, and Scottish in particular, contributed to the expansion of British power and influence in the region through helping shape the architectural and urban environments of Argentina. To reach this conclusion, the thesis is structured in three sections dealing with the three most significant aspects of the thesis: informal empire in Argentina, the iron trade, and Scottish cast-iron architecture in Argentina.

In this dissertation, I argue that two dominant perspectives on farming in Canada—the technoscientific capitalist perspective on modern industrial farming and the popular vision of hard-won survival on the family farm—both draw on narrative and aesthetic strategies that have deep roots in distinct, but related variations of the georgic tradition, which arrived in Canada in the eighteenth century and continues to shape literary representations and material practices today. Critics of Canadian literature have tended to subsume the georgic under the category of pastoral, but I argue that the georgic is a separate and more useful category for understanding the complex myths and realities of agricultural production in Canada precisely because it is a literary genre that focuses on the labour of farming and because it constitutes a complex and multi-generic discourse which both promotes and enables critique of dominant agricultural practices. I argue that, despite its sublimation beneath the pastoral, the georgic mode has also been an important cultural nexus in Canadian literature and culture, and that it constitutes a set of conventions that have become so commonplace in writing that deals with agricultural labour and its related issues in Canada that they have come to seem both inevitable and natural within the Canadian cultural tradition, even if they have not been explicitly named as georgic. By analyzing a variety of texts such as Oliver Goldmith’s The Rising Village, Isabella Valancy Crawford’s Malcolm’s Katie, Susanna Moodie’s Roughing It in the Bush, Frederick Philip Grove’s Settlers of the Marsh, Martha Ostenso’s Wild Geese, Al Purdy’s In Search of Owen Roblin, Robert Kroetsch’s “The Ledger,” Christian Bok’s Xenotext, Rita Wong’s Forage, and Phil Hall’s Amanuensis, I recontextualize Canadian writing that deals with agrarian work within two distinct but related georgic traditions. As Raymond Williams and others have shown, the georgic’s inclusion of both pastoralizing myths and material realities makes it useful for exploring ecological questions. The georgic is often understood in terms of what Karen O’Brien has called the imperial georgic mode, which involves a technocratic, imperialist, capitalist approach to agriculture, and which helped theorize and justify imperial expansion and the technological domination of nature. But as ecocritics like David Fairer, Margaret Ronda, and Kevin Goodman have argued, the georgic’s concern with the contingency and precariousness of human relationships with nonhuman systems also made it a productive site for imagining alternatives to imperial ways of organizing social and ecological relations. Ronda calls this more ecologically-focused and adaptable georgic the disenchanted georgic, but I call it the precarious georgic because of the way it enables engagement with what Anna Tsing calls precarity. Precarity, as Tsing explains, describes life without the promise of mastery or stability, which is a condition that leaves us in a state of being radically dependent on other beings for survival. “The challenge for thinking with precarity,” she writes, “is to understand the ways projects for making scalability have transformed landscape and society, while seeing also where scalability fails—and where nonscalable ecological and economic relations erupt” (42). By tracing the interplay between imperial and precarious georgic modes in Canadian texts that have mistakenly been read as pastoral—from Moodie’s settler georgic to the queer gothic georgic of Ostenso’s Wild Geese to the provisional and object-oriented georgics of Robert Kroetsch and Phil Hall—I argue that the precarious georgic strain has always engaged in this process of thinking with precarity, and that it holds the potential for providing space to re-imagine our ecological relations.