The thesis explores the theme of hybridity in Octavia Butler's Xenogenesis trilogy and in her last novel, Fledgling, which both deal with complex relationships between humans and a different species. The main focus is on the characters of mixed origin - offspring of two distinct species and beings whose existence is a result of genetic experiments. These individuals occupy a metaphorical "in-between" space where cultural, racial, sexual and other boundaries meet and blur. The theoretical framework follows two sets of ideas - Homi Bhabha's notion of hybridity and the so-called Third Space, and Donna Haraway's cyborg figure. The second chapter of the thesis is centered on the origins and development of the concept of hybridity and its current use in postcolonial discourse. Furthermore, it introduces the most relevant ideas from Bhabha's The Location of Culture and Haraway's "A Cyborg Manifesto" and compares them. The following two chapters are mainly devoted to Butler's hybrid characters, Akin and Jodahs from Xenogenesis and Shori, the protagonist of Fledgling. This section analyses, among other issues, their physical features and special skills connected with hybridity, the construction of their identity, their relationship with others and their relation to the clash between different species and...

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.

My dissertation traces the formation and growth of the reader of the Bengali novel in nineteenth century Bengal through a close study of the writings by Bankimchandra Chattopadhyay that comment on—and respond to—both the reader and the newly emergent genre of the Bengali novel. In particular, I focus on the following texts: two novels written by Bankim, Durgeśnandinī (The Lady of the Castle) (1865) and Bishabṛksha (The Poison Tree) (1872), literary essays published in nineteenth century Bengali periodicals, personal letters written by Bankim and his contemporaries, and reviews of the novels, often written and published anonymously. I suggest that by examining the reader of the Bengali novel it becomes possible to understand how the individual Bengali negotiates the changes occurring in nineteenth century Bengal—an era in which traditional beliefs collide with the intellectual and technological innovations brought on by colonial modernity. As my dissertation shows colonialism is far from being a disembodied institution operating at the level of governments and ideologies. Instead, it becomes evident that with the novel, colonial modernity enters the Bengali home in the form of changing moral paradigms. What the Bengali reader chooses to read, and how she performs her reading come to have a real import in her quotidian life. The three sites of reading I examine—the reader as a textual event in the novels, the reader as imagined in the literary essays, and the anthropological reader writing and responding to the reviews of the novels—revitalises the overdetermined field of the postcolonial novel by shifting the focus from the novel as a stable literary object being consumed by a relatively passive reader, to an active reader whose reading practice shapes both the genre and the subject reading it.

In my dissertation project, I engage in a discursive analysis of whiteness to examine how it influences postcolonial modes of self-styling. Critical whiteness studies often focuses on representations of whiteness in the West as well as on whiteness as physical—as white bodies and white people. I focus on representations and functions of whiteness outside of the West, particularly in relation to issues of belonging and modes of postcolonial identification. I examine Anglophone African literary representations of whiteness from the twentieth and twenty-first centuries to query how whiteness both enables and undermines anticolonial consciousness. A central question I examine is, How does whiteness as a symbolic manifestation function to constitute postcolonial African identification? Scholarship on the topic of subjectivity and liberation needs to explicitly examine how whiteness intersects with key notions of modernity, such as race, class, progress, and self-determination. Through an examination of postcolonial African literary representations of whiteness, I aim to examine the aspirations, unpacked stereotypes, and fears that move us as readers and hail us as human subjects. Ultimately, through this work, I grapple with the question of identification, understood as the system of desires, judgments, images, and performances that constitute our experiences of being human. I begin by looking backward at the satirical play, “The Blinkards,” written in 1915 in the context of British colonization of the Gold Coast in West Africa (present-day Ghana), to develop an understanding of postcolonial identification that includes an examination of the artistic expression of a writer conceptualizing liberation through notions of cultural nationalism. I go on to examine a selection postcolonial African literatures to develop an understanding of how racialized socio-cultural realities constitute forms of self-hood in post-independence contexts. I hope to use my argument about representations of whiteness in African literatures to open up questions fundamental to contemporary theories of identification in postcolonial contexts, as well as to make a philosophical argument about the ethics of whiteness as it undergirds transnational modes of modernity. One main point I make in relation to postcolonial theories of subjectivity is that notions of identification are tied up in local, regional, and global circuits of capital and cultural production. In chapter 2, I look at an early (Grain of Wheat 1967) and recent novel (Wizard of the Crow 2006) by Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o (Kenya), who locates African postcolonial subjectivity as deeply embedded in local traditions, myths, and storytelling circuits. By fluidly mixing the contexts of the local, the national, and the global, Ngũgĩ astutely challenges naturalized conventions that position black identities and blackness as always inferior to whiteness. Ngũgĩ represents postcolonial consciousness as a space whose local relationships are deeply informed by global structures of race, economics, and politics. Situating African postcolonial identification within global circuits of migration, capitalism, and colonialism, Ngũgĩ engages the pervasive significance of whiteness through representations of sickness and desire, suggesting that postcolonial identification is performed through beliefs and practices that are situated within a global racial hierarchy. From there I go on to analyze a contemporary short story cycle by post-apartheid generation South African writer Siphiwo Mahala. Through his work, I continue to explore the issue of performative identification constituted through desire and aspirational notions in which whiteness works as a moving signifier of cultural and social capital. The main question I address in this chapter is, What is the meaning of whiteness in post-apartheid South Africa? Through this examination, I use my analysis of representations of whiteness to reflect on the politics of entanglement as a way to move beyond racialized and geographic modes of identification, to challenge conceptual boundaries that undergird modernity, and theoretical possibilities of a politics of entanglement in relation to broader issues of identification and belonging in postcolonial contexts.

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.

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

Comment l'art contemporain du sud de la Méditerranée est-il perçu et reconnu par les experts du monde de l'art occidental ? Telle la question à laquelle nous nous sommes intéressée. Pour y répondre, il nous a fallu comprendre les liens qu'entretiennent l'art et la mondialisation et discuter les apports des études culturelles et postcoloniales à ce sujet. A partir de ce questionnement initial nous avons rassemblé et étudié les discours hégémoniques intervenant dans le champ de la culture, des processus de négociations, des politiques de différences et des modes d'identification des artistes du Sud selon une vision ethnocentriste et identitaire. Pour mener à bien notre recherche, nous avons conduit deux études. La première porte sur une étude thématique des intitulés d'expositions internationales concernant l'art contemporain du sud de la Méditerranée (Europe et États-Unis de 1999 à 2014). Nous soutenons l'idée que les sujets d'expositions véhiculent un discours qui traduit des idées culturelles d'hégémonie occidentale et des orientations concernant le genre, l' ethnicité, la classe, confinant le statut de l'artiste sud-méditerranéen à un rôle «périphérique ». La seconde enquête qui est de nature compréhensive, traite des croyances des artistes du sud de la Méditerranée et de leurs positionnements par rapport aux marqueurs identitaires dans la construction de catégories ethniques. Quel regard portent-ils sur ces marqueurs, leur accordent-ils une certaine reconnaissance ? Cette étude a été conduite avant et après les mouvements révolutionnaires du printemps arabe. / How is contemporary art of the southern Mediterranean perceived and cognized by experts in the world of Western art ? It is this very question which actually interested us. To answer this, we had to understand the links between art and globalization and discuss the contributions of cultural and postcolonial studies related to this subject. From that initial question, we have gathered and studied hegemonic discourses involved in the field of culture, negotiation processes, differences policies and modes of identification of the artists from the South in an ethnocentric vision. To carry out our research, we conducted two studies. The first concerns a thematic study of the headings of international exhibitions on contemporary art from the south of the Mediterranean (Europe and the United States from 1999 to 2014). We support the idea that the subjects of exhibitions convey a discourse that reflects the cultural ideas of Western hegemony and trends concerning genre, ethnicity, class, confining the status of the southern Mediterranean artist to a "peripheral" role. The second survey which is comprehensive in nature, deals with the beliefs of the southern Mediterranean artists and their positioning in comparison with identity markers in the construction of ethnic categories. How do they perceive these markers, do they give them some recognition ? This study was conducted before and after the revolutionary movements of the Arab Spring.

Jean-Claude Eloy est un compositeur passionné de musiques extra-européennes (et en particulier de musique japonaise) qui revendique un multiculturalisme militant et refuse farouchement que sa démarche puisse être associée à un quelconque exotisme. Pourtant, et sans que la sincérité de son positionnement idéologique puisse être remise en cause, certaines ambiguïtés apparaissent au fur et à mesure de l’étude de sa production. Ainsi, si l’exotisme de surface caractéristique du XIXe siècle a disparu au profit d’un intérêt largement documenté pour les cultures musicales non occidentales, on n’en décèle pas moins la permanence de thèmes caractéristiques de cet exotisme. Il s’agira d’analyser ce paradoxe et d’en proposer des explications. Le travail part de l’hypothèse que l’exotisme repose sur un imaginaire anthropologique à partir duquel prennent naissance des expressions différentes selon les lieux et les époques. L’exotisme répondrait ainsi à des réalités humaines dans lesquelles le contexte colonial aurait joué un rôle uniquement facilitateur (et non suscitateur). Cet exotisme ne pourrait donc pas avoir disparu avec la fin des empires. Il s’agira ainsi de lire les ambiguïtés d’Eloy à la lumière d'un « mythe exotique » toujours vivace dans l’imaginaire collectif contemporain. S’appuyant sur le courant des postcolonial studies, cette lecture interrogera les résurgences exotiques présentes dans l’œuvre d’Eloy pour aboutir à la définition d’un exotisme postcolonial différente de celles qui ont pu être développées dans le domaine littéraire. / Jean-Claude Eloy is a French composer. He is passionately fond of extra-European music, especially Japanese music. He calls for muticulturalism and refuses his works to be associated with exoticism. Even so - and without questionning Eloy’s intellectual honesty - it is possible to find out some ambiguities in his works. For instance, even though superficial exoticism, typical of XIXth century, no longer appears in his music, several themes of this exoticism can be found in some of this works. We will analyze this paradox and suggest some explanations. Our thinking is based on the proposition that exoticism comes from anthropoligical imagination and takes a variety of forms depending on the era. According to this proposition, colonialism has made the development of exoticism easier but didn’t create it. As a result, exoticism could not completely disappear with the end of colonial empires and still exists as a human reality. Postcolonial studies, semiotics and hermeneutics will be used as a background approach to explain the existence of exoticism in Eloy’s works.

Les littératures de pays anciennement colonisés, ou "postcoloniales", développement un mode d'expression original, qui outrepasse des limites. En s'appuyant sur les analyses de Patrick Sultan, on constate que la transgression est présente partout dans ces oeuvres : transgressions politiques, discursives, sociales, linguistiques et littéraires. Les auteurs postcoloniaux se définissent dans un rapport de tension avec l'ordre établi : pour exister, ils choisissent de rejeter l'héritage colonial. Pourtant, paradoxalement, le français demeure la norme, la langue d'expression. Ainsi, Déwé Görödé et Chantal Spitz, deux auteures respectivement kanak et polynésienne, subvertissent dans leurs oeuvres les normes, les codes et les formes liées à la culture française, accédant ainsi à une liberté nouvelle. Elles expriment leurs souffrances, dans une position anti-coloniale, où elles résistent à l'inclusion dans l'Etat-nation. Ceci se traduit dans l'écriture, où le refus des normes est omniprésent : transgressions des genres, déconstruction des codes grammaticaux, recours à des formes linguistiques jugées "familières" ou "populaires", expression de la révolte et de la violence...Elles assument cette nouvelle parole, et ce nouveau style d'écriture, qui est le leur. De plus, elles choisissent des personnages subversifs. Cette forme de littérature transgressive, qui porte les stigmates du colonialisme, est porteuse d'une joie paradoxale : le sérieux du propos politique peut côtoyer des passages plus légers, où les deux auteures s'amusent avec les mots, inventent des tournures de phrases, des néologismes, des calembours...L'écriture, très puissante, dévoile ainsi une grande fantaisie verbale. Si les femmes sont montrées comme victimes de la violence des hommes, dont elles restent souvent esclaves, elles expriment aussi une philosophie joyeuse, une philosophie du présent, un "gai savoir" au sens nietzschéen. / The literatures of formely colonised countries, also known as (postcolonial studies", have developed an original mode of expression, overstepping some limits. The notion of transgresseion refers to the breaking of rules, codes, while implying at the same time the existence of a norm to conformto. Bearing on Patrick Sultan's analyses, we have come to the conclusion that the notion of transgression can be found everywhere in postcolonial literary works, be it political, discursive, social, linguistic or literary. Postcolonial authors define themselves by their strained relationship with the established order. In other words, their choice of standing against colonial heritage is the aim and condition of their very exixtence. Still, the French language paradoxically remains the norm, the language of expression. Against this backdrop, Déwé Görödé and Chantal Spitz, a kanak and Polynésian author respectively, use their work to subvert the norms, the codes and the forms related to the French Culture, thereby gaining a new form of freedom. This finds expression in their writing, where the rejection of norms i all pervasive and underlies a transgression of genres, a deconstruction of grammar codes, the author's resorting to linguistic forms perceived as "colloquial or popular", the expression of revolt and violence. Moreover, the authors choose subversive characters. A careful study of these women's works has allowed me to show that this transgressive literary form, which bears the marks of colonialism, carries a parodixal joy : the gravity of the political discourse may well be interspersed with lighter passage, where the two authors play with words, and create their own turns of phrase, neologisms and puns. Therefore, their extremely powerful writing reveals remarkable verbal playfullness with words.