This dissertation investigates the constitutive effects that practices of large data collection and knowledge production have upon states and subjectivities. It does so by tracking the career of the oldest genre of colonial reports in India, titled the ‘Annual Administration Reports’(AARs). For an 80-year period (1855-1935), every province was required to produce an ‘annual report’ organized under sixteen broad topics. I argue that these AARs played an instrumental role in shaping both the modern Indian state and colonial subjectivity in three ways. First, the heavily statistical mode of narrative that came to be employed by the AARs turned India, and Indian labor, into what Heidegger terms a ‘standing reserve’, available for ready capitalist expropriation. It is through these reports that India came to be rendered available externally as a ‘colony.’ Second, shortly after the launch of the AARs, and because of its design, it began to appear that a singular, standardized state existed across the entire territory of India, engaged simultaneously in the same activities. Third, the uniform space of the state that these reports rendered, facilitated the rise of anti-colonial nationalism in South Asia. The earliest nationalists across South Asia rose to prominence by reflecting on, comparing, and critiquing the information contained in these regional reports. In developing these arguments, my dissertation presents both a novel site and a new approach for inquiry into knowledge production, state formation and colonial subjectivities.

by Kwan Shui-man. / "March 1999." / Thesis (Ph.D.)--Chinese University of Hong Kong, 1999. / Includes bibliographical references (p. 265-283). / Electronic reproduction. Hong Kong : Chinese University of Hong Kong, [2012] System requirements: Adobe Acrobat Reader. Available via World Wide Web. / Electronic reproduction. Ann Arbor, MI : ProQuest Information and Learning Company, [200-] System requirements: Adobe Acrobat Reader. Available via World Wide Web. / Mode of access: World Wide Web. / Abstracts in English and Chinese.

In the first chapter of Crossing the River (1993), Caryl Phillips depicts the dilemma of a fluid identity for the peoples of the African diaspora and their descendants by using ambiguity to simulate feelings of contradiction, liminality and a double consciousness. The first character, Nash Williams, struggles with his cultural identity as an emancipated, black slave and missionary who is repatriated in Africa to convert the pagans of Liberia. A postcolonial reading of Nash’s hybrid position illustrates his experiences of unhomeliness, of religious doubt and realisation in the shortcomings of mimicry. The second character, Amelia Williams is divided by her dual identity as the wife of a slave owning-slave liberator in antebellum America. Via a contrapuntal reading of Amelia as the antagonist of the tale, her hostile manner supports the suggestion that she sought to control the peculiar situation which was threatening her livelihood, depreciating her social status and debasing her imperialist values. Her proslavery standpoint could not, however, be established unequivocally. Nevertheless, both Amelia and Nash are unmistakably troubled by inner conflicts engendered through slavery and polarised ideologies.

Due to the high energy consumption demand and restrictions in the installation of new transmission lines, using Flexible AC Transmission System (FACTS) devices is inevitable. In power system analysis, transferring high-quality power is essential. In fact, one of the important factors that has a special role in terms of efficiency and operation is maximum power transfer capability. FACTS devices are used for controlling the voltage, stability, power flow and security of transmission lines. However, it is necessary to find the optimal location for these devices in power networks. Many optimization techniques have been deployed to find the optimal location for FACTS devices in power networks. There are several varieties of FACTS devices with different characteristics that are used for different purposes. The imperialist competitive algorithm (ICA) is a recently developed optimization technique that is used widely in power systems. This study presents an approach to find the optimal location and size of FACTS devices in power networks using the imperialist competitive algorithm technique. This technique is based on human social evolution. ICA technique is a new heuristic algorithm for global optimization searches that is based on the concept of imperialistic competition. This algorithm is used for mathematical issues; it can be categorized on the same level as Genetic Algorithm (GA) and Particle Swarm Optimization (PSO) techniques. Also, in this study, the enhancement of voltage profile, stability and loss reduction and increasing of load-ability were investigated and carried out. In this case, to apply FACTS devices in power networks, the MATLAB program was used. Indeed, in this program all power network parameters were defined and analysed. IEEE 30-bus and IEEE 68-bus with 16 machine systems are used as a case study. All the simulation results, including voltage profile improvement and convergence characteristics, have been illustrated. The results show the advantages of the imperialist competitive algorithm technique over the conventional approaches.

This dissertation reconstructs a theoretical framework for the Indian Constitution. It does so immanently, by focusing on the making of the Indian Constitution, taking into account both the demands of its specific historical conditions, and the formal constraints of drafting a constitution. The dissertation shows that in its historical context the task of the Indian constitution makers should be understood as creating a constitutional system that can mediate a transformation of the social condition. Performing this task required reinterpreting the established tenets of constitutionalism. The reinterpretation produces a distinct variation of constitutionalism that is termed transformational constitutionalism. Part I of the dissertation focuses on some of the central tenets of constitutional theory by examining the writings in which they first assumed their paradigmatic form. The concepts are situated in the historical context in which they were formulated to highlight the specific challenges they were a response to, and hence distinguishing them from the conceptual terrain in which the Indian Constitution was formulated. Part I also shows the essentially preservative nature of the main tenets of constitutional thought, and that the fully developed versions of its central concepts seek to preclude any possibility for major changes in social conditions. Part II sets out the historical developments that led to the material and ideational terrain on which the Indian Constitution was conceived. It first outlines the institutional and discursive structures of colonial rule to tease out the development of concepts that would serve as the point of reference for the constitution-makers. Part II then turns to the resistance to colonial rule by focusing on the ideas and politics of M.K. Gandhi to delineate the strengths and weaknesses of Congress's claim to represent the Indian nation at the moment of independence, and outline the two different visions of what it meant to free oneself from colonial subjugation, and the different challenges for bringing those visions to fruition. Finally, Part II outlines the way in which the Indian constitutional vision was caught in an interdependent dynamic of break and continuity with its colonial past. After Part I and II have traced the conceptual coordinates of a modern constitution, and the specific historical condition in which the Indian constitution was conceived respectively, Part III focuses on the Indian Constituent Assembly Debates to show how the framers sought to respond to the concrete challenges facing them by creatively reinterpreting the precepts of modern constitutionalism itself. The dissertation shows that the Indian Constitution has to be understood as a totality containing three related strata - that of constitutional imagination, promises, and text - which exist in tension with each other. This tension constitutes the contradiction at the heart of the Indian Constitutional form. The dissertation concludes by following one such contradiction, between the strata of imagination and text as it developed during the most important constitutional conflict of the initial years on the question of compensation for acquisition of property. It also demonstrates how that conflict fundamentally shaped the nature of Indian constitutional practice.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Chicago, Dept. of History, August 2001. / Includes bibliographical references. Also available on the Internet.

The Western imagination has ascribed histories and identities of the Marquesas Islands throughout centuries of evolving discourses and representations as a paradoxical paradise, bolstering colonialist ideologies of social evolutionary theory. The islands have either been represented as backwards on a social scale to justify Western dominance, or have been represented as being in a state of authentic human nature out of colonial guilt and imperialist nostalgia. These representations reveal a paradox in which the Marquesas is ascribed in the Western imagination as a degenerate space, yet also as a space where the regeneration of human nature is made possible— provided that a time-backwards Marquesas is dependent on a civilized West.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of California, Riverside, 2009. / Includes abstract. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 425-447). Issued in print and online. Available via ProQuest Digital Dissertations.

This dissertation investigates the protest cultures of social revolutionary groups during and after the events of 1968 in France and West Germany before inquiring into how political officials and police responded to the difficulties of maintaining public order. The events of 1968 led revolutionaries in both France and West Germany to adopt new justifications for militant action based in heterodox Marxism and anti-colonial theory, and to attempt to institutionalize new, confrontational modes of public protest that borrowed ways of knowing urban space, tactics, and materials from both the working class and armed guerrilla movements. Self-identifying revolutionaries and left intellectuals also institutionalized forums for the investigation of police interventions in protests on the basis of testimonies, photography, and art. These investigative committees regularly aimed to exploit the resonance of police violence to promote further cycles of politicization. In response, political officials and police sought after 1968 to introduce and to reinforce less ostentatious, allegedly less harmful means of crowd control and dispersion that could inflict suffering without reproducing the spectacle of mass baton assaults and direct physical confrontations—means of physical constraint less susceptible to unveiling as violence. Second, police reinforced surveillance and arrest units. The new tactics of the police borrowed their principles from the struggle against subversion, criminality, and terrorism in order to neutralize the small-group tactics of militant demonstrators. Thus, 1968 served as the point of emergence of a confrontational protest culture within the New Left that in turn provoked the re-articulation of practices of the state. It was a revolution in the counter-revolution.

This dissertation presents an original reconstruction of Kintwadi kia Bangunza, the movement of Simon Kimbangu in Belgian Congo, from the period 1921 to 1942. It interprets the movement ancestrally, arguing that Kimbangu and his initiates were spiritualists who worked to heal the dead and reverse the European occultism of the First World War. When the prophetic healers (bangunza) received the sick, they became mediators between the living and dead, performing rituals using Holy Spirit medicine to retrieve, reconcile with, ascend and avenge their ancestors. This dissertation brings together a wide variety of sources in five languages, gathered from over a year of archival research as well as several months of anthropological fieldwork. It presents a feminist, interdisciplinary analysis of the transformation of Kintwadi from its beginning as an ancestral healing movement, into a revolt movement led by the ancestors and finally, to its institutionalization as various churches. This dissertation argues that how we read Kintwadi, provides a useful prism through which to consider the politics of decolonization in Africa today.