Research is a modern practice whose production of knowledge needs to be critically and continually examined. The pursuit of knowledge is not a neutral and objective endeavor; it is a socially situated practice that is embedded within power/knowledge/culture configurations. Historically, research discourses have labeled and positioned minority groups to an inferiority/superiority matrix, illustrating how research can create an oppressive otherness/alterity. Thus, the general purpose of this study was to critically critique research from the postcolonial perspectives of alterity and colonial discourse. In particular, the study sought to deconstruct the conceptual systems that create the alterity of (Mexican) American children within research discourse. The study was in part guided by Said's (1978) analysis of the colonial discourse in Orientalism. There were two parts to the study that analyzed one hundred and nineteen research documents from 1980-2004. Phase I identified the discursive themes that construct that alterity of (Mexican) Americans by employing a qualitative content analysis method. Phase II employed a discourse analysis method to deconstruct theconceptual systems and sites of power in the production of knowledge that position (Mexican) Americans as objects of research. The analysis disclosed that the conceptual systems that construct the alterity of (Mexican) Americans are structured by modern and colonial research structures that project a hegemonic Westernized vision of research, education, and human existence. Under these conceptual structures, there are multiple levels of alterity ascribed to (Mexican) Americans that continue to (re)inscribe positions of inferiority; as objects of research, they are constantly placed in a comparative framework against the dominant cultural norms. Some of the key sites of power in the production of knowledge about (Mexican) Americans are illustrated by the researcher (as author) and the university (as a privileged location). The conclusions problematized research as an apparatus that reconstructs hierarchical differences and reinscribes colonial relationships where the Other is defined only from a Western and culturally dominant perspective of separateness.

This thesis discusses postcolonial literature as focus of study on Swedish upper secondary school. It is based on literature concerning postcolonial literature, identification and culture. It also contains an empiric survey of the spread of usage of postcolonial liturature for educational purposes at upper secondary school in Sweden. The survey is in two parts, one qualitative with teacher interviews. The other part is quantitative, based on the results of a questionnaire by students.

Cette thèse de doctorat, s’inscrivant dans le champ des études postcoloniales, s’intéresse à l’émergence du théâtre de l’immigration durant la décennie 1970 dans la continuité de luttes qui marquent l’apparition d’un discours critique sur la colonisation et ses effets. Le théâtre est y utilisé comme une arme de combat, une poursuite de l’activité politique et militante, permettant de démanteler les mécanismes d’aliénation et d’exploitation auxquels sont soumis les immigrés en contexte contemporain. Il est en effet désormais impossible de penser l’immigration sans penser les résultats d’une histoire qui a débuté avec la colonisation. Les indépendances, loin de consacrer une rupture dans les modes de domination établis pendant la colonisation, semblent au contraire en perpétuer certaines pensées et pratiques dans une expression renouvelée : c’est notamment à travers la figure de l’immigré algérien, excroissance à rebours de la colonie française qu’était l’Algérie, que des modes de traitement, d’encadrement et de surveillance de l’immigration, hérités en partie de la période coloniale, perdurent dans la période postcoloniale. Ces mécanismes de domination et d’exploitation des travailleurs immigrés seront violemment dénoncés durant la décennie, qui voit l’apparition à la fois d’une nouvelle subjectivité politique et l’émergence d’un théâtre immigré dont la pratique illustre les théories anglo-saxonnes sur la colonisation et ses conséquences dans le jaillissement de nouvelles formes discursives et esthétiques. Le poids de l’héritage colonial, en particulier celui lié à l’Algérie, permet ainsi de mobiliser les travailleurs autour d’une identité contextuelle et de développer un théâtre qui repose idéologiquement et esthétiquement sur l’examen panoramique d’une réalité qui s’inscrit dans une temporalité et une territorialité complexes, liées au mouvement. / This doctoral dissertation, falling in the field of postcolonial studies, investigates the emergence of an immigration theatre during the decade 1970 in the continuation of fights that characterise the development of a critical discourse regarding colonisation and its effects. In this context, theatre is used as a weapon, a prolongation of the political and militant activism, permitting to dismantle the mechanisms of alienation and exploitation to which immigrants are subject in contemporary environment. Indeed, it is now impossible to consider immigration without considering outcomes of a history initiated with colonisation. Independences, far from consecrating a rupture in the modes of domination established during colonisation, instead seem to perpetuate some beliefs and practises in a renewed expression: it is in particular through the Algerian immigrant figure, backward excrescence of the French colony Algeria was, that methods for processing, supervising and monitoring immigration, in part inherited from the colonial era, persist during postcolonial times. These domination and exploitation mechanisms directed toward immigrant workers will be fiercely denounced during the decade, which sees apparition at the same time of a new political subjectivity and the emergence of an immigrant theatre, whose practise illustrates Anglo-Saxon theories on colonisation and its consequences in the burst of new discursive and aesthetical forms. The weight of colonial legacy, particularly the one related to Algeria, therefore allows to mobilise workers around a contextual identity and to develop a theatre ideologically and aesthetically based on the panoramic examination of a reality inscribed in complex temporality and territoriality linked to motion.

This thesis explores the field of Postcolonial Gothic, initially through an examination of theories of the Gothic and the postcolonial and their points of intersection. Homi Bhabha’s notion of the ‘unhomely’ as the paradigm for postcolonial experience, particularly with regard to migrancy and Julia Kristeva’s concept of the abject are identified as particularly productive for a Postcolonial Gothic framework, which is then applied to a survey of the way the Gothic is figured on the individual and the Local, regional or national levels in the context of Caribbean, Canadian, Australian and New Zealand postcolonial writing and demonstrates how the Gothic as a mode of writing furnishes postcolonial authors with a narrative strategy to express the traumas of colonialism and their postcolonial legacies. In coming to terms with the past, historical temporality and authority are rendered problematic by postcolonial writers because the physical and psychic violence of colonialism and its effects on the individual and on society are compounded by the repression of past trauma. The effects of such trauma threaten to resurface despite resistance. These experiences underpin the images of postcolonial revenants as hybrid, distorted and monstrous figures, which arise out of cultural contact between colonised and coloniser. The ghost, the phantom, the revenant, gain new meanings in the service of the postcolonial, where the duppy, and the soucouyant, from the Caribbean; the Bunyip from Australia and the shape- shifting figure of Coyote from Canada are hybrid manifestations created from European, indigenous and cross-cultural remains and they speak of culturally specific histories, traumas and locations. The thesis is arranged into four chapters: Caribbean gothic, Canadian Gothic, Australian Gothic and New Zealand Gothic. Each chapter provides an overview of the Gothic in the national or regional context, placing the emphasis on the postcolonial and then focuses on the way the Gothic is utilised by both dominant and marginal cultures: by white settlers and indigenous peoples in Canada, Australia and New Zealand, by the descendents of people forcibly mobilised through slavery in the Caribbean, and by other more recent migrants to, or between these locations. The writers discussed have different tales to tell about the effects of colonialism on the individual and on their society, but they have chosen the Gothic as means of expression for some of the most violent and unspeakable acts of colonialism and their legacy in the postcolonial

A colonial discourse has perpetuated the literary notion of islands as paradisal. The aims of this study are to explore how these entrenched notions of paradise, which islands have traditionally represented metonymically, are contested in the works of four postcolonial authors: Jamaica Kincaid, Romesh Gunesekera, Jean Arasanayagam and Lawrence Scott, from the island nations of Sri Lanka and the Caribbean. I have chosen three diasporic authors while the fourth, Arasanayagam, is an indigenous writer who still lives in Sri Lanka. Arasanayagam’s experience of living in a refugee camp in 1983 caused her to feel displaced in a way similar to those who have left their homelands. The purpose of including these particular authors in my study is to explore how their very diverse cultural experiences -- migrant or native, privileged or non-privileged, hybrid ancestry or culturally hybrid -- exemplify Homi K. Bhabha’s “hybridisation as a force of creative interaction” (Bhabha 1997: 2). I will use their work as examples of his theory of liminal space as a site of negotiation between cultures (Bhabha 2004). The mixed cultural heritage of these authors represents a doubleness which can be linked to the ‘double relation’ that Bhabha refers to in explaining hybrid translation as a process of cultural cross-reference. The study traces how the notions of island paradise have been represented in European literature, the oral and literary indigenous traditions of the Caribbean and Sri Lanka, a colonial literary influence in these islands, and the literary experience after independence in these nations. Persistent themes of colonial narratives foreground the aesthetic and ignore the work force in a representation of island space as idealised, insular and vulnerable to conquest; an ideal space for management and control. English landscape has been replicated in islands through literature and in reality the ‘Great House’ being an ideological symbol of power. Dorothy Lane has suggested that “the island can also be usefully employed by postcolonial writers to interrogate many of the assumptions of insularity” (Lane 1995: 4) and that “island discourse often incorporates several analogous figures of management and enclosure — such as the house and garden” (Lane 5). Using this as a point of departure for my study I have chosen texts which focus on gardens, island space and houses to explore how these writers from island cultures have responded to colonial narratives. These texts have previously been under-researched in the context of island motifs. This thesis explores how the selected postcolonial writers use these motifs to re-vision colonial/contested sites and in so doing offer an alternative space for negotiating the ambivalence of hybridity

“(Re)Placing Nations: Postcolonial Women’s Contestations of Spatial Discourses” reads the proliferation of literary representations of landscapes in recent work by Jamaica Kincaid, Shani Mootoo, Edwidge Danticat, Yvonne Vera, Monica Arac de Nyeko and Toni Morrison as a trope for rethinking the nation as a space with physical boundaries. In this project I make the distinction between space as an ideological construct and place as a physical entity. Both place and space are connected to ideologies yet have specific implications for constructions of gender and sexuality. My project considers the dual yet dialectically related processes of creating physical space and identity formation. Recent frames for engaging questions of citizenship and belonging have more sought to be broadly diasporic. This analysis re-centers these debates in more localized spatial discourses. I argue that writers examined in my project revise literary forms such as the pastoral, cartographic tropes, garden writing and the peasant novel in order to deconstruct various national divisions of space and place that exclude women, ethnic minorities and rural citizens. My project posits that contemporary African and African diaspora women’s literature constructs these places as open and evolving in a dialectical relationship with communities whose subject formation is intimately connected to their physical environments. By insisting on these distinctions, formerly rigid boundaries that separated the public from the private, the rural from the urban, the migrant from the rooted are challenged along with the implicit geography of power that scaffolds these separations.

This research paper explores the multifaceted role of women as witnesses during the Bangladesh Liberation War of 1971, with a specific focus on their embodiment of the nation at war and the profound impacts the conflict had on their lives. I base my analysis on Tahmima Anam's novel "A Golden Age" to provide insights into the practices of witnessing performed by and on women, and their relationship to national and female identities. I argue that women's witnessing of the war can be extrapolated from their specific social, corporeal, and physical spaces and the ways in which these spaces were utilized and received by women and their counterparts. Using postcolonial theory and witness theory stemming from trauma studies, this paper examines the dynamics within women’s spaces to reconsider women's negotiations for autonomy from within predefined social categories during the war. My research highlights the diverse external pressures faced by different groups of women during the Bangladesh Liberation War, underscoring the need to redefine ethical and empathic witnessing when engaging with narratives of trauma. By expanding the discourse on cross-cultural trauma studies, this paper emphasizes the importance of responsibly addressing and engaging with testimonies of crisis. The examination of women's witnessing, and their spatial positioning contributes to a deeper understanding of the complexities of gender, identity, and witnessing in times of conflict. / Thesis / Master of Arts (MA) / This thesis aims to expand the discourse on women’s witnessing during the 1971 Bangladesh Liberation War to ensure readers, academics, and governments encounter testimonies of crisis with ethics, empathy, and responsibility. I examine Tahmima Anam’s "A Golden Age" to reconsider how women and women’s spaces like the home and female bodies are witnessed by nations. Additionally, I explore how women witnessed the nation and other women during the war while negotiating national duty with personal identity.

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La mémoire occupe une place importante, tant dans les sociétés en générale que dans la littérature en particulier où elle est devenue une référence obligée, une exigence éthique et poétique pour comprendre le passé. Depuis quelques décennies déjà les questions liées à la mémoire reviennent de plus en plus sur la scène littéraire et politique. Dans cette optique, la présente thèse tente de réfléchir sur l’écriture de la mémoire envisagée dans une perspective postcoloniale à travers le roman historique contemporain. Le titre et le débat qu’il soulève mettent en relation les littératures algérienne, congolaise et haïtienne dans le but d’analyser la représentation du passé dans quatre romans : La Femme sans sépulture de Assia Djebar, Le Lys et le Flamboyant de Henri Lopes, Rosalie l’Infâme de Évelyne Trouillot et Ombres dansantes ou le zombie, c’est moi de Hans Christoph Buch. L’omniprésence de la thématique de la mémoire dans ces romans et l’enchevêtrement des faits de l’Histoire et des destins particuliers des personnages invitent à une approche comparatiste. Cette approche est adoptée ici en tant qu’elle nourrit un regard réflexif sur les pratiques culturelles des sociétés algérienne, congolaise et haïtienne. Cette étude a le dessein de poser d’abord, les fondements théoriques des notions et concepts de mémoire, de postcolonialisme en procédant à leur exégèse. Ensuite, elle examine la représentation du passé dans les espaces culturels africain et caribéen à travers les oeuvres sélectionnées. Et enfin, elle construit une poétique de la mémoire postcoloniale dans le roman historique contemporain. Sur fond d’une réécriture de l’Histoire, se dessine ici les contours d’un ensemble de pratiques auctoriales qui s’inscrivent dans une revisitation permanente des récits de l'historiographie. / The Memory has an important place, in our societies in general as well in literature, particularly where it became an unavoidable reference, an ethical and poetic requirement to have a better understanding of our past. For decades yet the questions related to our memory increasingly come back on the political and literary scene. This thesis intends to reflect on the writing of Memory considered in a postcolonial perspective through the historical contemporary novel. The title and thedebate raised put in relation the Algerian, Congolese and Haitian literature in the aim to analyse the representation of the past with the following novels The Woman without sepulcher from Assia Djebar, The Lily and Flamboyant from Henri Lopes, The Infamous Rosalie from Évelyne Trouillot and Dancing shadows or zombi, it’s me from Hans Christoph Buch. The omnipresence of the theme of memory in these four novels and the entanglement of the facts of the History and the particular draws of the characters presented invite to a comparative approach. This approach is adopted here so it canfeed a reflexive look on the cultural practices of the Algerian, Congolese and Haitian societies. This study has the goal to first display the theoretical foundations of Memory notions and concepts, from postcolonialism proceeding to their exegesis. Then, it examines the representation of the past in the African and Caribbean culturals spaces through their selected artwork. Finally, it builds a poetic of the postcolonial memory in the historical contemporary novel. Painted like a rewriting of the History, appear here the outlines of a whole series of auctorial practices entering in a permanent new twist of the Historiography texts.

À travers cette étude, un essai théorique sur les dispositifs littéraires au cœur de l'écriture de la violence en Afrique subsaharienne au XXIe siècle sera proposé. L’objectif de ce travail sera de déterminer si l'existence d'un dispositif littéraire féminin émergeant en réaction à un contexte violent est envisageable. Le point d’orgue de cette étude sera de démontrer en quoi le dispositif littéraire est en interaction avec le dispositif violent en y instaurant à la fois ordre et désordre, au-delà des frontières génériques. Ces recherches s'axent autour de six œuvres rédigées entre 2000 et 2010. Tanella Boni, écrivaine et philosophe, sera mise à l’honneur à travers l’étude de deux romans : "Matins de couvre-feu" (2005) et "Les nègres n’iront jamais au paradis" (2006). À ces deux fictions sera greffé son opus poétique "Chaque jour l’espérance" (2002). Nous comparerons ces ouvrages à deux fictions et un recueil poétique de Véronique Tadjo : "L’ombre d’Imana : Voyages jusqu’au bout du Rwanda" (2000) et "Loin de mon père" (2010) et "A mi-chemin" (2000). / Through this study, a theoretical essay on literary devices at the heart of writing violence in sub-Saharan Africa in the twenty-first century will be proposed. The objective of this work will be to determine if the existence of a feminine literary device emerging in response to a violent context is conceivable. The highlight of this study will be to demonstrate how the literary device is interacting with the violent device by introducing both order and disorder, beyond the generic borders. This research focuses on six works written between 2000 and 2010. Tanella Boni, writer and philosopher, will be honored through the study of two novels: "Curfew" (2005) and "Negroes n ' will never go to heaven" (2006). To these two fictions will be grafted his poetic opus "Everyday Hope" (2002). We will compare these works with two fiction and a poetic collection of Veronique Tadjo: "The shadow of Imana: Travels to the end of Rwanda" (2000) and "Far from my father" (2010) and "Midway" (2000).