In addition to proposing a survey and subsequent analysis of the French-Algerian War in French-language comics, also known as bandes dessinées, published in Algeria, France, and Belgium since the 1960s, my dissertation investigates the ways in which this medium re-appropriates textual and iconographic source materials. I argue that the integration or citation of various sources by artists functions to confer a measure of historical accuracy on their representation of history, to constitute a collective memory as well as personal postmemories of the war, and to re-contextualize problematic images so that they and the hegemonic discourses they reinforce may be deconstructed. Moreover, the bande dessinée mimics secondary schoolbook representations of the war in both Algeria and France in its recycling of problematic images such as Orientalist painting, colonial postcards, and iconic images of war. The recycling of textbook images has the double advantage of ensuring reader familiarity with these images and of inviting critical interpretations of them. By exploring how the bande dessinée reuses colonial images as well as critical histories in predominantly anti-colonialist narratives, I seek to explain how this popular medium uniquely problematizes questions of history, memory, and postcolonial identity related to French Algeria and its decolonization. It is my contention that, because historical bandes dessinées frequently include or reference authentic textual and iconographic source material documenting the repercussions of the French-Algerian war on various communities, they represent a valuable resource to middle and high school teachers looking to enrich the state-mandated history curriculum. By using the bande dessinée in this capacity, educators exploit this medium as both a historical document (whose objective is to transmit knowledge of the past) and a document of history (which allows scholars to retrace the evolution of public opinion).

Understanding women’s experiences of mangrove forest conservation in the Global South is important because mangrove forests are a crucial defense against climate change, and are also increasingly the targets of global climate change policies. The intervention of postcolonial feminist theory combined with feminist political ecology has the potential to bring forward women’s seldom-heard experiences of climate change in these valuable ecosystems. This work supports previous feminist political ecology scholarship focused on understanding women’s complicated relationships to the environment and the gendered effects of climate change policies, while challenging dominant conservation discourse around women as a monolithic group. This thesis focuses on women living in Madagascar’s largest mangrove, particularly under current mangrove reforestation efforts and emerging blue carbon climate change policies. This project explores how the women in this mangrove forest are situated along axes of power differently, the implications of social divisions for conservation, and the ways in which current mangrove conservation projects reproduce power relations in the mangrove by failing to recognize difference.

This study examines the modernist fiction by three transnational women writers who turned to the ocean in their writing during the first half of the twentieth century to navigate their divided or hyphenated national identities. The Anglo-Irish writer Elizabeth Bowen (1899-1973), the Finland-Swedish author Hagar Olsson (1893-1978), and the New Zealand short story writer of English descent, Katherine Mansfield (1888-1923), use ocean space in their fiction, in the form of both sea imagery and material seascape settings, to unsettle ideologically limiting and culturally anchored categories of identity, gender, class, place and time. The modernist aesthetics and marginal ethics of these white colonial women who existed at a slant to the geographical and cultural center of the British, masculine metropolis pivot on two competing ocean views. First, the sea features in their work as a historically compliant, smooth surface in the service of the establishment, enabling and justifying imperial expansion and colonial settlement, as well as defining and patrolling the uncompromising borders of the land-based modern nation state. Alternately, the ocean comes to disrupt progressive imperial models of history, to inspire fluid and transgressive ideologies, to bear witness to violent histories submerged by official records, and to confound our sense of scale and chronological time through outsized subterranean ecologies that blur the line between land and water, and, as a consequence, throw into question larger fundamental, ontological distinctions, such as that between the ‘human’ and the ‘non-human,’ or ‘more-than-human.’ By bringing postcolonial and ecocritical perspectives to bear on Bowen, Mansfield and Olsson’s literary representations of the ocean, my study contributes to the current expanding reach of modernist studies, ushering into the critical spotlight global regions previously overlooked and misfit writers traditionally dismissed, to locate that which modernity originally defined itself against at the vibrant heart of that construction.

[Abstract]: This is research on cultural identity and the history of design. The project, by applying aspects of postcolonial theories (third space, border theory and hybridity) to the history of the four women designers in the Art Deco period in Europe, explores the influences of Eastern cultures in developing their Western designperspective.Their experience in fighting against patriarchal society toward success is a useful analogy for my country Taiwan’s struggle to win recognition in the world. It isthrough the recognition of these four women designers’ contributions to design history that I present their stories as models to my design students in Taiwan toassist them in establishing their own design identity.The research findings indicate that these women designers’ benefited from Eastern culture and created a successful cultural mélange between the East and West. Similarly, my design students in Taiwan will have the opportunity toreverse the pathway in appropriating from the West to create new possibilities in the East. I argue that hybridity is a key component for responding to and foraddressing the identity crisis and internal disruption in present-day Taiwan. Through knowing and understanding these women designers’ achievements, Taiwanese students have a model for self-reflection to recognise the importance of our own cultural value to the world.

This study examines some of the significant challenges that Nakoda peoples encountered from 1870-1980 in the Banff-Bow Valley, Alberta. Beginning with missionary movements, the 1877 Treaty Seven agreements and the establishment of the reservation systems, I trace the emergence of a disciplinary power regime and the subsequent consequences for Nakoda communities. Canadian governments and agents of the colonial bureaucracy manipulated time, space and movement which altered the structure of Aboriginal lives in ways that attempted to increase visibility, economic productivity and docility. Race as a normalizing and dividing practice (Foucault, 1975) is used to demonstrate how levels of discipline furthered assimilation strategies through the formation of Canadas first national park and the development of the regions tourism economies. As the preeminent example of the engagement of Nakoda peoples in local tourism industries, the Banff Indian Days sporting and cultural festivals, which were celebrated from 1894-1978, are also investigated. Borrowing from poststructural and postcolonial theory, the interactions between tourists, participants, organizers and performers are problematized. It is revealed that the festivals became critical sites of cultural exchange that engendered unique socio-economic, political and cultural opportunities. In addition, the Indian Days fostered important identity-making possibilities and crucial spaces to assert, contest, and produce perceptions of Aboriginal cultures. This research privileges information obtained from oral history interviews with Nakoda peoples. However, archival materials, mainly newspaper accounts, photographs, tourism advertisements, and government documents also contribute to the primary evidence collected. As well as analyzing racial discourse, this work also considers how Nakoda peoples responded to the representations and expectations that informed the production of Aboriginal identities. I conclude this study by suggesting that it is crucial for researchers to consult diverse Aboriginal perspectives and collaborate with the communities within which they work. This research offers new understandings of the cultural histories of the Banff-Bow Valley which reflect the dynamic and complex nature of colonial power relations.

In the United States, the past twenty years has witnessed a growing academic interest in understanding 'globalization,' i.e., a series of interconnected social, cultural, and political processes occurring under integrated economies. Management scholars have tried to understand globalization in terms of its potential consequences for companies conducting business in various countries and regions. However, globalization involves more than this, for as new relationships between people and places occur, new ideas about who they/ us are in those relationships also emerge. How can international management scholars thus understand these complex relationships occurring under globalization? How can they theorize and study such relationships?Although there are multiple ways to address these questions, the approach to globalization within U.S.-based international business and management research has been insufficient. First, meta-theoretical assumptions supporting U.S.-based management theories and practices have seldom been questioned in regards to their deployment in non-Western contexts. Second, the emphasis of this research on "cultural differences" implies "separation" and may conceal social and cultural formations established through global relationships. Thus, alternative approaches to understanding business practices in the context of globalization are needed.To this effect, I first develop the notion of identity formation , based on poststructuralist and postcolonial theories, as a conceptual framework, in contrast with the modernist views of identity informing the extant international management literature. I suggest this notion as an appropriate focus of analysis for understanding contemporary relationships between people in the world. To demonstrate these arguments, I conduct fieldwork focused on the international entrepreneur, specifically the Turkish entrepreneur. Relying on an extended case study design and a multi-method approach, I examine how Turkish entrepreneurs in high-technology sectors in the U.S. and in Turkey engage in identity formation processes.The identity formation framework allows me to demonstrate how globalization processes occur relationally through embedded discourses of hybridity, gender, subalternity, and nation articulated by international entrepreneurs. I further address how postcolonial lenses allow for conceptualizing encounters between West and non-West occurring under globalization as a series of interdependent events at the locus of identity formation. As such, my dissertation offers a theoretically distinct conceptualization for globalization research in international management.

The abscence of the brazilian artist Tarsila do Amaral (1886–1973) in the general art history is investigated, using the colonial structure as a starting point. In South America she is regarded as one of the greatest artists in modern time, in the rest of the world she is more or less unknown. The conclusion is that the colonial mechanisms are still in progress in our assumed postcolonial world, and has excluded Tarsila do Amaral, and the anthropophagic movement she was a part of, from the art history. The study points out the importance of looking into this neglected artist and the historic event. Not only to add it to the history of art, but also to show how anthropophagy as an artistic strategy created in the 1920’s Brazil is as relevant today as it was then. Three oil paintings of Tarsila do Amaral is used to describe the artistic strategy that solved the problem of beeing shaped as a mirror image to the western world. The paintings A Negra, Abaporu and Antropofagia tells us the story of how the Brazilian people started to see themselves as culturaly independent from Europe. Neither as something opposite nor similiar, but as something between. Anthropophagy is challenging our notion of ”us” and ”them” as well as centre and periphery – and is therefor useful in the writing of art history. Its not only important to make room for Tarsila do Amaral in the history of art – its also urgent to let her contribution be a part of the present art world.

<p>This dissertation explores the themes of race and resistance in nineteenth-century Haitian writings and highlights their impact on French-speaking nineteenth- and twentieth-century African and Caribbean literature. This exploration spans across literary genres and centuries, and juxtaposes disciplines that are rarely put into dialogue with each other. Central to my approach is an interdisciplinary perspective that sheds light on the key interactions between colonial history, legal decrees, anthropology and engaged literature in nineteenth-century French and Francophone studies. And in charting the impact of these writings on the twentieth-century Francophone landscape, this project also addresses current debates in Caribbean, French and Haitian studies and contributes to the growing literature in black Atlantic and postcolonial studies. This research project begins by analyzing rhetorical representations of race and resistance in rare texts from Toussaint Louverture, Pompée-Valentin de Vastey and Juste Chanlatte, in particular with respect to their representations of the Haitian revolution (1791-1804), the only successful slave revolt in history to have resulted in the creation of a new state. By focusing on how Louverture, Vastey and Chanlatte responded to slavery, pseudo-scientific theories of racial difference, and the pernicious effects of the colonial system, it explores both the significance of the revolution's literary representation and the extent of its impact on postcolonial imaginations in Haiti, and the rest of the Caribbean, Africa and France. In particular, I analyze the impact these texts had on subsequent African and Caribbean literature by Emeric Bergeaud, Joseph-Anténor Firmin, Marie Vieux-Chauvet, Aimé Césaire, Edouard Glissant, and Bernard Dadié.</p> / Dissertation

La tesi affronta alcune grandi questioni relative al rapporto tra trasformazioni sociali e mondi culturali nella contemporaneità. La prospettiva adottata è caratterizzata da un approccio multifocale, che cerca di integrare la riflessione che ha per oggetto di analisi il medium musicale, le sue caratteristiche, funzioni e potenzialità con un contributo che cerca di rilevare l'emergenza di nuove formazioni identitarie nella Gran Bretagna del nuovo millennio. In particolare, il focus della ricerca è costituito dall'analisi dell'esperienza di produzione e fruizione di islamic conscious rap da parte dei giovani musulmani britannici di origine asiatica, che la più recente riflessione sociologica definisce Brasian, figli della diaspora, protagonisti di quella svolta culturale che contribuisce ad una continua riconfigurazione dell'identità postcoloniale. Nell'ambito di questo contributo si è cercato di analizzare in prospettiva critica le diverse categorie che hanno cercato, nel corso degli ultimi decenni, di definire ed inquadrare il concetto forte di "identità" sullo sfondo di eventi macro quali colonialismo, diaspora, globalizzazione e migrazioni. / This thesis is focused on the relationship between cultural worlds and social transformations within contemporary British society. Our study is based on a differentiated approach where the analysis of popular music material, of its features and its functions merges with the emergence of new identity configurations in the UK. The main research focus is the production and consumption of Islamic conscious rap by Brasian Muslim youth, a category that has been recently introduced within the international debate on identity. Through their social and cultural experience Muslim young people of South Asian origin are at the forefront of a new cultural turn in the redefinition of postcolonial identity, also in relation to many other contemporary issues: colonialism, Diaspora, globalisation and migration. The process of cultural reterritorialisation together with that of cultural reproduction constantly change the cultural landscape of this youth: thank to their multicultural skills and their transcultural capital young Muslim people manage to balance within different cultural worlds, and Islamic rap is here considered as link with the translocal Muslim Ummah. This work's aim is to describe the reconfiguration of translocal scenarios through the processes of cultural respatialization and retorritorialisation through the musical medium within the local-global nexus.

In asking ‘How do queer Palestinian womyn ‘queer’ Palestinian identity”, the present research focuses on the various forms of traditional, narrative, and creative resistance practices of Palestinian womyn who challenge the following three narratives: 1) the national narrative which tags ‘queer’ as ‘Other’ and which posits the national movement at the top of the hierarchy of struggles; 2) the colonial narrative which is sustained by the Israeli public relations campaigns aiming to portray Israel as a modern, progressive, safe gay haven for queers, in opposition to a Palestine and Arab World which are said to be integrally homophobic, barbaric, regressive, etc. in an attempt to ‘pinkwash’ the occupation; and 3) the neocolonial narrative in which Western and Israeli Jewish queer movements reproduce colonial dynamics in their attempt to ‘save’ Palestinian queers who are deemed to be powerless, voiceless victims in need of saving.