This thesis provides a comparative reading to selected writings from Anglophone Trinidadian writer Sam Selvon and Japanophone Taiwanese writer Weng Nao, demonstrating the link between these two authors’ specific representation of multiple diasporic models of Caribbean diaspora and Taiwanese diaspora respectively and its influence on diasporic identity narratives. This study provides a cross-linguistic/ cultural perspective on comparative postcolonial literary studies, which helps to move beyond the primary focus of Anglophone texts and contexts. Although the focused two authors Sam Selvon and Weng Nao come from different historical specificities and linguistic backgrounds that urge them produce their narratives in different ways and tones of tackling issues that they have encountered in each socio-political and cultural contexts respectively, their works provides outstanding examples of how contemporary diasporic routes—both geographically and metaphorically, have significant influence on literary productions that should not be categorised by its geographical or linguistic boundaries, and can only be fully understood by linking one to another from the legacies of colonialism and the triangle models of diasporic routes. The diasporic identity, as being illustrated in both of their works, has been evolved with geographical movements and transformed into an iconic concept that makes new forms of artistic production possible. Diasporic literature, therefore, should not be limited into traditional disciplinary compartmentalisation of national literary studies. By bringing the focus on the multiple diasporic journeys, the identity representation reflected in the literary work in this study helps to identify the complexity and boundary crossing within Anglophone literature and Japanophone literature, which have already transformed into literary works of being able to depict a more complex model of modern cultures—endless traveling and hybrid. By bringing forth the excluded Japanophone texts in the field of postcolonial studies to be compared with the texts from the prominent Anglophone postcolonial writer Sam Selvon, this thesis hopes to offer some insights into the reassessment of the literary status of Weng Nao and the significance of his works in the world literary stage, and, furthermore, to identify how Japanophone literary works might be compatible with postcolonial analysis.

This thesis reads the fiction and poetry of Spokane/Coeur d’Alene writer Sherman Alexie as predominantly urban Indian literature. The primary experience of the growing majority of American Indians in the twenty-first century consists in the various threats and opportunities presented by urban living, yet contemporary criticism of literature by (and about) American Indians continues to focus on the representations of life for those tribally enrolled American Indians living on reservations, under the jurisdiction of tribal governments. This thesis provides critical responses to Alexie’s contemporary literary representations of those Indians living apart from tribal lands and the communities and traditions contained therein. I argue that Alexie’s multifaceted representations of Indians in the city establish intelligible urban voices that speak across tribal boundaries to those urban Indians variously engaged in creating diverse Indian communities, initiating new urban traditions, and adapting to the anonymities and visibilities that characterise city living. The thesis takes a broadly linear chronological structure, beginning with Alexie’s first published collection of short stories and concluding with his most recent works. Each chapter isolates for examination a distinct aspect of Alexie’s urban Indian literature, so demonstrating a potential new critical methodology for reading urban Indian literatures. I open with a short piece explaining my position as a white, British scholar of the heavily politicised field of American Indian literary studies, before the introductory chapter positions Alexie in the wider body of Indian literatures and establishes the historical grounds for the aims and claims of my research. Chapter one is primarily concerned with the short story ‘Distances’, from The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven (1993), and the Ghost Dance religion of the late nineteenth century, reading Alexie’s representations of this phenomenon as explorations of the historical and political tensions that divide those Indians living on tribal lands and those living in cities. Chapter two discusses the difficulties of maintaining a tribal identity when negotiating this divide towards the city, analysing the politics of indigenous artistic expression and reception in Alexie’s first novel, Reservation Blues (1995). Alexie’s second novel, Indian Killer (1996), signals the relocation of his literary aesthetics to the city streets, and chapter three detects and unravels the anti-essentialist impulse in Alexie’s (mis)use of the distinctly urban mystery thriller genre. Grief, death and ritual are explored in chapter four, which focusses on selected stories from Ten Little Indians (2003), and explains Alexie’s characters’ need for new, urban traditions with reference to an ethics of grieving. Chapter five connects the politics of time travel to the representation of trauma in Flight (2007), and addresses Alexie’s representations of violence in Ten Little Indians and The Toughest Indian in the World (2000), proposing that it is the structural violences of daily life, rather than the murder and beatings found throughout his work, that leave lasting impressions on urban Indian subjectivities. My conclusion brings together my approaches to Alexie’s urban Indian literature, and suggests further areas for research.

<p>The Subaltern Clinic explores a certain legacy of unreason that Sigmund Freud identified throughout the course of his writings as the "death drive," or the compulsion to repeat. In Freud's work, the death drive is often thought as the opposite of the pleasure principle, which situates the pleasure-unpleasure binary at the center of psychoanalytical thinking and Freud's conceptualization of the psyche as well as morality, ethics, and civilization. The Subaltern Clinic traces a legacy of the death drive and a series of thematic concerns that emerge from it, specifically the instability of the pleasure-unpleasure binary that ostensibly upholds the "principle of reason," through a colonial-postcolonial archive. In doing so, the dissertation attends to those subaltern figures who are constituted as the "unreason" of society, particularly the mentally ill, women, and homosexuals. </p><p>In particular, the dissertation looks to the intersection of psychoanalysis and deconstruction, specifically to Jacques Derrida's engagements with Freud's "Beyond the Pleasure Principle," to argue that deconstruction needs to be thought of as a marginal and politicized form of psychoanalytic thinking, the stakes of which emerge through Derrida's readings of Freud's death drive. The dissertation follows the thread of these readings to consider the problems of difference, violence, sadism and masochism, and anxiety in the work of colonial and postcolonial practitioners of psychoanalysis as well as postcolonial artists and novelists. The Subaltern Clinic makes the argument that an attention to the legacy of the death drive in the postcolonial archive allows for a more robust critique of postcolonial reason, which would attend to questions of ethics and aesthetics.</p> / Dissertation

The film representation of the Sámi people has evolved during the last century from the ethnographic portrayals that reproduce a romantic stereotype of the good savages, to feature and documentary films that discuss the Sámi identity and its colonial history. In recent years a new generation of Sámi and Swedish documentary directors have focused their work on analysing the impact that multiple structures of power actually have in the production of the Sámi identity and culture. In this research I explore the intersections of such structures in the documentary road movies Sámi Daughter Yoik (2007) by the Sámi-Swedish director Liselotte Wajstedt, and The Only Image of My Father (2004) by the Swedish director Kine Boman. The main purpose of the research is to examine the discussions of identity that these films propose and to analyse the strategies with which the directors question the simplistic representation of the Sámi people. Based on the postcolonial and intersectional perspectives, the text offers a critique of the discourses of authenticity that confine the Sámi identity into the frame of ethnicity. The study gives special attention to the different layers that the directors' identities involve and their role in the construction of alternative representations of the Sámi people. A relevant finding is that the directors have succeeded in representing the Sámi people as complex and heterogeneous, helped by their choices on genre, authorship and their own approach to identity as a performative, multidimensional and dynamic process.

The purpose of the study is to highlight women's experiences of and beliefs about the labour market, in relation to wearing the veil. It´s based on a qualitative study of semi-structured interviews with thirteen university students of women wearing hijab and illustrate how their reflections of discrimination affect educational choices. It also describes what treatment the women wearing hijab has experienced in previous contact with the labor market and when the veil has been actualized in different work situations. The result is described in three themes:  “wearing hijab”, “education and profession” and “work life”. It displays how the women highlight their experiences of discrimination towards their hijab and states that there is discrimination in social and public contexts, as well as in the Swedish labor market. Furthermore, the women tell how difficult it is for the hijab wearing woman to be considered as her own individual, instead, she is defined by the hijab and met with prejudiced values and reactions. The results were analyzed with theories as postcolonial feminism, orientalism, and different forms of discrimination, stigmatization and exclusion. During the job search, the respondents in this study tells that they need to over emphasize their skills because they constantly feel that they need to disprove prejudices about an imagine incompetence. Especially after the European Court of Justice ruled (2017-03-14) that entitles the employers to deny women wearing hijab at the workplace. Additionally, the negative attitude is not always visible but hidden outward and towards the periphery of society. This study clarifies how they are treated in society and highlights the limits of their opportunities in the labor market because of prejudice about the hijab. The results are related to previous studies and are discussed in relation to the dominant image of the veil in the West.

Gender equality is an important attribute in Sweden, much connected to the country’s selfimage. This thesis analyzes Swedish state policy strategies for Sweden’s works with gender equality abroad, in development cooperation. From a feminist postcolonial perspective, the thesis conducts a critical discourse analysis of the policy framework regulating Swedish development cooperation in relation to gender equality. The result show that women and men are constructed as discursively different in the policy framework. Further, the issue of gender inequality, as portrayed within the policy framework, constructs women as particular vulnerable and subordinated to men. A discursive construction which paradoxically reinforces the traditional, stereotypical gender norms which the policy framework aims to abolish. In line with this paradox the result also show that men are not recognized as responsible for gender inequalities nor are they lifted as agents of change in gender equality work. A result that suggests that women are both the ones in need of and the ones responsible for creating a gender equal future in developing nations according to the discourse of Swedish development cooperation policy.

Abstract The period of South Africa’s political transition in the late 1980s and 1990s also saw a number of interesting developments in the field of cultural production, especially within the province of literature. A number of literary scholars, critics of all realms, writers, some enthusiasts and adventurers all showed interest in the direction of literature after the repressive years of apartheid. The dominant academic question at the time centred on the possible transition in the thematic and formalistic dimension of the literature of the new South Africa. Scholars and cultural commentators that include Es’kia Mphahlele, Njabulo Ndebele, Albie Sachs, Guy Butler, Elleke Boehmer, Michael Chapman, Mbulelo Mzamane, Andries Walter Oliphant, amongst others, all contributed immensely in the debates that attempted to define the possible direction of the literature after apartheid. This research is concerned with the developments in the Post-Apartheid South African Novels of English expression. Its focus is on how temporal mobility has impacted on cultural production especially as witnessed in the many transformations in the field of literature, particularly the novel as a genre. Using the tropes of memory, violence, and otherness, it examines the novels of writers as varying as André Brink, J.M. Coetzee, Zakes Mda, Zoë Wicomb, and Jo-Anne Richards. At the level of form, the fantastical and the confessional modes of narration are discussed as significant manifestations of the post-apartheid narratives using the novels of André Brink and Jo-Anne Richards respectively. It suggests that, among other things, the post-apartheid novels of English expression are marked by some interesting thematic blocs that include the fascination with land, the artistic display of remorse through the confessional mode, the rekindling of memory and its representation in narrative, the peculiar interest in violence and alterity, the continuing reportage of the urban space and the implications of urbanity on the ordinary citizenry, the recourse to gangsterism, miscegenation and the dilemma of a humankind confined to the psychological spaces of the interstices. Efforts were made in this research to avoid the ‘intellectual apartheid’ often associated with the hermeneutic engagements of the literati previously devoted to South Africa’s literary scholarship. It is for this reason that a more elaborate introductory chapter highlights aspects of the contributions of novelists and scholars that include Nadine Gordimer, Mongane Wally Serote, Lewis Nkosi, Njabulo Ndebele, and the ‘emergent’ ones such as Phaswane Mpe, K. Sello Duiker, Pamela Jooste, among others. An important dimension to this study is that it situates the Post-Apartheid narratives not only within relevant historical contexts, but also develops its argument by drawing immensely from the intellectual culture dominant in South Africa before, during, and after the notorious era of racial separatism. It concludes on the suggestive note that South African writers and literary scholars should attempt to demonstrate a more rigorous interest in locating the creative points of convergence between the aesthetic and social ideals.

Sur les territoires colonisés par la France paraissent des journaux locaux qui suivent le développement national de la presse : entre 1830 et 1880, l’époque est médiatique et le journal est un support important des publications littéraires. Dans les colonies, les périodiques contiennent ainsi des textes adaptés à leurs territoires respectifs, mais publiés toujours selon la même structure, ce qui permet une comparaison entre les différentes stratégies conduisant à l’élaboration d’identités coloniales. Ces textes, par leur diversité et leurs évolutions, représentent une sorte de chaînon manquant entre la littérature des récits de voyage et la littérature coloniale qui se définit au tournant du XXe siècle : interrogés et étudiés sous cet angle, ils prennent valeur de corpus signifiant. Ils montrent en effet le rôle identitaire de cette littérature médiatique adaptée aux colonies : en adaptant l’exotisme aux conditions coloniale, en faisant varier le critère d’altérité et par bien d’autres moyens encore, la presse locale fonde en partie une attitude coloniale qui se retrouve, mutatis mutandis, dans l’empire colonial français. C’est également la raison pour laquelle le corpus médiatique colonial du XIXe siècle se trouve être au centre de connexions avec les textes de la littérature coloniale ainsi qu’avec les problématiques de l’écriture postcoloniale : lieu de publication, de nouveauté, de tentatives identitaires et d’essais génériques, le journal colonial a produit entre 1830 et 1880 des mécanismes d’écriture appelés à se développer par la suite. / Local newspapers were published in French colonial areas following the same evolution as the national newspapers: between 1830 and 1880, media-rich times, the press represents a significant publishing-platform for literary texts. Colonial newspapers contain texts adjusted to their respective geographic areas, but keep the same structure regardless, thereby allowing the comparison between the strategies leading to the building of colonial identities. The diversity and the different evolution pathways of these texts may then be considered as the missing link between the travel narratives and the early-20th century defined colonial literature. As such, they can undoubtedly be considered as a significant corpus of colonial times. These texts reflect the identity role this colonial-area adjusted media literature had: by adapting exoticism to the colonial conditions, by varying the criterion of alterity and by many other ways, local press founds, partially, a colonial attitude that can further be found, mutatis mutandis, in the French colonial empire. This is also the reason the 19th-century colonial-media corpus is at the crossroads of both colonial literature and postcolonial writing problematics: as a place for publication, novelty, identity essays, and literary genre essays, the colonial newspaper witnessed the creation, between 1830 and 1880, of writing mechanisms that would eventually develop later on.

Cette étude s’intéresse aux trois piliers de l’écrit narratif à la période romantique, dans les œuvres de la Cubaine Gertrudis Gómez de Avellaneda (1814-1873), portant sur les colonies hispano-américaines et caribéennes (Memorias, Sab, Guatimozín, El Cacique de Turmequé, El aura blanca). L’imagerie et les procédés habituellement mobilisés dans un romantisme hispano-américain, fortement inspiré des canons européens, et pourtant mu par un désir d’indépendance politique et culturelle, font de cette littérature une littérature du paradoxe. Non dépourvues de cette caractéristique, les narrations de l’auteur apparaissent toutefois comme de surprenants récits. A l’aune de l’évolution des formes romanesques qui ont succédé au Romantisme, jusqu’aux écrits de la modernité, et aux poétiques postmodernes et postcoloniales, on constate la modernité que ces textes présentaient déjà. La (dé)construction des personnages, en particulier le Métis, celle des lieux, et le jeu polyphonique de dires démultipliés remettent en question nombre des représentations traditionnelles, dans la réécriture de l’Histoire des Amériques. Un désir de dire autrement les divers « réels » émerge, ainsi que le souhait d’intégrer la complexité culturelle de cette zone. Sans avoir clairement défini de véritable poétique, l’auteur explore l’espace, la temporalité et le jeu des voix, pour fonder les bases d’une écriture ontologique et mémorielle qui interroge les identités. Celle-ci se créolise, par la mise en contact d’éléments hétéroclites qu’elle recompose, la multiplicité des sources littéraires ou orales, l’apparition de nouveaux territoires langagiers ou encore des personnages qui échappent aux typifications. / This study focuses on the three pillars of narrative art in the romantic era in the works of Cuban writer Gertrudis Gómez de Avellaneda (1814-1873) dealing with Hispanic-American and Caribbean colonies (Memorias, Sab, Guatimozín, El Cacique de Turmequé, El aura blanca). The images and narrative devices traditionally mobilized in Hispanic-American Romanticism – a literature strongly inspired by European artistic ideals, and yet driven by a desire for political and cultural independence – make it a literature pervaded by paradoxes. Although they tend to share this common feature, the authors’ narratives stand out and surprise. In the light of the evolution of the novelistic forms that followed Romanticism, including modernist writings, and postmodern and postcolonial poetics, these texts appear as already “modern”. The (de)construction of the characters – particularly the “Metis” – and places, together with the polyphonic effect of a myriad of different discourses, challenge many traditional representations concerning the re-writing of the History of the Americas. What emerges is a desire to find a new way to express the various forms of the “real” and to capture the cultural complexity of this geographical area. Without clearly defining any particular literary method or ars poetica, the author explores space, temporality and the interplay of voices, thus laying the bases for an ontological, memory-oriented mode of writing that questions identities. This mode of writing goes through a process of Creolization, as it gathers and recomposes disparate elements, multiplies its literary or oral sources, and makes new linguistic territories, or characters who elude types, materialize.

In light of globalization, international social work from global North to global South is accelerating and the emphasis from Swedish universities on international experience among students has increased. Various scholars problematize the domination of the global North as theories and practice have historically been unquestionably transformed from so-called developed to developing countries. Since the Western knowledge can be seen as the norm worldwide, international social work practice can have a negative impact on the local people, culture and knowledge if not adapted to the local context. The aim of the study was to explore to what extent Swedish social work students are prepared for field training abroad. This by exploring Swedish social work student’s experiences of their field training in South Africa. Further, the study aim was to increase our understanding of how the background as a Swedish social work student influences the field training in South Africa. The idea of the study is also to explore how South African social welfare workers relate and conceive Swedish social work students at their social welfare organization. In order to explore this subject, the study was based on fifteen semi-structured interviews with both Swedish social work students doing field training in South Africa and South African social welfare workers supervising Swedish students. Our study reveals that Swedish students doing field training in South Africa are not prepared academically in order to conduct field training abroad. Furthermore, the students expressed that the social work education lacked in terms of support, supervision and preparations for international field training. Our result indicated that students are given a high status and are seen as professionals by South African social welfare workers. Further, this study shows an indistinct relation between who is educating and who is learning among Swedish students and South African supervisors. This as a result of the power of whiteness and the view of the student’s as professionals with valuable knowledge. Our analysis has revealed, according to postcolonial theory and the concept of white privilege, signs of a continuation of historical colonial power relations and a distinction between “we” and “them”. However, international social work is a complex phenomenon and additional research is needed to unpack this subject further.