The concern of Chinese intellectuals with the "idea" of modern science from the West in the transition generation from 1895 to 1923 was fundamentally a concern about "national survival" and modernity. The value and meaning that accrued to science as "method" -- as a "thinking technique" -- and to the evolutionary ideas of Charles Darwin and Herbert Spencer as the "science of choice" among Chinese intellectuals of this period, was due to belief or disbelief in the power of these ideas to describe, explain, or solve the problematic of "modernity" in a Chinese context.

"Mexican Americans Write Toward Justice in Texas, 1973 - 1982" examines literature produced in the course of struggles for justice conducted by Mexicans, Mexican Americans, and their allies, the origins of this literature, and its effects. Three areas -- police brutality, exploitation of farmworkers, and inequitable, inadequate public education - troubled Mexican Americans activists across the political spectrum. Additionally, many people were appalled by U.S. treatment of immigrants. The poetry and plays of Nephtalí De León, Heriberto Terán, Gil Scott-Heron, Carlos Morton, and an activist teatro in Houston exemplify a long tradition of cultural production that simultaneously mourns and organizes in response to violence against Mexicans in Texas. The Texas Farmworker Union (TFWU) newspaper, El Cuhamil , documents the cacophony of voices participating in farmworker mobilizations for social justice in Texas. El Cuhamil also reorients the narratives about farm worker organizing from a U.S.- centered "civil rights" perspective to a Mexican-centered one. Two U.S. Supreme Court decisions arising from Texas, San Antonio v. Rodríguez (1973) and Plyler v. Doe (1982), illustrate how federal courts began to retreat from the engagement with social justice that had characterized much civil rights jurisprudence between roughly 1946 and 1973. These decisions also reveal the contradictions at the heart of constitutional equal protection at its "best" or most effective. This dissertation seeks to understand how Mexicans and Mexican Americans tested a variety of rhetorical strategies - U.S. citizenship, Aztlán, the international working class, Catholic universalism, and human rights - to articulate their needs and desires and make claims in popular culture, labor organizing, and the law. I situate these writings historically and in U.S. Southwestern literature, Mexican American literature, U.S. civil rights jurisprudence, and Mexican intellectual traditions. A subsidiary contribution of this dissertation is its tentative exploration of the distinct trajectories of Mexican Americans in what is now the Texas Plains and Panhandle. The alienating sense of "nothingness" that some people attribute to this region derives from the conditions under which Anglo settlement began in the 1880s. Modernity, here, did not alter or overlap with the modes of production that preceded it, but violently obliterated them. / text

In this report I argue that during the independence wars from Spain and the first decade of republican rule, the learned elite of the viceroyalty of New Granada—present day Colombia, Ecuador, Venezuela, and Panama—articulated narratives of nature and science to debates over provincial hierarchies, to justify provincial unity, foreign commercial integration, and the creation of political symbols for the new polity. In the process of undoing the Spanish empire, the lettered elite conceived of their homeland’s natural bounties as key cultural capital, and as the language with which to frame their aspirations as political community, as part of a national polity or of regional patrias. By using newspapers, constitutional debates, scientific writings, and visual evidence, I place the elite’s sensibilities and concerns about their fatherland’s nature in the wider context of political transformations that took place from 1808 and on. In the first section, I explore eighteenth-century assessments of New Granada’s nature, offering an overview of key conceptions of New Granada’s geopolitical situation and nature that shaped the Creole imagination. In the second section, I characterize the reforms brought about by the Bourbon monarchy in New Granada, giving weight to the socialization of practices of the utility of science among the learned elite. The third section illustrates how Neogranadians deployed nature in assessing provincial fragmentation, and in the debate over the preeminence of Santafé as capital when the monarchic crisis exploded. The fourth section explores how nature was employed as an argument in debates over the integration of present-day Colombia, Venezuela, and Ecuador into a single republic, and the adoption of a federal or a central state. Finally, section five discusses the role of New Granada’s natural landmarks in discourses of provincial and foreign commercial integration, along with a reflection on the use of nature as political symbol for the new republic. My aim is to explore the ways that the lettered elite incorporated nature into geopolitical discourses of a polity separate from Spain, and to uncover the tensions embedded in the ways they imagined their desired nation. / text

This study compares how English and French Canadian intellectuals viewed American society from 1891 to 1945. During the period under study, the Dominion experienced accelerated industrialization and urbanization, massive immigration, technological change, and the rise of mass culture. To the nation's intellectuals, many of these changes found their source and their very embodiment in the United States. America, it was argued, was the quintessence of modernity, having embraced, among other things, secularism, democracy, mass culture, and industrial capitalism. / In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Canadian hostility to the United States and continental integration was expressed in two conservative discourses: that of English Canadian imperialism and French Canadian nationalism. Despite their fundamental divergence on the national question; both imperialists and nationalistes shared an essentially antimodern outlook, and anti-Americanism was their logical point of convergence. / By contrast, the most passionate Canadian defenders of American society could be found among liberal and socialist intellectuals like F. R. Scott and Jean-Charles Harvey. They saw continental integration and Canadian-American convergence as both inevitable and desirable. Intellectual continentalism reached its summit of influence during the 1930s and 1940s. / The present study is based on the analysis of some 520 texts found essentially in the era's periodical literature. Each, at least in part, explores some aspect of American life or of the relationship between Canada and the United States. Unlike most previous scholarship, which has tended to view anti-American sentiment merely as an expression of Canadian nationalism, this study is more concerned with Canadian intellectuals as thinkers on the left, the right, and the centre. / The comparative, pan-Canadian nature of this study reveals that English and French Canadian intellectuals shared common preoccupations with respect to the United States. However, the tone and emphasis of their commentary often differed. In English Canada, where political institutions and the imperial bond were viewed as the mainstays of Canadian distinctiveness, writing on the United States tended to deal primarily with political and diplomatic issues, in Quebec, where political institutions were not generally viewed as vital elements of national distinctiveness, social and cultural affairs dominated writing on the United States.

This thesis follows the interaction of "double-voicing" and "double-consciousness" in Native American literary history. It begins with surviving records from the time of colonial contact and ends with works by Leslie Marmon Silko and Thomas King, two contemporary authors of the Native American Literary Renaissance. "Double-voicing" is a common feature found in many works preserved by early anthropologists from various Native American oral traditions. However, after colonial contact this feature largely disappears from literary works written by Native American authors, when it is replaced by the societal condition "double-consciousness." With the revitalization of cultural knowledge in the mid-twentieth-century, Native authors also revitalize their rhetorical techniques in their writing and the "double-voice" feature reemerges coupled with a bicultural awareness that is carried over from "double-consciousness." / vi, 98 leaves ; 29 cm.

In Galicia, translation slowly emerged as part of a cultural program during the 1920s, primarily through the activities of the Xeración Nós and the Irmandades da Fala, two intellectual and political groups seeking to recuperate and defend Galician language and culture through two magazines, A Nosa Terra and Nós. This aspect of nationalism is deserving of study because few scholars have addressed how the appropriation of literary texts, via translations, impacts nationalists' agendas. Nineteenth-century Galician scholars had claimed to establish ethnic and cultural links in early history between Galicia and Ireland and other alleged Celtic nations. The Xeración Nós and the Irmandades da Fala continued this legacy by researching Celtic and Irish history as well as introducing Irish writers, discussing their contributions to literature, and translating their works in journals. Their main intention was to demonstrate the Galicians' distinctiveness from Spain and to establish a common link with a nation struggling for its national rights. Therefore, for both journals, the subject of Ireland and the Irish was an obligatory and ideologically imperative reference. This thesis examines the role of translation in Nos and A Nosa Terra and its impact on Galician cultural nationalism. Working within the parameters of translation theory, nationalism, and post-colonialism, I consider why literary works by authors such as W.B. Yeats (1865-1939), James Joyce (1882-1941), and Terence MacSwiney (1879-1920), and the Irish epic, Leabhar Gabhála (The Book of the Conquests of Ireland), are discussed and later translated into Galician and what these translations seek to achieve within the re-emerging culture. On this basis, my objective is to show that as translated literature assumes a new role by providing invigorating models in the target culture, it regenerates national culture, language, and literature.

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