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South African painter turned photographer, Zwelethu Mthethwa, was born in Durban during Apartheid. In 1980 Mthethwa began taking his photographs in the shanty towns on the outskirts of Cape Town and later took pictures in Mozambique and New Orleans. His work has global significance. Using art and literary theory and criticism, I expand upon the significance of his photographs in the contemporary world. I do “readings” of eight photographs from eight different series of Zwelethu Mthethwa’s work using postcolonial theory, abjection, and cultural studies as theoretical constructs to provide three different angles for interpreting his work.

In this thesis, I examine how colonial constructs on Chinese culture affects people's views toward sexual minorities in Hong Kong. In the first Chapter, I explain the shift of my research focus after I started my research. I also conduct a brief literature review on existing literature on sexual minorities in mainland China and Hong Kong. In the second Chapter, I examine interviewees' accounts of family pressure and perceived conflicts between their religious beliefs and sexual orientation. I analyze interviewees' perceptions of social attitudes toward sexual minorities. Hidden in these narratives is an internalized colonial construct of Chinese culture in Hong Kong. This construct prevented some interviewees from connecting Christianity with oppression toward sexual minorities in Hong Kong. In the third Chapter, I examine the rise of right-wing Christian activism in pre- and post- handover Hong Kong. I also analyze how sexual-minority movement organizations and right-wing Christians organized in response to the political situation in Hong Kong. Then, I present the result of content analysis on debates around two amendments to the Domestic Violence Ordinance (DVO)-the first legislation related to sexual minorities in Hong Kong after handover. I draw on data from online news archives and meeting minutes and submissions of the Legislative Council (LegCo). Based on the rhetoric of US right-wing Christians' "(nuclear) family values," Hong Kong right-wing Christians supported excluding same-sex cohabiting partners from the DVO. This rhetoric carved out a space for different narratives about "Chinese culture" and "Chinese family." These different versions of Chinese culture matched diasporic sentiment toward the motherland and gained currency from post-handover political landscape and power configuration in Hong Kong. These versions also revealed the colonized and diasporic mindset of opponents of the amendments; these mindsets also reflect the same internalized colonial construct of "Chineseness" my interviewees have. Based on analyses of interview data in Chapter II and in Chapter III of how people view sexual minorities, I argue that a colonial diasporic psyche aptly captures people's views toward sexual minorities in Hong Kong. Since the political situation and DVO are specific to Hong Kong, I do not include interviewees who are not of Hong Kong origin in this thesis.

The applicability of trauma studies within an examination of postcolonial literature has been a contested topic for scholars in both fields. Additionally, scholarship regarding Amitav Ghosh’s postcolonial science fiction novel The Calcutta Chromosome encourages various readings of the novel but does not currently offer a cohesive examination of all its thematic disciplines and stylistic elements. Through an examination of this postcolonial novel, I will provide a more holistic reading of the novel through an application of trauma studies that explores its representation of the internal postcolonial conflict regarding Western and non-Western historiographies. My analysis will focus on the lexical, character, and narrative levels of the novel through its dominant medical, technological, postcolonial, and political themes for inclusions of Caruth’s aporia related to the manifestation of trauma in literature.

Contemporary postcolonial critique poses questions about the impact of colonization on the construction of the political. Beginning with David Scott’s account of the limits and even hopeless condition of anticolonial resistance and postcolonial theory, this thesis explores one way in which the political might be reconstructed under postcolonial conditions. The analysis is primarily theoretical in character. I work through texts by Immanuel Kant, Mary Douglas and Partha Chatterjee to recount the narrative of modern politics and its affect upon postcolonial societies. On this basis, I recognize the sovereign state as the key point of contention in accounts of the continuing reproduction of social exclusions. I then identify the imposition of colonial Enlightenment to have refigured authentic modes of self-representation for the colonized; colonial Enlightenment I suggest, conflated cultural difference with the value of right, and has thereby largely depoliticized practices of exclusion. Shifting to consider how postcolonial political space might be reconstructed, I draw on Warren Magnusson’s understanding of urban politics. By challenging the ontological positioning of the sovereign state, the city may be understood as a dynamic political actor that does not erase cultural difference. Then by examining practices of scavenging in Brazil and Argentina, I compare one case in which the sovereign state has effectively perpetuated conditions of social exclusion with a case in which a municipality has been able to address these conditions. I conclude that the contemporary condition of postcolonial critique can indeed be taken in more optimistic directions through challenges to the ontological primacy of the sovereign state so that the value of difference can be recognized and emancipation rethought. / Graduate / 0615 / kerstin@uvic.ca

The purpose of this paper has been to examine various ethnic stereotypes in two Swedish film adaptations of Astrid Lindgren’s character Pippi Longstocking. I have used a semiotic content analysis and postcolonial theory to investigate: 1) how the ethnic groups are represented in the different materials, 2) if there is a hegemonic relationship between the foreign group and one’s own group, 3) whether there has been a "decolonization" during the twenty years that separate the two films. This study has shown that, in the 1949 adaptation, primarily Africans were produced in a negative light and as biologically inferior in relation to the whites. Furthermore, other ethnic groups, such as Indians, Egyptians, Brazilians, and Danes, were portrayed as scared, alien or different. However, the TV series of 1969 permeates with a greater sense of racial tolerance than its predecessor and, despite remnants of racial stereotyping, the overall tone of the later adaptation feels more progressive.

The purpose of this study is to examine how two Muslim feminists perceive themselves to betreated by the Swedish majority society and within the secular feminist movement. Thesurvey was conducted using qualitative method with a total of two interviews. For the study'stheoretical perspectives, I have used postcolonialism and postcolonial feminism. The result ofthe survey and the analysis show that the informants say that they face an image of Muslimwomen as considered being under oppression. The informants believe that this stereotypicalimage has its origin from the colonial period. The question that is most important for themwithin feminism is to be treated as a feminist and as a Muslim without being questioned. Theyfeel like it's hard to identify with the Swedish secular feminism, but they also feel that thegroup of Swedish secular feminists have a difficulty identifying themselves with Muslimwomen too. Consider this, one of the informants does not feel welcome among Swedishsecular feminism while the other one never had an interest in becoming a member of itbecause she did not consider them to strive for the same goal as herself. The informantsclaims that there are opportunities for them to speak in the public debate, but as Muslimfeminists they are facing a bigger struggle.

Drawing on recent interdisciplinary scholarship on the sense of place, this dissertation examines how the literary landscapes of formerly colonized countries embody colonial and post-colonial history. The project focuses on the ways in which specific material places both preserve and trigger memories, especially memories relevant to the colonial and postcolonial history of these places, and how the conjunction of place and the past leads us to “bump into” social memories often dismissed from formal histories. The “rememory” that one encounters in a particular place recuperates the territorial significance of formerly colonized countries in a deterritorialized world. In this sense, landscapes serve as material palimpsests of colonial and postcolonial history. To discuss the recovery of memories etched on landscapes, this dissertation investigates works by three postcolonial writers: Paule Marshall’s The Chosen Place, The Timeless People (1969), Zoë Wicomb’s You Can’t Get Lost in Cape Town (1987) and Playing in the Light (2006), and Amitav Ghosh’s The Hungry Tide (2005). Employing their liminal location as diasporic writers to examine the colonial and post-colonial history of their home countries, these writers recuperate the memories of the marginalized that are not visible in the official archives of those countries. Set on a fictional Caribbean island, Marshall’s work unburies the history of resistance to colonial governance, a history neither glorified nor written about in formal history. Narrating the story of a “white” woman who discovers that she is actually of mixed-race descent, Wicomb’s Playing in the Light reveals the past of racial passing buried in the urban landscapes of post-apartheid Cape Town. Ghosh’s The Hungry Tide unfolds the dismissed history of the Indian Partition on the border of India and Bangladesh, awakening memories of refugees marginalized because of their class, religion and ethnicity. Disclosing memories of the past, Marshall, Wicomb, and Ghosh demonstrate how inextricably entangled the past colonial conflicts of the homelands are with their present post- or neo- colonial socio-political issues. Drawing on memories bound to places, Marshall, Wicomb and Ghosh recover the specificity and diversity of postcolonial history and place, challenging the neoliberal and neocolonial promise of a border-free world market and the postmodern illusion of multi-national or non-territorial world citizens.

This thesis documents the genealogy of the development of Jakarta’s urban water supply infrastructure from 1873 (the inception of the first colonial water supply network) to the present. Using an analytical framework of governmentality, supplemented by insights from postcolonial studies and political ecology, the thesis explains the highly unequal patterns of water access in Jakarta as the product of (post)colonial governmentalities, whose relations of power are expressed not only through discursive categories and socio-economic relations, but also through material infrastructures and urban spaces. The thesis presents material from the colonial archives, Jakarta’s municipal archives, and the publications of international development agencies and engineering consultancy firms. This is combined with primary data derived from interviews, questionnaires, and participant observation of the implementation of current pro-poor water supply projects in Jakarta. This data is used to document how water supply is implicated in the discursive and material production of the city and its citizens, and to challenge conventional developmentalist and academic analyses of water supply access. Specifically, a conceptual triad of water, space, and populations – produced through, but also productive of government rationalities – is used to explain two apparent paradoxes: (1) the fragmentation of access in Jakarta despite a century of concerted attempts to develop a centralized system; and (2) the preferences of lower-income households for non-networked water supply, despite its higher cost per unit volume. This analysis hinges on an elucidation of the relationships between urban governance and urban infrastructure, which documents the interrelated process of differentiation of types of water supply, water use practices, populations, and urban spaces from the colonial period to the present. This, in turn, is used to explain the barriers being encountered in current pro-poor water supply development projects in Jakarta. The thesis thus makes a contribution to current academic debates over the ‘colonial present’. The contribution is both theoretical – in the emphasis placed upon the materiality of governmentality – and empirical. Finally, the thesis also makes a contribution to the urban and development studies literatures through its reinterpretation of the urban ‘water crisis’.

Aboriginal Australian heritage forms a significant and celebrated part of Australian heritage. Set within the institutional frameworks of a predominantly ??white?? European Australian heritage practice, Aboriginal heritage has been promoted as the heritage of a people who belonged to the distant, pre-colonial past and who were an integral and sustainable part of the natural environment. These controlled and carefully packaged meanings of Aboriginal heritage have underwritten aspects of urban Aboriginal presence and history that prevail in the (previously) colonial city. In the midst of the city which seeks to cling to selected images of its colonial past urban Aboriginal heritage emerges as a significant challenge to a largely ??white??, (post)colonial Australian heritage practice. The distinctively Aboriginal sense of anti-colonialism that underlines claims to urban sites of Aboriginal significance unsettles the colonial stereotypes that are associated with Aboriginal heritage and disrupts the ??purity?? of the city by penetrating the stronghold of colonial heritage. However, despite the challenge to the colonising imperatives of heritage practice, the fact that urban Aboriginal heritage continues to be a deeply contested reality indicates that heritage practice has failed to move beyond its predominantly colonial legacy. It knowingly or unwittingly maintains the stronghold of colonial heritage in the city by selectively and often with reluctance, recognising a few sites of contested Aboriginal heritage such as the Old Swan Brewery and Bennett House in Perth. Furthermore, the listing of these sites according to very narrow and largely Eurocentric perceptions of Aboriginal heritage makes it quite difficult for other sites which fall outside these considerations to be included as part of the urban built environment. Importantly this thesis demonstrates that it is most often in the case of Aboriginal sites of political resistance such as The Block in Redfern, the Aboriginal Tent Embassy in Canberra and Australian Hall in Sydney, that heritage practice tends to maintain its hegemony as these sites are a reminder of the continuing disenfranchised condition of Aboriginal peoples, in a nation which considers itself to be postcolonial.