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This thesis on Dominica is the only study in the social sciences which deals extensively and exclusively with the life experience of Dominicans. The study has three interrelated purposes. It analyses and interprets the life experience of Dominicans as subjects of their own experiences rather than as objects or victims of colonial forces. It seeks to reveal to Dominicans that, despite their colonization, they have a positive identity of which they can be proud and which can be useful to them in the realization of their future aspirations. Finally, it argues consistently against more common metropolitan perspectives used in the analysis of Caribbean experience. The thesis attempts to accomplish these interrelated purposes by an examination of those significant activities in the Dominican life experience which have been directed towards human survival and change in the colonial situation. Specifically, the study shows how Dominicans themselves, beginning with the slave period, through the emancipation era, the creation of political organizations, right up to the Castle Bruce Cooperative Movement, have acted constantly on their own behalf in order to achieve the dual objectives of survival and change. Finally, given the emphasis of the thesis and because Dominica is probably the least studied Island in the British Caribbean, the study is considered a contribution not only to the understanding of Dominican political and social life, but also to Caribbean and general social science literature. / Thesis / Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)

Advertising plays an important role in the modern society. It influences not only the development of business concretely, but also sharpness of culture abstractly. The commercial advertisement of real estate is a communication of media industry, and a financial origin of media industry as well. The great investment to commercial advertisement from real estate client will obtain more exposure. However, there are many specific values in the advertising text, and the values will shape culture and habitus in the wake of advertising exposure. Following that, people start to drink STARBUCKS, watch the western movie, put on thee NIKE shoes, learn English and concern the stock market in U.S.A. by being educated from advertising. Westernization and modernization bring progress of technology and politics, but they could be able to fade away culture identity. The main point of this research is to deconstruct and exposure the western myth that is disguised in real estate advertising text, and to decode how the western is constructed to be an superiority and connect with hierarchical society. Furthermore, by observing a great deal western signs in real estate advertising, this research also analyzed the organization and operation of signs to realize the process of self-culture exclusion and self-colonization from the post-colonial point of view. The research method is qualitative semiology analysis. This research gathered twenty samples from numerous real estate advertising on the basis of western index and manifold content, in order to reveal the underlying meaning by analyzing the selection, composition and arrangement of sign. Two results have found from this research. Firstly, real estate website advertising rebuilds that west is superior, ideal and aspirational, and regards west as pronoun of success and happiness. For example, ¡§Watch child English drama at Christmas, Have a tea time break.¡¨ The advertising brings the western holidays, western way of education and western tea time culture into the context of life to naturalize western culture and value into daily life. Secondly, real estate website advertising represents self-colonization. For example, ¡§The San Sia old street, Baroque architecture.¡¨ The San Sia old street that is made of red brick is symbol of Eastern architecture. But, the advertising lay emphasis on the arch configuration to represent the San Sia old street as a kind of western architecture. After reviewing the analysis, this research declared two suggestions. The first, real estate advertising producer should increase the amount of the eastern sign, meanwhile, use eastern sign within eastern cultural context as well, in order to weaken self ¡Vcolonization. The second, audiences should have an ability to deconstruct and criticize real estate advertising to dig underlying meaning and reveal hierarchical representation, and also awake rethinking of eastern subject.

This study analyzes the news texts of Typhoon Morakot, applying news discourse analysis and post-colonial concepts to discuss the specific types of aboriginal representation in the media, and the media also shape some specific discourse for aboriginal people. After analyzing the news texts, it shows that mainstream media represent aboriginal as the negative other, while alternative media represent them as the subjects who can acclaim their own rights. These two different discourses imply that there are some complex power relations behind the news texts, the mainstream media reinforce the power from central government and the charity organization. They build a strong and powerful discourse to rationalize their dominance over aboriginals, which excludes aboriginals¡¦ opinions from the public policy. However, this study also shows there is an alternative direction of power; alternative media try to subvert the mainstream discourse. They point out the central government is the trouble maker, aboriginals shouldn¡¦t be scapegoats. Hence, we can find that aboriginals are on the way to establish their own subjects.

This study describes case managers' perceptions of the association between methamphetamine and child neglect. The analysis indicates that out of 30 women, 100.0% agreed that the use of methamphetamine is associated with child neglect. Children are being neglected due to methamphetamine causing impairment in the parents' ability to appropriately care for their children. The study findings note a statistically significant relationship between the variables at the .05 level of probability.

My thesis analyzes James Joyce’s engagement with Catholic-nationalist Ireland’s (mis)understanding of women in Dubliners, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, and Ulysses. I argue that, while Joyce shows both men and women struggling against the constraints of Catholic-nationalist gender roles, he implies that neither can be free from those constraints until Irish artists seek to more thoroughly understand women. After explaining how Catholic-nationalist rhetoric influenced the Irish understanding of women, I argue that Joyce not only recognizes and engages with Irish gender oppression but also believes that Irish art both constructs and is constructed by this oppression. With analyses of some of Joyce’s female characters, Stephen Dedalus, and Molly Bloom, I demonstrate how Joyce critiques Irish culture’s concept of women and Irish art’s representation of them, and then establishes a new paradigm of artistic representation.

This thesis investigates testimonies of three female authors from Latin America and the Middle East through scriptotherapy narratives which "give voice to previously repressed memories," defined by Sidonie Smith and Julia Watson. Through the genre of autobiography, women have an opportunity to showcase acts of resistance towards the inner turmoil of colonial trauma that has been brought upon their existence. Decoloniality re-integrates the roots of colonial power into re-invigorated narratives that will become lineage. The only way that they can create their own identity is through "legending," Gilles Deleuze's conceptualized theoretical framework, which does not offer an escape from colonialism but utilizes its power to offer narratives of healing. As "scriptotherapy" narratives, these female authors are displaying resistance by circulating their stories to the global public and bringing communities together to understand that it is possible to stop the cycle of trauma and abuse that exists to keep the women of their culture repressed. I argue that Julia Alvarez and Azar Nafisi's scriptotherapy narratives encode trauma as acts of resistance in relation to turbulent political situations in their home countries. Julia Alvarez's Something to Declare: Essays (1998) details her experiences as a Latin American woman who has been displaced, bodily, from the Dominican Republic during its revolutionary period from April to September of 1965. Azar Nafisi's Things I've Been Silent About: Memories of a Prodigal Daughter (2008) paints a historical portrait of her Iranian family life during the Islamic Revolution of 1978–1979 and the toll the colonial powers had on cultivating her journey into womanhood. Adriana Páramo's My Mother's Funeral (2013) showcases writing as trauma reintegrated into a narrative in which personal ideologies and native Spanish language construct an intersectional space. Through storytelling, women are advocated for globally and consciously brought into the major Western culture to instigate change.

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Although the field of German Romantic Orientalism has been growing in recent years, the prolific writer E.T.A. Hoffmann has largely escaped critical attention. This study of his oeuvre reveals, however, that it was shaped and influenced by both the scholarly and popular orientalist discourses of his time. Furthermore, Hoffmann satirises literary orientalist practices even as he takes part in them, and so his work exposes the ambivalence of the apparent German veneration for the ‘Romantic’ Orient. While Hoffmann responds to the Romantic image of the Orient set up by his predecessors (J.G. Herder, Novalis, Friedrich Schlegel), he does so in order to reveal both the uses and the limits of this model for the Romantic artist in the modern world. The Orient serves as an inspiration for Romantic art, and thus Edward Said’s claim that the Romantics appropriated the East merely for the rejuvenation of European literature must be acknowledged. Nevertheless, as an extremely self-aware writer, Hoffmann does not utilise this approach uncritically. My thesis shows how Hoffmann responded to the image of the Orient as it was produced by writers, musicians, and scholars inside the German-speaking lands. The Orient resists successful imitation, as his texts acknowledge when they turn a critical eye towards German cultural production. Furthermore, Hoffmann’s famous criticism of nineteenth-century society is enhanced by comparison of German and oriental characters, with the latter often coming out more favourably. Hoffmann’s tales therefore demand a reassessment of the view that the Romantics constructed the Orient exclusively as a paradisaical land of poetic fulfilment. His (self-) reflective response to the nineteenth-century treatment of the Orient in Germany marks him out as an original – and essential – voice in Romantic Orientalism.

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