Critics and analysts of religious politics in India have described Hindu nationalism variously over the years: as fascist, fundamentalist, right-wing, jingoist, extremist, and ethnicist. The already large corpus of writing on the ideology and activities of the Hindu nationalists continues still to describe the serious threat of communal thinking to the secular/liberal character of the modern Indian state. What is missing from this discourse, however, is an interrogation of the very concepts on which both critiques of communal politics and defenses of secular-liberalism are based. What does it mean to understand 'fundamentalism' as the cultural 'other' of such liberal virtues as secularism and tolerance? What are the implications of constituting ethnicist movements not merely as obstacles, but as threats to the project of modernity? This dissertation examines first the dominant phraseology of such Indian intellectual critiques, arguing that narratives of ethnicism and extremism are created not only from within, by ethno-nationalist ideologues, but also from without, paradoxically by the very liberal discourses that describe communal threats to secular modernity. Second, by tracing the evolution of feminist activism in Hyderabad, I trace also the processes by which liberal discourses of difference and diversity come to structure activist praxis, making ethnicity the dominant descriptor of social reality, and instituting a 'culture of ethnicism' that implicates both activist-intellectual and ethnicist. Working thus within the frameworks of secular liberalism, and bound by a pre-constituted opposition to political expressions of religiosity, the Indian activist/intellectual community does not have the tools by which to understand the phenomenon of Hindu ethnicism. Finally, this dissertation suggests that Hindu religious ethnicism needs to be seen essentially as a challenge to the prevailing secular order that separates religious belief from the modern, the rational, the scientific, regarding it (at worst) as a pre-modern affliction, or (at best) as an individual, private expression of identity. Hindu ethnicist belief represents a rationality unto itself, I argue: a (religious) critique of the liberal logic of secularism; a religious ideology of tolerance and governance; a rationality of and for modernity that we can afford to ignore only at our own ultimate peril.

During the revolutionary period the Soviets came into political and cultural conflict with Russia's Muslims. Despite indications that the majority of Muslims desired political unification based on their Islamic heritage, the Party divided them into separate "nationalities" along narrow ethnic lines, incorporated most into the RSFSR, and attempted to uproot traditional Islamic institutions and customs under the aegis of class war. Resistance took the form of pan-Muslim nationalism, a reformist political conception with roots in the Near East. This conflict not only aborted the export of revolution to the Islamic world, contributing to the passing of the revolutionary era in Russia, but aided Stalin's rise to power. Soviet policy succeeded politically, defining the terms of interaction between Russians and Soviet Muslims for the next 70 years, but failed culturally in 1921-22, when the Party was forced to suspend its "war on Islam" as the price of political control.

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The history, culture and ethnic diversity of the Republic of the Indonesia make it a highly complex country. With an area as vast as the whole Europe, at the crossroads of the Indian and Pacific oceans, having abundant natural resources, a dynamic population which is the fourth in the world, Indonesia also benefits from a very resistant economy. / Economic take off is supported by a strong political regime that has been led by President Suharto for thirty years now. Foreign investors are attracted by this new, very magnetic and promising market. Faced with a high demand for investments approvals, the government is liberalizing regulations dealing with direct and portfolio investments. / In 1995, Indonesia was the first host country for foreign investments, before the Chinese People's Republic, which amounted to 39.9 billions of dollars.

The European Union (EU) has comparative advantage in regional integration. Moreover, regionalism is a growing phenomenon, as both the growing number of regional trade agreements and literature on new regionalism indicate. In this context, the EU has incorporated regional integration into European development policy as a strategy to help integrate the African, Caribbean and Pacific (ACP) states into the global economy, with the negotiation of region-to-region reciprocal free trade agreements, called Economic Partnership Agreements (EPA). This thesis examines the extent to which the Pacific may constitute a region, for the purposes of the Cotonou Agreement, along cultural, political and economic dimensions of regional cooperation. This is in order to measure the potential for regional integration in the Pacific, as well as to test the applicability of the EU's regional template of development in this context. A theoretical framework is developed, based on the political economy of regional cooperation among developing states, in order to apply a series of propositions to the test the integrative potential of the Pacific region. The key finding is that regionalism in the Pacific is easily politicised. Anthropological evidence and economic analysis also confirm the informal nature of regional cooperation in the Pacific works against global imperatives for deeper regional integration, as Pacific islanders have generally not subscribed to a common identity, and the welfare benefits from regional free trade are shown to be minimal. Consequently, the Pacific accepts the EPA platform in order to maintain the development partnership with the EU, rather than because regional free trade is the most desired vehicle for development in the region. A trade agreement will therefore be concluded with the Pacific ACP states, but its form and timing remain the key issues for clarification.

This thesis sets out to investigate the ways in which Caribbean authors have responded to the canonical texts of the coloniser, and how they have rewritten certain genres, modes and the ideological biases that inform them. In Chapter One, the continuing presence of representations of the Caribbean as paradise or Eden – evident, I suggest in my Introduction, in the first works of Caribbean literature, such as James Grainger’s The Sugar-Cane (1764), and later in J. E. C. McFarlane’s ‘My Country’ (1929), Tom Redcam’s ‘My Beautiful Home’ (1929), H. S. Bunbury’s ‘The Spell of the Tropics’ (1929) – is revised in the works of Una Marson, Alejo Carpentier, Aimé Césaire, Édouard Glissant, Gisèle Pineau, and Shani Mootoo; while the more direct canonical rewritings of Maryse Condé and Derek Walcott are the subject of Chapter Four. Behind these readings of the contemporary Caribbean canon lies a fundamental question: what makes these engagements with legacy a postcolonial, rather than counter-colonial, response? In turn, through a critical reading of Peter Hallward’s Absolutely Postcolonial (2001) in Chapter Two, I argue that the postcolonial may be defined as that which is specific to various colonial legacies and histories, but not specified by them. Chapter Four elaborates this model, drawing on Glissant’s The Fourth Century (1997) and David Dabydeen’s ‘Turner’ (1994). Creolization is a cultural, linguistic, ontological, and literary term that focuses on the emergence of a creolized culture/expression/identity/text from the meeting and synthesis of the informing elements. Through the writings of creolization’s foremost theorist, Édouard Glissant, I stress that what results from this form of relation is not a sum of its parts, but a wholly new and original existent. In other words, the process of creolization is distinguished by its ability to affect singular forms that remain specific to the elements which engender it – the social, historical, and geographical contexts elements which engender it – the social, historical, and geographical contexts specific to the site of its articulation – but which, nevertheless, exceeds the limitations of the ‘original’ components. This fundamental contention is developed through my analysis of Glissant’s theoretical expositions, Caribbean Discourse (1981), discussed in Chapter One, and Poetics of Relation (1990) outlined in Chapter Two alongside Glissant’s poetry and the contributions of Peter Hallward and Derek Attridge. Importantly, the distinct model of creolization that emerges at the end of Chapter Two as a process of relation that generates new forms, resonates with the poetics of another celebrated Caribbean author and theorist: Wilson Harris. It is through Harris’s essays and novels such as Jonestown (1996), The Mask of the Beggar (2004), and The Ghost of Memory (2006) that the significance of my reading of creolization to the Caribbean canon becomes clear.

The initial discovery and settlement of the islands of Oceania is an important issue in Pacific anthropology. I test. two methods by which new island groups might be discovered: drift voyages and downwind sailing. I focus on the region of the initial eastward expansion into Remote Oceania by the Lapita people. Simulations are driven by high resolution surface wind and current data from atmosphere and ocean models forced by real observations and which capture the high degree of seasonal and interannual variability in the region. Both drift and sailing voyages can account for the discovery of all the islands in the Lapita region based on initial starting points in the Bismarck and Solomon archipelagos. Eastward crossings are most probable in the Austral summer and fall when the probability of occurence of westerly winds is highest. Contact with islands in the arc from Santa Cruz to New Caledonia is viable in all years and is particularly probable in the Austral summer. Pathways further to the east as far as Tonga and Samoa are plausible when considering anomalous westerlies which occur in certain years. Other key crossings in Polynesia are also possible when considering this interannual variability, much of which is associated with El Nino events. Many of my findings differ from an important, earlier modelling study performed by Levison et al. (1973).

The thesis deals with the problems of translating "soft-sell" advertisements between Arabic and English. It is argued that a standardisation strategy of any international advertising campaign across cultures of soft-sell advertising is unsuccessful at any time in the case of Arabic and English. This stems not only from, besides the huge differences already existing between the two languages and cultures, such as socio-economic and socio-political, but also from the different methods and strategies adopted by the copywriters in employing various elements of humour, irony, persuasion, taboos (e.g. sexual connotations), conceptual sarcasm and cultural intertextuality, which are aimed at particular audiences, and the translation of which is determined by the elements of time and space. Localisation, according to the characters of the local market is thus the best solution for any successful cross-cultural advertising. The development of the role of culture and language in a given society has also been illustrated, followed by various approaches to cultural translation equivalence and cultural translation difficulties between Arabic and English. The thesis also contains a study of the techniques and methods of advertising. This includes elements of persuasion, strategies of standardisation, language and paralanguage of advertising, style of advertising and deviation in advertising from the norm of standard English.

This thesis examines the role and function translations played in Turkish history, especially within the framework of its Westernisation movement from the mid-nineteenth to the late twentieth centuries. A descriptive approach is adopted, aiming to identify cultural patterns which shape and reflect translational decisions and help to a better portrayal of the socio-cultural context of translation during the time span examined. To this end, the thesis seeks to describe in detail historical, political, literary and linguistic factors which have affected the translation activity. The main assumption of this thesis is that acculturation was used as the main strategy in translations from Western languages during the periods which were marked with an extensive translation activity, especially during the nineteenth century and the first decades of the Republican era. This acculturation strategy not only helped to enrich the target literary system, bringing new literary models (genres), new subject matter, developing the language and giving rise to a new Turkish literature, it also had an effect upon the broader socio-cultural polysystem, especially on the process of identity creation. The analysis of the social, political and cultural conditions and policies suggests that the status given both to the source and target cultures has been the main factor for the acculturation. As examined in the last part of the thesis, a shift of power relations in the Turkish context, especially after the 1980s, marked a new kind of an acculturation strategy and a certain movement of resistance. The thesis concludes that there is need to know more about different translation histories in order to learn more about the acculturation process and to move beyond a Eurocentric view, and an interdisciplinary approach should be taken for such research.

In this dissertation, the various strategies of humour translation have been analysed by taking various cartoons with speech bubbles from the popular Turkish humour weekly magazine Leman and other similar publications. Generally considered as an extremely problematic, sometimes next to impossible, task within the translation studies, humour translation requires and deserves special attention since, as it was explained in the related sections, it may unite or separate people within the context of one single joke. As we also have stated elsewhere in the text, the description of both humour and translation, as two separate concepts, are not available in certain and decisive terms. This is especially true for the concept of humour which also covers the areas of laughter, jokes, wit, satire, irony and many others which are all interchangeable with each other. This fact makes an all-round definition very difficult. We also tried to show that, the visual humour or the visual aspect of humour could be a valuable asset for a foreign recipient who genuinely wishing to understand humour products from a different and remote culture. We wanted to show, and to some extent share, that the cartoons, provided they are not strictly political or crammed with regional issues and accents, could be fathomed by an outsider with the help of a decent translation and an adequate amount of contextual and cultural background information. We have assumed, from the very beginning of this project, that the contemporary Turkish humour, particularly cartoons that are represented in Leman and other similar publications, was interesting enough to become a dissertation subject, particularly those with stock types or characters since they have the potential of becoming snapshots of a country which is still considered as alien (or other) by the West. As far as this writer concerned, the main points of interest concerning Turkey by the British public could roughly be summarised in two points: a bargain trip to the seaside during the summer season and some occasional football matches Manchester United plays against Turkish teams in Istanbul. Especially the latter always attracts heavy press coverage during and after a match. We wanted to show that there are other cultural aspects exist in Turkey as well and such aspects could be transferred to other cultures by ways of translation. The material we have chosen is both visual and prose at the same time and although they function as a unity, they also complement each other. It is proposed that, although a perfect translation is always a desirable concept in almost every field, the translation of humour is possible within certain frameworks. The visual side of cartoons, as in situation comedies, contributes immensely to the comprehension of the message, which should be considered as the most important feature of the joke. To this end, a variety of cartoons are selected from both Lenicyn and other similar humour weeklies and translated with an adequate amount of background and contextual information that provided beforehand. This background information also includes, as far as the material in question permits, a close analysis of the language and the subject matter. To provide a better insight for the reader, a summary of Turkish humour and humour magazines are added alongside a section on the issue of humour itself.