This project utilized a form of arts based educational research described as analog hypertext to develop interpretative material representing multiple critical, theoretical, and disciplinary perspectives on objects in a university art museum’s object study gallery. Drawing on scholars’ recommendations for postcolonial interpretation of non-Western art, the project created a web of information, which simultaneously revealed and critiqued the underlying ideologies and power structures shaping the museum’s display in an effort to change existing interpretive practice. The project developed five color-coded thematic self-guided tours—art as commodity, spiritual practice, technology and cultural evolutionism, mortuary rituals, and postcolonial perspectives—presented to the public as an interpretive exhibition invited visitors’ contributions. This paper explores how the analog hypertext functions as both a research tool and a content delivery device for the representation of multiple critical perspectives, fostering interdisciplinary perspectives and visitor meaning-making in the process.

This thesis discusses female silence, voice and representation as portrayed in four postcolonial novels written by Asian female writers or those from the Asian diaspora. The novels included in the corpus are The God of Small Things by Arundhati Roy, Cereus Blooms at Night by Shani Mootoo, Brick Lane by Monica Ali and Brixton Beach by Roma Tearne. This thesis aims to explore the different strategies adopted by the authors to represent different forms of silence of the type highlighted in theoretical work by Spivak, Olsen and Showalter. The novels analysed open up new contexts in which issues of silence, migration, displacement and multiculturalism, which are central in postcolonial literature, are explored. In its examination of these issues in detail, the thesis has been influenced by postcolonial and diasporic studies, with a focus on women’s issues and feminist thought. Instead of focusing on the role of silence solely in relation to specific characters, the thesis attempts to engage with the complex ways in which these narratives represent various forms, moments and scenes of silence. From the analysis, we can exemplify that the novels can also be used to suggest the ambivalences of speaking/not-speaking via the narrative representations of silence. Authorial silence involves the author’s deliberate refusal to speak directly in the text ; instead, the author utilises several literary devices to convey something indirectly to the reader. Silence is also linked to concepts such as shame, secrets and gossip. One is likely to refrain from speaking if he or she is ashamed, secretive or is the topic of gossip in one’s community. There are also some female characters who are portrayed as not-speaking, or choosing to remain silent so as not to cause problems for the family. A few other characters have been portrayed as refusing to speak out as they have been traumatised into silence. Lastly, women can also be complicit in holding on to patriarchal structures and in the process, attempt to speak out in order to to silence or to cause problems to other women.

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...

This thesis provides a comparative reading to selected writings from Anglophone Trinidadian writer Sam Selvon and Japanophone Taiwanese writer Weng Nao, demonstrating the link between these two authors’ specific representation of multiple diasporic models of Caribbean diaspora and Taiwanese diaspora respectively and its influence on diasporic identity narratives. This study provides a cross-linguistic/ cultural perspective on comparative postcolonial literary studies, which helps to move beyond the primary focus of Anglophone texts and contexts. Although the focused two authors Sam Selvon and Weng Nao come from different historical specificities and linguistic backgrounds that urge them produce their narratives in different ways and tones of tackling issues that they have encountered in each socio-political and cultural contexts respectively, their works provides outstanding examples of how contemporary diasporic routes—both geographically and metaphorically, have significant influence on literary productions that should not be categorised by its geographical or linguistic boundaries, and can only be fully understood by linking one to another from the legacies of colonialism and the triangle models of diasporic routes. The diasporic identity, as being illustrated in both of their works, has been evolved with geographical movements and transformed into an iconic concept that makes new forms of artistic production possible. Diasporic literature, therefore, should not be limited into traditional disciplinary compartmentalisation of national literary studies. By bringing the focus on the multiple diasporic journeys, the identity representation reflected in the literary work in this study helps to identify the complexity and boundary crossing within Anglophone literature and Japanophone literature, which have already transformed into literary works of being able to depict a more complex model of modern cultures—endless traveling and hybrid. By bringing forth the excluded Japanophone texts in the field of postcolonial studies to be compared with the texts from the prominent Anglophone postcolonial writer Sam Selvon, this thesis hopes to offer some insights into the reassessment of the literary status of Weng Nao and the significance of his works in the world literary stage, and, furthermore, to identify how Japanophone literary works might be compatible with postcolonial analysis.

This thesis reads the fiction and poetry of Spokane/Coeur d’Alene writer Sherman Alexie as predominantly urban Indian literature. The primary experience of the growing majority of American Indians in the twenty-first century consists in the various threats and opportunities presented by urban living, yet contemporary criticism of literature by (and about) American Indians continues to focus on the representations of life for those tribally enrolled American Indians living on reservations, under the jurisdiction of tribal governments. This thesis provides critical responses to Alexie’s contemporary literary representations of those Indians living apart from tribal lands and the communities and traditions contained therein. I argue that Alexie’s multifaceted representations of Indians in the city establish intelligible urban voices that speak across tribal boundaries to those urban Indians variously engaged in creating diverse Indian communities, initiating new urban traditions, and adapting to the anonymities and visibilities that characterise city living. The thesis takes a broadly linear chronological structure, beginning with Alexie’s first published collection of short stories and concluding with his most recent works. Each chapter isolates for examination a distinct aspect of Alexie’s urban Indian literature, so demonstrating a potential new critical methodology for reading urban Indian literatures. I open with a short piece explaining my position as a white, British scholar of the heavily politicised field of American Indian literary studies, before the introductory chapter positions Alexie in the wider body of Indian literatures and establishes the historical grounds for the aims and claims of my research. Chapter one is primarily concerned with the short story ‘Distances’, from The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven (1993), and the Ghost Dance religion of the late nineteenth century, reading Alexie’s representations of this phenomenon as explorations of the historical and political tensions that divide those Indians living on tribal lands and those living in cities. Chapter two discusses the difficulties of maintaining a tribal identity when negotiating this divide towards the city, analysing the politics of indigenous artistic expression and reception in Alexie’s first novel, Reservation Blues (1995). Alexie’s second novel, Indian Killer (1996), signals the relocation of his literary aesthetics to the city streets, and chapter three detects and unravels the anti-essentialist impulse in Alexie’s (mis)use of the distinctly urban mystery thriller genre. Grief, death and ritual are explored in chapter four, which focusses on selected stories from Ten Little Indians (2003), and explains Alexie’s characters’ need for new, urban traditions with reference to an ethics of grieving. Chapter five connects the politics of time travel to the representation of trauma in Flight (2007), and addresses Alexie’s representations of violence in Ten Little Indians and The Toughest Indian in the World (2000), proposing that it is the structural violences of daily life, rather than the murder and beatings found throughout his work, that leave lasting impressions on urban Indian subjectivities. My conclusion brings together my approaches to Alexie’s urban Indian literature, and suggests further areas for research.

<p>The Subaltern Clinic explores a certain legacy of unreason that Sigmund Freud identified throughout the course of his writings as the "death drive," or the compulsion to repeat. In Freud's work, the death drive is often thought as the opposite of the pleasure principle, which situates the pleasure-unpleasure binary at the center of psychoanalytical thinking and Freud's conceptualization of the psyche as well as morality, ethics, and civilization. The Subaltern Clinic traces a legacy of the death drive and a series of thematic concerns that emerge from it, specifically the instability of the pleasure-unpleasure binary that ostensibly upholds the "principle of reason," through a colonial-postcolonial archive. In doing so, the dissertation attends to those subaltern figures who are constituted as the "unreason" of society, particularly the mentally ill, women, and homosexuals. </p><p>In particular, the dissertation looks to the intersection of psychoanalysis and deconstruction, specifically to Jacques Derrida's engagements with Freud's "Beyond the Pleasure Principle," to argue that deconstruction needs to be thought of as a marginal and politicized form of psychoanalytic thinking, the stakes of which emerge through Derrida's readings of Freud's death drive. The dissertation follows the thread of these readings to consider the problems of difference, violence, sadism and masochism, and anxiety in the work of colonial and postcolonial practitioners of psychoanalysis as well as postcolonial artists and novelists. The Subaltern Clinic makes the argument that an attention to the legacy of the death drive in the postcolonial archive allows for a more robust critique of postcolonial reason, which would attend to questions of ethics and aesthetics.</p> / Dissertation

The film representation of the Sámi people has evolved during the last century from the ethnographic portrayals that reproduce a romantic stereotype of the good savages, to feature and documentary films that discuss the Sámi identity and its colonial history. In recent years a new generation of Sámi and Swedish documentary directors have focused their work on analysing the impact that multiple structures of power actually have in the production of the Sámi identity and culture. In this research I explore the intersections of such structures in the documentary road movies Sámi Daughter Yoik (2007) by the Sámi-Swedish director Liselotte Wajstedt, and The Only Image of My Father (2004) by the Swedish director Kine Boman. The main purpose of the research is to examine the discussions of identity that these films propose and to analyse the strategies with which the directors question the simplistic representation of the Sámi people. Based on the postcolonial and intersectional perspectives, the text offers a critique of the discourses of authenticity that confine the Sámi identity into the frame of ethnicity. The study gives special attention to the different layers that the directors' identities involve and their role in the construction of alternative representations of the Sámi people. A relevant finding is that the directors have succeeded in representing the Sámi people as complex and heterogeneous, helped by their choices on genre, authorship and their own approach to identity as a performative, multidimensional and dynamic process.

The purpose of the study is to highlight women's experiences of and beliefs about the labour market, in relation to wearing the veil. It´s based on a qualitative study of semi-structured interviews with thirteen university students of women wearing hijab and illustrate how their reflections of discrimination affect educational choices. It also describes what treatment the women wearing hijab has experienced in previous contact with the labor market and when the veil has been actualized in different work situations. The result is described in three themes:  “wearing hijab”, “education and profession” and “work life”. It displays how the women highlight their experiences of discrimination towards their hijab and states that there is discrimination in social and public contexts, as well as in the Swedish labor market. Furthermore, the women tell how difficult it is for the hijab wearing woman to be considered as her own individual, instead, she is defined by the hijab and met with prejudiced values and reactions. The results were analyzed with theories as postcolonial feminism, orientalism, and different forms of discrimination, stigmatization and exclusion. During the job search, the respondents in this study tells that they need to over emphasize their skills because they constantly feel that they need to disprove prejudices about an imagine incompetence. Especially after the European Court of Justice ruled (2017-03-14) that entitles the employers to deny women wearing hijab at the workplace. Additionally, the negative attitude is not always visible but hidden outward and towards the periphery of society. This study clarifies how they are treated in society and highlights the limits of their opportunities in the labor market because of prejudice about the hijab. The results are related to previous studies and are discussed in relation to the dominant image of the veil in the West.

Gender equality is an important attribute in Sweden, much connected to the country’s selfimage. This thesis analyzes Swedish state policy strategies for Sweden’s works with gender equality abroad, in development cooperation. From a feminist postcolonial perspective, the thesis conducts a critical discourse analysis of the policy framework regulating Swedish development cooperation in relation to gender equality. The result show that women and men are constructed as discursively different in the policy framework. Further, the issue of gender inequality, as portrayed within the policy framework, constructs women as particular vulnerable and subordinated to men. A discursive construction which paradoxically reinforces the traditional, stereotypical gender norms which the policy framework aims to abolish. In line with this paradox the result also show that men are not recognized as responsible for gender inequalities nor are they lifted as agents of change in gender equality work. A result that suggests that women are both the ones in need of and the ones responsible for creating a gender equal future in developing nations according to the discourse of Swedish development cooperation policy.

Abstract The period of South Africa’s political transition in the late 1980s and 1990s also saw a number of interesting developments in the field of cultural production, especially within the province of literature. A number of literary scholars, critics of all realms, writers, some enthusiasts and adventurers all showed interest in the direction of literature after the repressive years of apartheid. The dominant academic question at the time centred on the possible transition in the thematic and formalistic dimension of the literature of the new South Africa. Scholars and cultural commentators that include Es’kia Mphahlele, Njabulo Ndebele, Albie Sachs, Guy Butler, Elleke Boehmer, Michael Chapman, Mbulelo Mzamane, Andries Walter Oliphant, amongst others, all contributed immensely in the debates that attempted to define the possible direction of the literature after apartheid. This research is concerned with the developments in the Post-Apartheid South African Novels of English expression. Its focus is on how temporal mobility has impacted on cultural production especially as witnessed in the many transformations in the field of literature, particularly the novel as a genre. Using the tropes of memory, violence, and otherness, it examines the novels of writers as varying as André Brink, J.M. Coetzee, Zakes Mda, Zoë Wicomb, and Jo-Anne Richards. At the level of form, the fantastical and the confessional modes of narration are discussed as significant manifestations of the post-apartheid narratives using the novels of André Brink and Jo-Anne Richards respectively. It suggests that, among other things, the post-apartheid novels of English expression are marked by some interesting thematic blocs that include the fascination with land, the artistic display of remorse through the confessional mode, the rekindling of memory and its representation in narrative, the peculiar interest in violence and alterity, the continuing reportage of the urban space and the implications of urbanity on the ordinary citizenry, the recourse to gangsterism, miscegenation and the dilemma of a humankind confined to the psychological spaces of the interstices. Efforts were made in this research to avoid the ‘intellectual apartheid’ often associated with the hermeneutic engagements of the literati previously devoted to South Africa’s literary scholarship. It is for this reason that a more elaborate introductory chapter highlights aspects of the contributions of novelists and scholars that include Nadine Gordimer, Mongane Wally Serote, Lewis Nkosi, Njabulo Ndebele, and the ‘emergent’ ones such as Phaswane Mpe, K. Sello Duiker, Pamela Jooste, among others. An important dimension to this study is that it situates the Post-Apartheid narratives not only within relevant historical contexts, but also develops its argument by drawing immensely from the intellectual culture dominant in South Africa before, during, and after the notorious era of racial separatism. It concludes on the suggestive note that South African writers and literary scholars should attempt to demonstrate a more rigorous interest in locating the creative points of convergence between the aesthetic and social ideals.