<p>What kinds of elements determine people´s possibilities of being integrated into society? This is what the author tries to illuminate in this essay, by discussing the plots and characters in White Teeth.</p>

What kinds of elements determine people´s possibilities of being integrated into society? This is what the author tries to illuminate in this essay, by discussing the plots and characters in White Teeth.

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J M Coetzee’s Disgrace deals with race and power in contemporary, post-colonial South Africa. This prize-winning novel is written after the country's first all-race elections, in 1994. It has therefore most often been analyzed as a representative for the writing of the new South Africa, where the social problems relating binary oppositions such as black – white, native – immigrant, powerless – powerful, are stressed. More specifically the shift of power within the above mentioned pairs is in focus. This is also the case for this essay, but instead of analyzing the realistic elements in the book it will examine the imaginary complexity of the opera Byron in Italy, which is created by the protagonist, David Lurie. This essay aims to widen the concept of “native” regarding post-colonial theory by looking at the peculiarity of Lurie’s situation; him being a representative of the white population in South Africa. By using post-colonial theory this essay aims at showing that Lurie can be seen as a white native, and that his process of writing the opera can be seen as symbolizing the evolutionary phases a colonized nation goes through in order to develop a national culture, as described by Franz Fanon.

This thesis examines the impact of Edward Said’s influential work Orientalism and its legacy in respect of contemporary reading and writing across cultures. It also questions the legitimacy of Said’s retrospective stereotyping of early examples of cross-cultural representation in literature as uncompromisingly “orientalist”. It is well known that the release of Edward Said’s Orientalism in 1978 was responsible for the rise of a range of cultural and critical theories from multiculturalism to postcolonialism. It was a study that not only polarized critics and forced scholars to re-examine orientalist archives, but persuaded creative writers to re-think their ethnographic positions when it came to the literary representations of cultures other than their own. Without detracting from the enormous impact of Said, this thesis isolates gaps and silences in Said that need correcting. Furthermore, there is an element of intransigence, an uncompromising refusal to fine-tune what is essentially a binary discourse of the West and its other in Said’s work, that encourages the continued interrogation of power relations but which, because of its very boldness, paradoxically disallows the extent to which the conflict of cultures indeed produced new, hybrid social and cultural formations. In an attempt to challenge the severity of Said’s claim that “every European, in what he could say about the Orient, was consequently a racist, an imperialist, and almost totally ethnocentric”, the thesis examines a number of different discursive contexts in which such a presumption is challenged. Thus while the second chapter discusses the ‘traditional’ profession-based orientalism of nineteenth-century E. G. Browne, the third considers the anti-imperialism of colonial administrator Leonard Woolf. The fourth chapter provides a reflection on the difficulties of diasporic “orientalism” through the works of Michael Ondaatje while chapter five demonstrates the effects of the dialogism used by Amitav Ghosh as a defence against “orientalism”. The thesis concludes with an examination of contemporary writing by Andrea Levy that appositely illustrates the legacy of Said’s influence. While the restrictive parameters of Said’s work make it difficult to mount a thorough-going critique of Said, this thesis shows that, indeed, it is within the restraints of these parameters and in the very discourse that Said employs that he traps himself. This study claims that even Said is susceptible to “orientalist” criticism in that he is as much an “orientalist” as those at whom he directs his polemic.

The purpose of this study is to use a qualitative approach to highlight the western involvement in Thai orphanages and, on basis of Western moral development workers and volunteers, enlighten how Western colonial heritage can be recreated in the humanitarian economic aid. The study is based on the recent tsunami disaster in 2004 which led to a huge voluntary effort by Western volunteers and organizations who wanted to rebuild the country. Now, seven years after the disaster, the country has recovered well and thanks to a strong turism, and industrial growth, the country has now reached the position of a middle income country with regional power. The study presents a selection of previous ressearch in the area from different critical perspectives. It is a field study based on qualitative interviews with six informants that highlights the individual engagment in humanitarian assistance. Theories based on Post-colonialism and globalization have been used in order to analyze and reach the result of this study.

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The standards of beauty always change in every generation in Taiwan, but there is only one standard still has strong impact on people, that is:¡¨ having white complexion¡¨. People say: ¡§A white complexion is powerful enough to hide seven faults.¡¨ The reason of ¡§whitening¡¨ is important because of the different powers which compete with each other to decide the meaning behind the discourse of ¡§whitening¡¨. The concept of ¡§Whitening¡¨ is from the promotion of beauty industry. What¡¦s more, this concept also made a strong impact through the media on people who live in Taiwan. Thus, to understand how the media delivery the ¡§whitening¡¨ concept is very important, especially through the most important media--- Internet in this generation. The main purpose of this research is to find out the process of developing the discourse of ¡§whitening¡¨ within the on-line Beauty Salon community and the context behind the discourse in Taiwan. Another purpose is to seek out the minority discourse which seldom appear within the mass media and also provide the ability of reflectivity thinking. The main structure of this research base on the critical concept of ¡§Knowledge/ Power¡¨ from the post-modern scholars: Gramsci, Foucault and the post-colonialism scholar---Said to discuss how the ¡§whitening¡¨ discourse is developed by the ¡§center¡¨(ex. doctor, expert and business ) and ¡§margin¡¨(ex.net pal)within the on-line beauty community. This research choose qualitative research method to do the context analysis in the most popular on-line community which is also the biggest BBS in Taiwan---¡§PTT ¡¨ and choose ¡§Beauty Salon¡¨ community within PTT as the research field. The results show that the ¡§Whitening ¡¨ discourse is a knowledge system within ¡§Beauty Salon¡¨ community and developed by the hierarchy relationship form doctors, skin-care experts, cosmetic businesses and cosmetic sales. What¡¦s more, the role of ¡§black skin¡¨ is ¡§the other¡¨ and has the inferiority within this knowledge system of whitening discourse. And the voice of supporting black skin also disappeared within Beauty Salon community. To compare with Beauty Salon community, there was another temporary skin-care on-line discussion bard founded by YAHOO in March 2008. And it has less limit and more open to express their opinions. This research found that there is the voice of supporting black skin appearing within this field and also using the strategy of different mimicry to ¡§write back¡¨ the discourse developed by majority. This research found that if there are only few powers to develop the discourse, the discourse will become one-dimension and hardly to see the different other opinion against the mainstream or the ¡§center¡¨ opinion. This also tells us that the limit of structure from the oligopoly powers in the Internet will expropriate people¡¦s chance and freedom to choose and contact the different voices, and this situation is worthy to reflect.

This thesis examines the relationship between utopianism and nationalism in New Zealand literature between 1817 and 1973. My research utilises the definition of both the utopia and the nation as “imagined” or “imaginary” communities (to use Benedict Anderson and Phillip Wegner’s terms), in demonstrating how they function as interdependent concepts in colonial New Zealand literature. Specifically, my research focuses on how a dominant discourse of Pākehā nationalism is influenced by the desires of colonial settlement. There is an identifiable tradition in which New Zealand is imagined as a utopian space with an ambivalence towards modernity. The settler nation is defined subjectively by different authors, retaining, however, a tradition of excluding groups which are not compatible with the authors’ utopian projections. This exclusion may be based on race, gender, class, political views or other categorisations. I view this tradition as a dialectic of changing desires and utopian visions, based on changing historical contexts, but always engaged with the central attempt to speculate the possibilities that New Zealand holds as a utopia for Anglocentric settlement. The thesis is divided into four chapters, each based on the comparison of two texts from a certain period. The first chapter compares two texts of early nineteenth century British settlement, J.L. Nicholas’ Narrative of Voyage to New Zealand (1817) and E.J. Wakefield’s Adventure in New Zealand (1845). The second chapter examines Samuel Butler’s Erewhon (1872) and Julius Vogel’s Anno Domini 2000 (1889). The third chapter focuses on Robin Hyde’s Wednesday’s Children (1936) and John Mulgan’s Man Alone (1939). My final chapter argues that the end of this mode of writing is signalled by Smith’s Dream (1971 rev. 1973) by C.K. Stead and Intensive Care (1970) by Janet Frame, which demonstrate a changing approach to the tradition. After this point, other postcolonial voices emerge and the attempted homogeneity of settler utopianism is disrupted.

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