<p>Den globala turismnäringen har kommit att bli en av världens mest lukrativa branscher. Hundratusentals svenskar turistar i Thailand varje år. Vad representerar Thailand i turistens ögon? Hur ser turisten på sig själv i förhållande till det han/hon möter och hur förhåller sig turisten till det lokala och globala? Uppsatsen utgår från en kritisk hållning till fenomenet turism. Teorier om Postkolonialism och Orientalism samt kritisk turismforskning blir därmed centrala i förståelsen av det undersökta materialet. Materialet som studeras i uppsatsen innefattas av resdagboksinlägg från hemsidan <em>Resdagboken.se</em>. Som metod används den kritiska diskursanalysen.</p><p>Materialet visar på vissa specifika teman; ”Det trygga äventyret”, ”Att inte vara som alla andra turister”, ”Sol, bad konsumtion och lättja”, ”Erotik”, samt ”Tilltalet till dem där hemma”. Genom belysandet av turismens bakomliggande strukturer och hur man genom det skrivna ordet uttrycker föreställningar om andra och sig själv, försöker författaren till uppsatsen bredda förståelsen för turismen som global företeelse.</p>

<p>Debatten om islam och muslimer kretsar kring en postkolonial diskursordning som aktualiseras genom den orientaliska, essentiella och eurocentriska diskursen. Under perioden 030601-040101 är en distinktion mellan Occidenten och Orienten tydlig när islam och muslimer kommer på tal i DN och Expressens krönikor och debattsidor. Muslimer framställs genom dessa diskurser som ett hot mot svenska och europeiska värderingar och borde således hållas på avstånd. Den muslimska kvinnan presenteras som förtryckt och oförmögen att kunna frigöra sig utan hjälp utifrån. Slöjan och andra muslimska kvinnors klädesplagg tillskrivs politiska värderingar och betraktas som någonting påtvingad. Islam framställs som en religion oförenlig med demokratiska värderingar och som sammanfaller med terrorism och fanatism. Även antisemitism beskrivs som en muslimsk företeelse. Islam i media presenteras, till skillnad från andra religioner, som en ideologisk och politisk rörelse och inte som en personlig andlig tro. I debatten om islams roll i Sverige och Europa har en perspektivförskjutning skett från det reella till doktrin, där muslimer avhumaniserats som individer och tillskrivits en kollektiv identitet.</p>

The aim of the dissertation is to describe and analyze the practice and meaning of Middle Eastern dance through the study of a number of performers in Stockholm. In particular, this study emphasises the ways in which the performers seek, create and defend values such as femininity, authenticity, empowerment and respectability in and through their dancing. Data for this study consists of field notes from participant observation in dance classes, festivals and gatherings; in-depth interviews and written material, such as leaflets and Internet material. Field notes from a trip to Lebanon with a group of Swedish dancers are also included. The performance of Middle Eastern dance in Stockholm may be seen as a way for Swedish women to find new femininities. They strive to combine a glamorous hyper-femininity with strength and respectability. This is a difficult task. The dancers constantly have to maintain a balance. While enjoying the hyper-femininity of oriental dance they must avoid being too sexy and thereby running the risk of being reduced to the position of sexual objects. To avoid losing control of the situation performing in public the dancers use different tactics. Many try to make the performance a clearly bounded event and make distinctions between themselves as individuals and the personas they embody on stage. This gives the performers a chance to playfully embody hyper-femininity. Other dancers have changed the dance itself, removing all movements and costumes that could be perceived as sexually inviting or aiming to please.

Spanish travel writings on China at the end of the 19th century have been largely ignored in the history of literature. Nevertheless, this topic deserves a thorough examination since these texts constitute a particular and important vision of an "Orientalized" country about an Oriental nation during a critical and complicated historical moment. On one hand, Spain was characterized by an irreversible decadence. Thus, in contrast to British and French imperial discourse, which reflects colonial experiences, Spanish travel writings provide a unique perspective from a Western empire that shared a similar fate with the Other: both being traditional and decadent nations. Furthermore, although China was a goal of imperial ambition, it was far less colonized than other regions. As a result, the commanding imperial gaze and fearless exploration were less likely to be cast on China. In addition, despite its general decline, China remained the home of an ancient and highly advanced civilization that still deserved Western respect and offered the West much to learn. Considering these facts, this dissertation consists of a general analysis of Spanish travel literature on China from 1870 to 1910. The primary purposes of the dissertation are to portray the bibliographic genealogy of references on Spanish travelers and their writings on China during this period; to depict their particular vision in which the construct of colonial discourse is transformed into a pretension to recover the lost imperial prestige and an interiorized reflection on Spain's own problems and possible solutions; and to present a fundamental ambivalence or even difficult conciliation between the colonial discourse and its resistance, ideology and utopia, as well as imperialist ambition and national crisis. Spanish travel writings on China consequently become an allegory of imperial nostalgia: a yearning for the imperial power that had vanished, without hope of restoration. / text

This thesis explores images of the Japanese schoolgirl as accessory to the Occidental Self in contemporary Orientalist pop culture in the US. In an analysis of a series of images by four different Western pop culture artists, each artist expresses an appreciation for Japan that is based primarily on their encounter with Japanese pop culture. Furthermore, they express identification with the Japanese Other and a desire to introject into Japanese subjectivities. However, lacking the material body needed for full immersion or identification with the Other, they produce the Japanese schoolgirl as an accessory to the Self. The accessory provides false immersion or identification with the Japanese Other. In this way, the Japanese schoolgirl becomes the embodiment of Japanese pop culture and an object for Western fetishization. / text

This thesis inquires into the factors behind Hollywood's depiction of the Middle East. That depiction is not static, but is modified in response to changes in political events and US government foreign policy. Although the events of 9/11 seemed to justify the traditional negative stereotype of Arabs, the image has been partially and rationally re-interpreted. This was due to the rise in prominence of the ideas of a minority of radical and free-thinking members of the Hollywood community who embraced a more intellectual approach, which advocated that the popular Western view of the Arab world was unjustified and based on a fallacious fabrication for Western political advantage. The research further shows that these activists did not owe allegiance to the Hollywood-US government propaganda machine. They were able to fracture this traditional alliance and provide the opportunity for the appearance of films of a radical nature, which were critical of US Middle Eastern policy and projected the Arab world in a new light. The study analyzes a selection of films that represent the Middle East in terms of their philosophy and cinematic structure, which enables them to act as vectors to raise public awareness of the issues and to promote reconciliation and co-existence between East and West.

Denna uppsats syftar till att studera hur Sverigedemokraterna framställer islam och muslimsk kultur i texter som representerar partiet. Jag har analyserat ett antal nyhetsartiklar publicerade i Sverigedemokraternas officiella partitidning SD-Kuriren och kritisk diskursanalys är den analysmetod som tillämpats. Som utgångspunkt för uppsatsen ligger tidigare forskning om Sverigedemokraterna från bland andra Sami Lipponen och Jens Rydgren, utöver detta har jag även utgått från de tre teoretiska utgångspunkterna; Postkolonialism, Orientalism och Neonationalism för att besvara uppsatsens syfte. Jag har bland annat haft för avsikt att undersöka om det går att finna någon förändring i SD-Kurirens nyhetsförmedling om islam över tid, samt att se om det finns texter där Sverigedemokraterna definierar islam och muslimsk kultur som något problematiskt. De centrala slutsatserna jag har kommit fram till i analysen är att det faktiskt har skett en förändring när det gäller SD-Kurirens nyhetsrapportering om islam i den bemärkelsen att Sverigedemokraterna i artiklar som publicerades år 2003 har ett kritiskt förhållningssätt till islam i olika avseenden, medan nyhetsrapporteringen i de nutida artiklarna (närmare bestämt 2007 till och med februari 2008) knappt består av sådana politiska värderingar och det är inte mycket som kan karaktärisera Sverigedemokraternas diskurs om islam som direkt främlingsfientlig.

Edward Said's description of Orientalism as a constitutive element of the modern West is one of the enduring concepts of cultural history. The Orientalism thesis begins with the observation that in the 19th century Westerners began describing the "Orient," particularly the Middle East and India, as a place that was once gloriously civilized but had declined under the influence of incompetent Islamic governments. This construction was then employed to justify Western Imperialism and the expansion of Christianity into Asia. This dissertation examines a case of Orientalism with a twist. Between 1775 and 1830 a group of Anglophone writers and artists depicted Spain as a state with a cultural trajectory similar to that described by the Orientalists. But in the Spanish case, the glorious past was the age of the Islamic Moors who had ruled parts of the Iberian Peninsula from 700 until 1492, while the current Christian rulers were the backwards and religiously intolerant impediments to progress. Thus the case of Spanish Orientalism employs an argument structurally identical to Said's Orientalism, with the role of the Christians and Muslims reversed. In examining this phenomenon, I focus on three particular issues. The first is the representation of the Moors in early modern European popular culture. I argue that these earlier traditions use the Moors as an emblematic manifestation of oppositionality to the centralizing state and elite authority. The romantics found in the Moors a symbol comparable to such other proto-Europeans as the Celts and the Goths, worthy predecessors to the warlike, chivalric, and liberty-loving modern Europeans. The second is the political context of Spanish Orientalism. Like "classical" Orientalism, Spanish Orientalism had a clear political payoff. Its articulators meant to show that the Spanish government was an unworthy steward of its rapidly disintegrating empire, thus Spanish Orientalism is closely associated with attempts to assert Anglophone authority in the Caribbean. Third, I examine in detail the work of the author most clearly associated with Spanish Orientalism, Washington Irving. In the four books he wrote while in Spain during the 1820s, Irving became the individual most responsible for reframing the long representational tradition of the Moors into a modern idiom and bringing it to a mass audience.

Prior to Germany’s emergence as an imperial power in 1884, scholarly knowledge of the Orient was only deemed useful to a handful of academics, largely in part because oriental scholarship’s primary emphasis was the study of classical languages and ancient manuscripts. German colonialism, on the other hand, required the creation of a new body of oriental knowledge, one that was firmly rooted in the contemporary world instead of antiquity. In 1907, Carl Heinrich Becker published Christianity and Islam, one of the first pieces of scholarship to examine the modern Orient with a modern methodology. In particular, it was Becker’s adoption of the sociology of religion, a concept pioneered by Max Weber and Émile Durkheim, which allowed him to interpret the modern Orient in a way not previously possible under the philological tradition that defined oriental studies for previous generations of scholars.

Med utgångspunkt i den postkoloniala teoribildningen granskar denna uppsats framställningarna av Asien i gymnasieskolans historieläroböcker för att undersöka hur läroböckerna upprätthåller eller motverkar de orientalistiska- och postkoloniala strukturer vilka beskriver Asien som underordnat väst samt identifierar hur dessa konstruktioner tar sig uttryck. Studien utgår från en ideologikritisk närläsningsstudie av fem läroböcker i historia. Samtliga studieobjekt är publicerade under år 2011 och 2012 inom ramen för den nya läroplanen, gymnasieskola 11, och kursen Historia1b. Analysen genomförs och presenteras via en analysmodell vilken innefattar rubrikerna andrafierande praktiker, över- och underordning, dikotomier och kulturell stratifikation. Resultatet visar att västerlandets hegemoni reproduceras genom i huvudsak eurocentriska diskurser där västerlandet överordnas österlandet eller där en eurocentrisk historieskrivning som berättar en selektiv historia förs i läroboken. Vidare kan av resultatet skönjas en kulturell stratifikation i vilken länder som anammat författningar av västerländska snitt och västerländska sedvänjor värderas högre än länder som inte gjort det. Resultatet visar också att läroböckerna reproducerar alienerande, stundom rasistiska, och pistocentriska schablonbilder och fördomar vilka bidrar till paradigmen om ett vi och ett dem.