Undergraduate honors paper--Mount Holyoke College, 2005. Dept. of History. / Includes bibliographical references (leaves 55-57).

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Washington, 2008. / Vita. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 280-287).

Thesis (Ph. D.)--Victoria University (Melbourne, Vic.), 2008. / Includes bibliographical references.

Thesis (Ph.D.)--Georgetown University, 2009. / Includes bibliographical references.

Thesis (Ph.D.)--Syracuse University, 2008. / "Publication number: AAT 3323067."

This dissertation examines the popular politics of the anticolonial struggle in Algiers from the perspective of people who participated in the Algerian Revolution at a grassroots level. It is largely the product of interviews conducted with 30 women and men who participated in the revolution in and around Algiers. Their participation in the struggle took diverse forms, including armed combat, material or logistical support to those fighting, participating in strikes or protests, and so on. In examining Algerians' anticolonial struggle 'from below,' I have sought to illuminate different and more plural perspectives of this period of history. In presenting this new material, I put forward a number of critiques on the existing historiography of the Algerian Revolution. My goal has been not only to include those who have been excluded from larger narratives in order to fold them into the political history of the revolution, but to demonstrate how these perspectives challenge those narratives. Finally, I have taken the experiences and perspectives of these Algerians to be a legitimate and productive vantage point from which to reflect on larger theoretical questions of popular politics and revolutions in the colonized world. These include questions about revolution, the diverse political imaginaries of what constitutes liberation and freedom, the means that can justly be used to attain such ends, the blurry lines between resistance and collaboration, the relationship between avant-garde parties and the masses that lend them support, and the different iterations of Islamic politics in modernity.

From the 1940s, the colonial administration enacted policies such as ‘slum clearance’ and the construction of housing estates to remodel Lagos into its vision of a modern capital city and a center that would unite all Nigerians. The federal government of Nigeria continued this project after independence in 1960 until 1976 when the third independent military government decided to build a new capital city in Abuja, Northern Nigeria because it claimed that Lagos was too congested and lacked land for expansion. This dissertation goes beyond the narrative of Lagos as a “failed” federal capital to show how Lagosians across class, ethnic, and gender backgrounds shaped urban planning and administrative projects during Nigeria’s transition from colonial to independent rule. It studies the intellectual views and political campaigns that interest groups from women traders, landlords, tenants, to indigenous Lagosians adopted to change how town officials and planners implemented rent control, public land acquisition, sanitation, and slum clearance. Contrary to the histories of urban planning that center on politicians’ and planners’ agendas or cast city dwellers as opponents of planning policies, this study argues that Lagosians’ competing interests influenced how they interacted with and sought to alter municipal laws. Letters to the newspaper editors, court records, songs, novels, petitions, and official correspondences and minutes reveal how Lagosians protested, accommodated, and created alternative proposals. For example, even though landlords and tenants’ associations contested rent control, both groups shared a similar goal to amend rather than abolish the slum clearance of Central Lagos during the 1950s. However, the consensus for the demolition projects marginalized the needs of Central Lagosians, who wanted the slum clearance’s cancellation. A social history of Lagosians’ involvement in the transformation of the city’s laws and spaces provides a different perspective to the scholarship on decolonization in Africa, which has tended to characterize cities as the centers of nationalist mobilizations. This dissertation illustrates citizens’ dedication to relying upon municipal institutions for public amenities rather than on informal networks, patron-client relationships, and associational groups, which have been the focus of many studies on urban livelihood in postcolonial Africa.

Sounds that Fall Through the Cracks, and Other Silences and Acts of Love tells the story of a dozen cosmopolitan socially aware singer-songwriters, poets and musicians of different racial, ethnic and national backgrounds who developed their political consciousness by thinking within/through the colonial problematic of Québec or Puerto Rico in the 1960s and 1970s. Five interrelated claims give coherence to this work: a) grasping the decolonial import of socially aware repertoires needs to attend to the meeting point among sound, music, lyrical content, and the interlocutor’s perspective on the musical object; b) understanding the historical contexts which shaped each interlocutor’s life is necessary to fully comprehend her political-aesthetic choices; c) when incorporating the interlocutor’s way of imagining the past one must pay attention to the ways in which that past has been historicized d) reflecting on how the other is inscribed in sound and word needs to account for how that other envisions herself and; e) these critical assessments must be developed “theorizing with your interlocutor” in a relentless back and forth informed by love and friendship that takes seriously the critical import of the interlocutor and considers his needs and desires. Combined, these claims are conducive to a critical analysis that is historically rigorous, ethical and fair to the interlocutor and the other to the extent that the unavoidable limitations of the researcher allows for. By departing from spaces where the eye meets the ear, logos and phono entwine, the historical context shapes the musical object and vice versa, fieldwork and life are fused, and the interlocutor is treated not only as a producer of culture but as a thinker in her own right, I problematize four major categories: Puerto Rican nueva canción (PRNC), chanson québécoise (CQ), the related anticolonial narratives that frame these musics, and the category “the decolonial.” Regarding the latter, I pay careful attention to the relationship between bodies of knowledge around the colonial, such as postcolonial, Latin American decolonial, settler colonial and anticolonial studies. Edouard Glissant has argued that “generalization” is one of the manifestations of a “totalitarian root” because “from the world it chooses one side of the reports, one set of ideas, which it sets apart from others and tries to impose by exporting as a model” (2010 [1990]: 20). Inspired in part by the Martiniquais philosopher and poet, my overall argument is that decolonizing knowledge must involve a collective praxis of “theorizing with your interlocutor” that in addition to assessing how colonial logics are reproduced and proposing ways to contest them, must challenge the “totalitarian” and individualist “root” of academic discourse. In order to develop this collective praxis, I walk hand in hand with my interlocutors/friends Américo Boschetti, Frank Ferrer, Bernardo Palombo, Jesús Papoleto Meléndez, Hilcia Montañez, Oscar Pardo, Sandra María Esteves, Suni Paz, Sylvain Leroux, Marie-Claire Séguin, Rouè Doudou Boicel, Lise Vachon and Georges Rodriguez, and other decolonial and anticolonial thinkers.

Education in Senegal has since Independence in 1960 relied on French, the language of the colonizer and a foreign language for most Senegalese learners. In Senegal, national languages refer to African languages, which are not officially enacted as languages of instruction in formal schooling in comparison to French, the former colonial and current official language. However, in 2015, the Ministry of Education adopted a bilingual education policy based on national (Senegalese) languages. This is due in no small part to the advocacy work of Senegalese national language activists or militants (strong advocates in French, drawing on a political connotation). This study looks at these self-proclaimed militants’ lived experiences with national languages and education, the extent of their multi-generational work and network, and their influence in shaping the language-in-education policy landscape at what appears to be a moment of “critical juncture” with the adoption of a bilingual education policy within the Ministry of National Education. A qualitative case study, it draws on in-depth interviews with these militants, historical and policy document analysis, and participant-observations to answer the following question: “How and why have self-proclaimed militants advocated for the use of national languages in the Senegalese educational system since the 1950s, and what are their current contributions at this critical moment in possible language-in-education policy change?” Situated in a sociocultural framework, this study draws on Walter Mignolo’s (1991) decolonial theory of “border thinking” and Senegalese decolonial authors to amplify the voices, innovations, and contributions of Senegalese bi-/multilingual education researchers, practitioners, and advocates. Decolonizing and delinking knowledge is particularly important in the field of bi-/multilingual education and literacy as research and practice are often exported from the Global North to Global South through international development and aid programs, when in fact, contexts of the Global North would gain more in learning from models of the Global South. In the context of Senegal, the militants’ engagement in bilingual education is an act of self-determination and sovereignty, to move away from inherited and internalized patterns of colonial education and at the same time navigate the dynamics of aid and development in education, in particular, international donor agencies agendas and funding mechanisms.

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.