Transculturalism refers to how cultural barriers are transcended and how cultures meet. Because the transcultural perspective reflects hitherto unrepresented spaces, it revises and innovates literary canons. This study investigates aspects of transculturalism in texts dealing with travel by the Canadian writer Janice Kulyk Keefer. It also explores how these aspects might alter our view of Canadian literature. The transcultural perspectives between mainstream Canada and Ukraine, Europe and Acadie have been analysed through three tropes of travel: departure, passage and arrival. Keefer’s texts have been read in accordance with Mikhail Bakhtin's dialogic theories to chart transcultural encounters and clashes. This thesis argues that a historic consciousness of their ethnic group gives the young generation a transcultural position that enables them to profit from their dual cultural competence. Although Imagined Communities are affirmed as receptacles of the cultural heritage, the impending environmental catastrophe demands that the national interests that they represent be abandoned for international co-operation. In Keefer’s European texts the transcultural aspects reflect how travel becomes synonymous with quests and epiphanies. Travelling is described as a learning process in Rest Harrow where the protagonist’s increasing cultural competence changes her from a tourist to a real traveller. The transcultural aspects also unmask prejudices, collisions and failed transitions. In this context Imagined Communities are criticized as agents of the colonial discourse, chauvinism, and intolerance. The transcultural perspective also reveals that patriarchal paradigms and the silencing of persecutions victimize the young generation. Furthermore, their ignorance of the mother tongue works as a linguistic barrier shutting them out from their ethnic group. Keefer's Acadian texts support Bakhtin's contention that isolated groups become intolerant to strangers and deviants. While the transcultural perspective unmasks tourists' perception of other countries as idiosyncratic, also the travellers' own ironic postmodernist view of themselves as tourists and of the artificiality of tourism is featured. The cultural assumptions of literary discourse are challenged by border blurring phenomena such as story-telling, the camivalesque, intertextuality and historiographic metafiction. Thus the morality of Keefer's transcultural approach lies also in her literary technique. The alternative perspective inherent in transculturalism makes individuals break away from their given cultural context to embrace a new transcultural ethos. / <p>Diss. Umeå : Umeå universitet, 1996</p> / digitalisering@umu

The aim of this thesis is to investigate the power relations in women’s farmers’ cooperatives in Nicaragua, and to see if the women feel that they have power over their decisions and if they feel that their power has changed after joining the cooperative. The theory used in this thesis is postcolonial feminism theories of women empowerment and frameworks on development efforts to women. The method used to gather data has been semi-structured one-on-one interviews. The investigated cooperatives are part of the umbrella organization Femuprocan. Femuprocan has received development funds from We Effect (formerly Swedish Cooperative Centre) and other aid agencies in order to form cooperatives and for capacity building. Previous studies show the importance of involving women in the decisions about how the development funds should be used.   The interviews showed that the women have been involved in the decisions within the cooperatives such as how the funds should be used. Most of the interviewed women perceived an increased sense of power after joining the cooperative, and can exemplify this. However, the change is slow. The women have identified that capacity building, meeting other women and gaining more money have been crucial in the empowerment process.

This study is based on 72 children's and young adult books that met the criteria of being about Muslims and published and circulated here in the U.S. They can be divided into the varied genres as 49 contemporary realistic fiction, 6 historical fiction, and 17 autobiographies, biographies, and memoirs. In-depth reading and coding were used to identify patterns based on a theoretical frame of postcolonial theory and the lens of cultural authenticity.The exploration of ideas focus on the following research questions related to children's and adolescent literature published and distributed in the US that depict Muslim cultures: What are the overall characteristics of the books? What are the background experiences of the authors, illustrators, and translators who write and distribute literature within the U.S. that reflect Muslim Cultures? How do the genres of contemporary realistic fiction, historical fiction, and biographies published for adolescents and children within the U.S. represent and frame the varied Muslim cultures? What are the relationships between the background experiences of the authors and the representations of Muslim cultures in their books?This work is grounded in the assumption that Muslims are presented in a certain manner in popular culture and literature in the U.S., and thus, postcolonial theory is relevant in unpacking issues within the literature about these people. This theory draws on these suppositions to unveil how knowledge is constructed and circulated in dealing with global power relations. It also sheds light on how the identities of natives become hybrids as the process of colonization in certain cases impacts the psyche of inhabitants of these regions.This study is a `critical content analysis' in comprehending how texts are based in the social, cultural, and political contexts in which they are created and read. Content analyses examine what texts are about, considering the content from a particular perspective. This method scaffolds and explained my research to support my analysis of the texts through postcolonial perspectives to observe how Muslims are portrayed within adolescent and children's literature in the U.S.

This study is a comparative analysis of how Hollywood portrays people from the Middle East before and after 9/11. The films used to conduct this study are True Lies (1994), The Siege (1998), The Kingdom (2007) and Body of Lies (2008). With a qualitative methodology, discourse analysis and postcolonial theory this study analysed not only how people from the Middle East is portrayed, but also how the Americans in the films are presented and how the characters in the films changed in the movies produced after 9/11.      The results show that people from the Middle East are portrayed in a negative way and that Hollywood uses stereotypes. However, people from the Middle East are more gradated in the films post-9/11. There is a bigger focus on Islam in the movies produced after 9/11 and the study also shows that family values play a less central part in the story in the films made after 9/11 and that work is of more importance. The American characters have a greater need to help their country in the war against terrorists in the films produced after 9/11 compared to the American characters in the films made before 9/11.

This thesis is premised on the notion, drawn mainly from a postcolonial perspective (which is subsumed under the poststructuralist as well as the postmodern), that Conrad's early writing reflects his abiding concern with how people construct their identities vis-a-vis the other/Other in contact zones on the periphery of empire far from the reach of social, racial and national identities that sustain them at home. It sets out to explore the problematic of race, culture, gender and identity in a selection of the writer's early works set mainly, but not exclusively, in the East, using the theoretical perspective of postcoloniality as a point of entry, nuanced by the configurations of spatiality which are factored into discourses about the other/Other. Predicated mainly on the theoretical constructs about culture and identity espoused by Homi Bhabha, Edward Said and Stuart Hall, this study proposes the idea of an in between "third space" for the interrogation of identity in Conrad's work. This postcolonial space, the central contribution of this thesis, frees his writings from the stranglehold of the Manichean paradigm in terms of which alterity or otherness is perceived. Based on the hypothesis that identities are never fixed but constantly in a state of performance, this project underwrites postcoloniality as a viable theoretical mode of intervention in Conrad's early works. The writer's early oeuvre yields richly to the contingency of our times in the early twenty-first century as issues of race, gender and identity remain contested terrain. This study adopts the position that Conrad stood both inside and outside Victorian cultural and ethical space, developing an ambivalent mode of representation which recuperated and simultaneously subverted the entrenched prejudices of his age. Conceived proleptically, the characters of Conrad's early phase, traditionally dismissed as those of an apprentice writer, pose a constant challenge to how we view alterity in our everyday lives. / Thesis (Ph.D. (English))--North-West University, Potchefstroom Campus, 2004.

Seeking to widen the existing literature on postcolonial cities, this thesis conducts an inquiry into the multilocality of postcolonial space. Through ethnographic research in Sri Lanka’s Galle Fort, it investigates how different social groups differently use and interpret the city’s former colonial built environment. Specifically, it examines how the postcolonial city is socially produced and constructed as a place of home for local communities, a World Heritage Site, and a gentrifying neighborhood. Using interviews, observations, and spatial analyses, it teases out the local, national, and transnational socio-economic forces that drive these processes, as well as the power-dynamics and resistances that come into play. It finds that postcolonial uses of space often relate to, and sometimes recall, social struggles that characterized urban space under colonialism. Drawing on these findings, it highlights the importance of studying social relations, heritage management, and gentrification in postcolonial cities in conversation with literatures on colonial urbanisms.

The object of the dissertation is British and Indian popular (commercial) cinema and the construction of identity there. The problem of identity construction in Indian and British films was researched employing three approaches found in the postcolonial theory: the critique of colonial discourse, anticolonial nationalism and the construction of national identity and the problematics of diasporic identity. The comparative analysis of the films from the two industries of the countries which were bounded by colonial relationships in the past let us see the complex ways of how identity is articulated in the postcolonial period. It also shows that the colonial memory is not merely a historical relict, but one of the ways to construct identity, which is always brought up and rethought in contemporary popular culture. The comparative analysis of British and Indian films leads us to the following conclusions: Nadion constructs itself through the constant employment of the resources of colonial memory – and does so depending on various goals: fantasy, nostalgia, fear etc. The ever-present use of colonial memory in the context of the present shows that postcoloniality is a process rather than achieved state, thus letting us observe the positions and functions of imperialism not only in the past, but present as well. British as well as Indian cinema includes the cultural “otherness” in the narratives, which is modeled and manipulated according to the historical period when the film was... [to full text] / Disertacijos objektas yra komercinis Britanijos ir Indijos kinas bei jame konstruojamos tapatybės. Tapatybės konstravimo problematika Indijos ir Britanijos filmuose yra tiriama remiantis trimis tapatybės analizės pokolonijinėje teorijoje pjūviais: kolonijinio diskurso kritika, antikolonijiniu nacionalizmu ir tautinės tapatybės konstravimu bei diasporinės tapatybės problematika. Lyginamasis dviejų, praeityje kolonijiniais saitais susietų valstybių kino filmų tyrimas leido pažvelgti į kompleksines tapatybės artikuliavimo pokolonijiniame laikotarpyje galimybes ir parodė, kad kolonijinė praeitis nėra vien tik istorinis reliktas, bet viena iš tapatybės konstravimo priemonių, nuolat sugrąžinama ir permąstoma šiuolaikinėje populiariojoje kultūroje ir kinematografijoje. Išanalizavus medžiagą disertacijoje prieita prie šių išvadų: tauta konstruoja save per nuolatinį kolonijinės atminties resursų panaudojimą – ir atlieka tai vedina skirtingų tikslų: fantazijos, nostalgijos, baimės ir kt. Nuolatinis kolonijinės atminties eskalavimas dabarties kontekste rodo pokolonializmo procesualumą, bet ne substanciškumą, atverdamas kelius pažvelgti į imperializmą ir jo poziciją ne tik praeityje, bet ir dabartyje. Tokiame kontekste tiek Britanija, tiek Indija į filmų naratyvus įtraukia kultūrinės kitybės kategoriją, kuri yra modeliuojama priklausomai nuo filmo sukūrimo laikmečio ir išreiškia skirtingas ideologines sanklodas. Kalbėjimas apie „Kitą“ tampa susietas su „Savimi“, taip sukuriant reikšmių... [toliau žr. visą tekstą]

Disertacijos objektas yra komercinis Britanijos ir Indijos kinas bei jame konstruojamos tapatybės. Tapatybės konstravimo problematika Indijos ir Britanijos filmuose yra tiriama remiantis trimis tapatybės analizės pokolonijinėje teorijoje pjūviais: kolonijinio diskurso kritika, antikolonijiniu nacionalizmu ir tautinės tapatybės konstravimu bei diasporinės tapatybės problematika. Lyginamasis dviejų, praeityje kolonijiniais saitais susietų valstybių kino filmų tyrimas leido pažvelgti į kompleksines tapatybės artikuliavimo pokolonijiniame laikotarpyje galimybes ir parodė, kad kolonijinė praeitis nėra vien tik istorinis reliktas, bet viena iš tapatybės konstravimo priemonių, nuolat sugrąžinama ir permąstoma šiuolaikinėje populiariojoje kultūroje ir kinematografijoje. Išanalizavus medžiagą disertacijoje prieita prie šių išvadų: tauta konstruoja save per nuolatinį kolonijinės atminties resursų panaudojimą – ir atlieka tai vedina skirtingų tikslų: fantazijos, nostalgijos, baimės ir kt. Nuolatinis kolonijinės atminties eskalavimas dabarties kontekste rodo pokolonializmo procesualumą, bet ne substanciškumą, atverdamas kelius pažvelgti į imperializmą ir jo poziciją ne tik praeityje, bet ir dabartyje. Tokiame kontekste tiek Britanija, tiek Indija į filmų naratyvus įtraukia kultūrinės kitybės kategoriją, kuri yra modeliuojama priklausomai nuo filmo sukūrimo laikmečio ir išreiškia skirtingas ideologines sanklodas. Kalbėjimas apie „Kitą“ tampa susietas su „Savimi“, taip sukuriant reikšmių... [toliau žr. visą tekstą] / The object of the dissertation is British and Indian popular (commercial) cinema and the construction of identity there. The problem of identity construction in Indian and British films was researched employing three approaches found in the postcolonial theory: the critique of colonial discourse, anticolonial nationalism and the construction of national identity and the problematics of diasporic identity. The comparative analysis of the films from the two industries of the countries which were bounded by colonial relationships in the past let us see the complex ways of how identity is articulated in the postcolonial period. It also shows that the colonial memory is not merely a historical relict, but one of the ways to construct identity, which is always brought up and rethought in contemporary popular culture. The comparative analysis of British and Indian films leads us to the following conclusions: Nadion constructs itself through the constant employment of the resources of colonial memory – and does so depending on various goals: fantasy, nostalgia, fear etc. The ever-present use of colonial memory in the context of the present shows that postcoloniality is a process rather than achieved state, thus letting us observe the positions and functions of imperialism not only in the past, but present as well. British as well as Indian cinema includes the cultural “otherness” in the narratives, which is modeled and manipulated according to the historical period when the film was... [to full text]

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This dissertation analyses a number of key themes in the work of postcolonial theorist and literary critic Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, and uses her ideas to argue for the usefulness of both deconstructive and postmodern thought in a postcolonial context generally, and in South Africa in particular. The early part of the thesis presents a brief overview of Spivak's work (Chapter 1) and discusses its relationship with Derridean deconstruction and what I have called "progressive postmodern thought". Chapter 2 explores in detail Spivak's use of theoretical concepts adapted from, or closely related to, deconstruction. Perhaps the most important of these is catachresis - the idea that all naming is in a sense false, and the words we use to conceptualise the world must be seen as "inadequate, yet necessary". The thesis looks at how Spivak foregrounds the methodological consequences of this insight in her own practice of constantly revisiting and rethinking her own conclusions, and also at the political consequences of recognising specific terms like "nation", "identity" or "woman" as catachrestic. Closely related to this area of Spivak's work are her idea of "strategic essentialism" and her adaptation of Derrida's concept of the pharmakon -- that which is simultaneously poison and medicine. Chapter 3 relates Spivak's work to three key areas of postmodern thought: alterity, and the ethics of the relationship between self and other; Lyotard's notions of the differand and the "unpresentable"; and aporia, or the ethical and political consequences of undecidability. I argue here that all of these emphases are potentially very useful in postcolonial studies, particularly in relation to the predicament - of the gendered subaltern, and that they help to define a progressive postmodern politics. The remainder of the dissertation discusses individual essays at greater length. Chapter 4 focuses in the main on "Can the Subaltern Speak?" (1988) and Spivak's arguments concerning the nature of subalternity and the politics of representation. Chapter 5 examines Spivak's engagement with French Feminism and her feminist critiques of mainstream deconstruction, arguing that Spivak's use of deconstruction undermines the opposition between linguistic and material forms of oppression and hence between theory and practice. Chapter 6 focuses on Spivak's reading of literary texts and raises issues concerning, inter alia, the production of the first world self at the expense of the third world other; the limits of both metropolitan theories and narratives of national liberation, democracy and development in relation to the experience of the gendered subaltern; reading the text of the subaltern body; the (impossible but necessary) ethical relationship between first world feminist and the subaltern in neocolonial space; rights and responsibility; the need to respect subaltern selfhood; and the possibility of what Spivak calls "learning from below". Finally, I look at the relevance of Spivak's thought to three areas of South African political and academic life: conflicts over representation within the local Women's movement; notions of national origin and national identity; and debates over deconstruction and the relationship between the academy and society. / Thesis (Ph.D.)-University of Natal, Pietermaritzburg, 1998.