Modernism is often connected to the public sphere due to its associations with urbanity and technological changes. But interiority and private life was as important to modernity and, in particular, in Virginia Woolf’s writing. This essay explores the protagonists’ access to and experience of privacy in Woolf’s novels To the Lighthouse (1927) and Mrs Dalloway (1925), which both centre on women in a domestic environment. The reading combines modernist reactions against Victorian domesticity, which was structured on the private/public dichotomy and which limited women’s access to privacy, and combines it with modernist views of interiority, informed, more specifically, by Freud’s model of the unconscious and the spatial features of it. Privacy and interiority are imagined with spatial metaphors, but privacy is not necessarily connected to physical place and being alone, but rather having the ability to control the social situation and to choose what one reveals about oneself. Both novels re-imagine privacy and its ties to physical as well as mental space. This essay argues that To the Lighthouse is centred on a traditional Victorian home which reflects how its protagonist experiences interior privacy, and Mrs Dalloway explores a more modern domesticity that challenges Victorian organisation of the home and in turn, women’s access to privacy and solitude. With modernity public life was made available for women to a larger extent, but just as public life is coded by power relations, so is private life, which determines what sort of life could be lived by, for example, women.

Wang Xiaobo is a Post-Mao novelist whose works have prompted tremendous attention from the intellectuals and the public after his death. The straightforward representation of sex in his fiction is often considered as one of the sources that contribute to his “liberal spirit”. This is because many of Wang Xiaobo’s stories full of sexual depictions are set during the Cultural Revolution. But Wang Xiaobo’s ambiguous manipulation of the relationship between sex and the power makes his resistance to authoritarianism a tricky issue. On the one hand, his nonchalant attitude to both sex and politics can be interpreted as a mocking of the Maoist ideology. On the other hand, the author’s detachment from the political background and the protagonist’s sexual carnival in the rural areas can be considered as indifferent to the Cultural Revolution. The engagement with Maoist ideology in the theoretical framework of suppression/revolt cannot give a satisfactory answer to the role of sex in his fiction. This thesis amends this framework by taking other elements than Maoist discourse into consideration. / Graduate

American historians tend to oppose “modernity” and “modern religion” to pre-modern and “traditional” faith, a binary that has privileged certain religious forms and displays of sacredness over others. This thesis challenges the structuring dichotomy of modernity by arguing that Protestant evangelical revivals were sites on which “modernity” was made, defined, contested, and remade at the end of the nineteenth century. Examining the major revivals of Dwight Moody and Billy Sunday, among others, it rejects grand narratives and insists on understanding revival campaigns as existing in a braided relationship with the “secular” public sphere: one player in a symbolic marketplace where various partisans attempted to demonstrate that they were uniquely “modern.” This “modernity” was constructed through multiple categories of gender, age, class, ethnicity, and race, linking claims of “modernity” to common-sense masculinity, idealized family roles, and Anglo-Saxon identity as site upon which “Americanness” was made. / Graduate / 0320 / 0337 / 0330 / barak65@hotmail.com

This thesis investigates the relation between exception and governmentality in the critique of sovereignty. It considers exception and governmentality as an expression of the problem of sovereignty and argues that this problem is expressed both within the accounts of sovereignty that exception and governmentality articulate, as well as between them. Taking Michel Foucault and Carl Schmitt as the paradigmatic theorists of governmentality and exception, respectively, I engage in close readings of the texts in which these concepts are most thoroughly elaborated: Security, Territory, Population and Political Theology. These readings demonstrate that, despite their apparent differences, exception and governmentality cannot be differentiated from one another. The instability evident in Schmitt and Foucault’s concepts show that the relation between them is best characterized as aporetic. / Graduate / 0615 / 0616 / reganburles@gmail.com

The history of colonialism is generally associated with the authoritarian regimes of the sixteenth century that expanded their reign for the purpose of material aggrandizement. Problems arise, however, when colonial regimes espouse explicit concern for the welfare of the subject population. Through a reading of British colonial discourse on India, as represented by the Economist newspaper, John Stuart Mill, George Campbell, and John William Kaye, I argue that market capitalism was seen as the means by which ‘backward’ Indian subjects would be ‘improved.’ But this ‘civilizing mission’ exposed Indian society to unprecedented violence as the British sought to enforce its conformity to a system of proprietorship and commercial production. To explain the paradox inherent to liberal colonialism I will employ the concept of biopolitics as developed by Michel Foucault. Biopolitics explains how the prioritization of ‘life’ leads, not to peaceful existence, but to efforts to eliminate elements of human activity deemed inimical to the reproduction of the species. In colonial India this took the form of adjudicating subjects’ ability to adapt to, and create, the circumstances for industry to flourish, showing that at its core, British rule in India represented an assault on the indeterminacy of life itself.

This thesis is an inquiry into the position of architecture both as a cultural product and as an autonomous discipline. The purpose to search for architectural autonomy is to discover architecture&rsquo / s internal values that can make architects become more aware of their tools and potentials. That kind of research is to discover the boundaries of the discipline of architecture, which interrelates with many other disciplines. In order to explore architectural autonomy, this thesis explores the internal qualities of architecture with relation to the external ones. The scrutiny of these internal qualities is to direct architecture through its own realm and to discover its significant values and internal potentials. Architectural autonomy is explored in this thesis in the framework of Modern Movement. The technological inventions and the social and cultural developments are considered as influential forces in the discipline and practice of architecture. This study attempts to identify the concept autonomy, not as a property indicating to an architecture that is completely independent from its cultural environment, but as a value implying to architecture&rsquo / s interior qualities that are significant in the discipline&rsquo / s boundaries. Architecture is examined with relation to its cultural circumstances / by arguing that architecture is not only a part of culture but also one of the constituents of it. Besides fulfilling cultural values, architecture has the ability to transform culture, with its own internal values. In this regard, the issue of autonomy gains importance in maintaining architecture a cultural value.

This dissertation analyzes the context and discourse the Kurdish ethno-nationalism have emerged in modern Turkey. In a critical survey of a selected Kurdish nationalist theories, it tries to analyze the historical and contextual trajectory the nationalist discourse have assumed vis-&agrave / -vis Turkish modernity. A particular emphasis is given on how and on what basis Kurdish nationalism has questioned the formation and the sources of the legitimacy of the Turkish state and its role in the making of Turkish modernity. Kurdish nationalism, in doing so, defined and instrumentally utilized ethnicity, along with other aspects of cohesion such as Islam, socialism and traditional tribal solidarity since the 1920s. This study argues that modern Kurdish nationalist movement emerged by divorcing itself from the Turkish left in the 1960s. It proliferated in the 1970s and spiraled down to separatist violence in the 1980s. Violence has dominated and synchronized Kurdish nationalist discourse in the 1990s. It sought for international recognition and independent sovereignty by targeting the legitimacy of the Turkish state. The Kurdish nationalist movement moved along, in discourse and practice, around the issues related to the Turkish state, which has evolved with the changing and diversified context of international rights.

Cambodian youth live in a country undergoing rapid development and modernization. The srey kalip or modern women of Phnom Penh are an emerging demographic group of young urban females driving social change in the context of globalization. Despite their obvious presence in society, very little is known about this growing demographic and even less is known about their sexual behavior. This research employed a range of ethnographic methodologies in order to capture one essence of Phnom Penh’s modern women—their reproductive health seeking behavior. The results of this study indicate that the adoption of a modern identity has changed constructions of traditional Khmer femininity. This introduced “liberalism” challenges traditional ideas about what it means to be a Khmer woman and what it means to be a sexual woman. The srey kalip’s sexual and reproductive health needs present a much broader profile than the existing health system is capable of providing for. The availability of existing sexual and reproductive health services does not dovetail with their modern identity. This inability to acquire adequate reproductive health care is a consequence of the disjunction between the srey kalip’s modern identity and a less modern health system. The tension between the modern and traditional body are drawn into focus when the srey kalip seek medical care for reproductive health services and are unable to obtain care that meets their unique needs. This is not a problem restricted to Cambodia. Many developing nations around the world have populations of urban youth who are more globally interconnected and more modern than their parent’s generation. Ministries of Health and health service providers around the world need to develop innovative and dynamic strategies to meet the sexual health needs of their burgeoning modern youth populations. The opportunity to meet the sexual and reproductive health needs of youth is a task that Ministries of Health around the world cannot afford to waste.

Sahul, the combined landmass of Australia and New Guinea, provides a record of behavioural modernity extending over at least the last 50,000 years. Colonised solely by anatomically and behaviourally modern humans, this continent provides an alternative record in the investigation of behavioural modernity to the extensively studied Middle Stone Age African and Upper Palaeolithic Eurasian archaeological records. In the past, the archaeological record of behavioural modernity in Sahul has been described as simple, sparse and essentially different to those records of Africa and Eurasia. These differences have been attributed to either low population densities during the Pleistocene or the loss of behavioural ‘traits’ on the journey from Africa to Sahul. While a number of studies have been undertaken, no single researcher has attempted to investigate the role of taphonomy and sampling on the representation of behavioural modernity in the archaeological record, despite Sahul being characterised by extreme environments, highly variable climates, and archaeologically, usually only small excavations. This study compiles the most complete record of chronology, evidence for behavioural modernity and excavation details for 223 Pleistocene sites yet attempted. It is also the most extensive dataset assembled for the examination of the issue of behavioural modernity on a single landmass. Site spatial and temporal distribution, site characteristics, excavations, absolute dating, preservation and sample size are examined to determine how the behavioural complexity of a modern human population is characterised on this isolated southern continent and the impact of taphonomy and archaeological sampling on that representation. Results demonstrate that preservation and sampling play a significant role in structuring the spatial and temporal representation of behavioural modernity in the archaeological record of Pleistocene Sahul. Contrary to previous findings, the evidence for behavioural modernity in Sahul is found to resemble the archaeological records of the African Middle Stone Age and Eurasian Upper Palaeolithic in terms of behaviour and artefact diversity. In terms of global narratives, these results also indicate that current understandings of behavioural modernity are incomplete and may misrepresent levels of behavioural complexity in early periods in some regions.

Doctor of Philosophy (PhD) / In recent years there has been substantial research on Dominican migration and transnationalism, yet these studies have largely overlooked both the manner in which globalisation generates new localisations, and the continuing salience of the state as a mediator between the global and the local. Based upon fieldwork in La Ciénaga, a poor barrio of Santo Domingo, this thesis argues that emplacement, rather than transnationalism, is paradigmatic of the experiences of poor Dominicans and provides their primary source of unity. Race, ethnicity, and social class have long been promoted as structuring the experiences of Caribbean people, but my analysis suggests that these operate more as sources of differentiation than of identification in Santo Domingo’s barrios. I examine the strategies and practices residents deploy to create value in place, overcome their localisation, and achieve progreso (progress) within the bounds of the state. These include transforming the material environment and its symbolic meanings, elaborating certain social hierarchies and contesting others, and developing locality-based political organisations. In the Caribbean, it has been usual for studies of cultural oppositions or dualisms to effectively constitute a different genre to studies of class, race, and globalization. My ethnography indicates that this distinction is false. Residents of La Ciénaga deploy cultural oppositions and notion of difference to define a place in the social hierarchies of the barrio and city, while simultaneously recognising the moral value and identical structural position of those around them. Popular politics in Santo Domingo are characterised by this tension between social stratification and the elaboration of cultural value in place. This thesis develops a political and social economy of value that addresses both the bases of stratification in the sphere of production and the ways in which projects of self-creation, such as through consumption, allow for the elaboration of cultural value and meaning for individuals and social groups. Given the importance of locality to popular politics, I argue that this integrated approach is necessary to any assessment of the transformative potential of community organisations and other political movements in Santo Domingo.