Through the filters of postcolonial theory, environmental humanities, and digital humanities, this project considers the capabilities and limitations of novels to galvanize action in response to environmental crises. My findings suggest that novels are well equipped to engage in environmental education, although some of the form’s conventions must be disrupted to fully capitalize upon its strengths. The modern novel is conventionally limited in scope, often resorts to apocalyptic narratives that can breed hopelessness, is dedicated to a form of realism that belies the dramatic weather events exacerbated by climate change, defers authority to a single voice, and is logocentric. By supplementing conventional novels with a variety of paratexts, including digital tools, scientific findings, non-fiction accounts of past, present, and future activism, and authorial biography, it is my contention that the novel’s potency as a pedagogical tool increases. After addressing this project’s stakes and contexts in my Introduction, Chapter II assesses three South Asian novels in English that are concerned with sustainable development: Bhabani Bhattacharya’s Shadow from Ladakh, Bharati Mukherjee’s Jasmine, and Aravind Adiga’s The White Tiger. I conclude by considering how StoryMaps might further disrupt pro-sustainable development propaganda alongside more traditional novels. Chapter III examines how explicitly activist South Asian novelists construct authorial personae that propose additional solutions to the environmental problems identified in their novels, focusing on Amitav Ghosh’s The Hungry Tide and Indra Sinha’s Animal’s People. Chapter IV coins the term “locus-colonial novel,” a novel that decenters the human, situating place at the fulcrum of a work of historical fiction, using Hari Kunzru’s Gods without Men as one exemplar. I examine Kunzru’s novel alongside promotional materials for planned Mars missions to consider how narratives of colonialism on Earth might lead to a more socially and environmentally sustainable colonial model for Mars. Chapter V introduces the concept of a digital locus-colonial novel that allows users to develop informed, environmentally focused scenarios for colonial Mars. Through these chapters, this dissertation identifies specific rhetorical techniques that allow conscientious novels to create imaginative spaces where readers might explore solutions to the social, economic, and increasingly environmental problems facing human populations worldwide.

Partant d’une pratique clinique en milieu pénitentiaire, nous nous sommes rendus compte de l’importance de la violence tant de celle contenue dans les motifs d’incarcération que celle amenée comme une énigme silencieuse dans les problématiques subjectives pouvant se faire entendre à la faveur des entretiens à visée thérapeutique que nous avons avec les personnes incarcérées.Au moyen d’outils prélevés dans des champs de recherche se référant à la méthode expérimentale, nous avons procédé à des observations et les avons traduites au moyen de traitements statistiques pour en tirer des conclusions faisant écho aux hypothèses formulées en amont. Cette approche a été confrontée à celle de la clinique en psychologie en prenant appui sur l’analyse et la construction de cas. Des cas et vignettes ont été exposés dans le but d’en prélever la part transversale ou généralisable d’un fonds singulier.Cette méthodologie comparative est utilisée comme une opportunité pour nous permettre d’interroger le choix épistémologique parfois implicite auquel nous nous sommes référés. Ce détour s’est présenté comme une nécessité didactique, propice, à consolider notre désir de savoir et, à être soumis à un examen critique.Ce parcours heuristique nous a permis de mettre à l’étude les énigmes toujours particulières que nous lègue chaque patient et parmi elles, des blessures anciennes et silencieuses qui accompagnent un malaise postcolonial dont l’un des modes prévalents d’expression sans parole est l’agir violent. Ce qui ne fait pas équivaloir l’agir violent à une maladie mais à une rupture en quête de sens ou encore à une manifestation d’un défaut de sens.Le travail thérapeutique avec les personnes détenues reçues comme patients montre que le traitement par la parole peut être une opportunité pour initier une autre forme d’élaboration subjective par le truchement d’un moment de reconnaissance. / Initiating from a clinical practice at a penitentiary, we realized the importance of violence both on grounds for incarceration and presented as a silent enigma in the subjective problems that can be heard through therapeutic interviews that we have with prisoners.Using tools taken from research fields based on the experimental method, observations were made and translated using statistical methods to draw conclusions in relation with the hypothesis formulated beforehand.This approach was compared with that of clinical psychology supported by analysis and case construction. Cases and thumbnails have been exhibited in order to extract the common factor of a singular framework.This comparative methodology’s purpose allow us to interrogate the sometimes implicit epistemological choice by which we are driven. This detour presented itself as a didactic necessity, conducive at consolidating our desire to know and to be subjected to a critical examination.This heuristic path allowed us to study the ever-present enigmas left to us by each patient and among them the old and silent wounds that accompany postcolonial discomfort, one of the prevalent modes of speechless expression is act violently. This does not equate violent action as a disease but as a fracture in the search for meaning or as a demonstration of a deficience of meaning.The therapy sessions of the detainees received as patients shows that treatment via speech can be an opportunity to initiate another form of subjective elaboration through a moment of recognition.

Né à Calcutta en 1952, Vikram Seth occupe une place éminemment originale sur la scène littéraire postcoloniale. Manifestement animée par une force centrifuge, l’œuvre de Vikram Seth semble se renouveler perpétuellement : du récit de voyage au recueil de poésie, entre vers et prose, Seth revendique le droit à la métamorphose et épouse tour à tour une myriade de genres. Cette constellation générique manifeste l’aversion profonde de l’auteur pour l’uniformité et son rejet du cloisonnement. L’œuvre de Seth ne peut en effet être fixée ni génériquement, ni contextuellement : les ancrages successifs de l’auteur dans des décors poétiques radicalement différents laissent en effet transparaître la pluralité irréductible de ses amarres culturelles. Riche d’une multiplicité d’enracinements, cette œuvre polymorphe défie toute catégorisation. L’hétérogénéité de cette production littéraire masque cependant une pratique organisée du pastiche. Celle-ci s’impose comme une véritable dynamique de création : les œuvres de Seth puisent en effet leur "matière première" dans les textes canoniques de la littérature européenne, affichant une volonté souvent jugée démodée de retour à la tradition. Pourquoi Vikram Seth a-t-il aussi ostensiblement recours au pastiche, pratique traditionnellement dépréciée en Occident ? Si certains critiques dénoncent le caractère en apparence apolitique de cette écriture, le pastiche ne saurait se réduire ici à une reprise mécanique ou nostalgique de textes toujours déjà écrits, mais acquiert au contraire une dimension critique à travers la notion de "mimicry". Toute l’œuvre de Vikram met en relief le caractère radicalement énonciatif de la textualité, soulignant avec force l’historicité du langage. / Born in Calcutta in 1952, Vikram Seth occupies a highly original place on the postcolonial literary scene, owing to the dazzling variety of his work. Indeed, his career has been one of restless reinvention: skipping from economist to poet, to travel writer, to novelist-in-verse, to librettist, to translator and to children’s writer, Vikram Seth even tried his hand at biography in Two Lives (2005). His writing displays a deep-seated abhorrence of uniformity: every new book by Seth creates a fresh departure in genre and theme, and moves seamlessly from one geographical and cultural location to another, revealing a distinct cosmopolitan sensibility that makes Seth’s affiliations and cultural moorings all but impossible to fathom. Seth’s protean opus thus proves miraculously immune to any definitive categorization. In fact, however, the generic heterogeneity of Seth’s work masks a hidden unity, which lies in a deliberate use of pastiche: Vikram Seth treats Western canonical texts as raw material, in an ostensibly unfashionable attempt to go back to earlier models of literary tradition. Why does Seth strive to preserve the European literary legacy so ostentatiously through the use of pastiche, a practice that is traditionally belittled in the West? Although current critiques of Vikram Seth’s writing berate him for evading the politics of his own cultural, historical and political location, I will argue that pastiche acquires a critical dimension in Seth’s work through the notion of "mimicry". Vikram Seth’s work sheds light on the radically enunciative quality of textuality, throwing into sharp relief the historicity of language.

In addition to proposing a survey and subsequent analysis of the French-Algerian War in French-language comics, also known as bandes dessinées, published in Algeria, France, and Belgium since the 1960s, my dissertation investigates the ways in which this medium re-appropriates textual and iconographic source materials. I argue that the integration or citation of various sources by artists functions to confer a measure of historical accuracy on their representation of history, to constitute a collective memory as well as personal postmemories of the war, and to re-contextualize problematic images so that they and the hegemonic discourses they reinforce may be deconstructed. Moreover, the bande dessinée mimics secondary schoolbook representations of the war in both Algeria and France in its recycling of problematic images such as Orientalist painting, colonial postcards, and iconic images of war. The recycling of textbook images has the double advantage of ensuring reader familiarity with these images and of inviting critical interpretations of them. By exploring how the bande dessinée reuses colonial images as well as critical histories in predominantly anti-colonialist narratives, I seek to explain how this popular medium uniquely problematizes questions of history, memory, and postcolonial identity related to French Algeria and its decolonization. It is my contention that, because historical bandes dessinées frequently include or reference authentic textual and iconographic source material documenting the repercussions of the French-Algerian war on various communities, they represent a valuable resource to middle and high school teachers looking to enrich the state-mandated history curriculum. By using the bande dessinée in this capacity, educators exploit this medium as both a historical document (whose objective is to transmit knowledge of the past) and a document of history (which allows scholars to retrace the evolution of public opinion).

Understanding women’s experiences of mangrove forest conservation in the Global South is important because mangrove forests are a crucial defense against climate change, and are also increasingly the targets of global climate change policies. The intervention of postcolonial feminist theory combined with feminist political ecology has the potential to bring forward women’s seldom-heard experiences of climate change in these valuable ecosystems. This work supports previous feminist political ecology scholarship focused on understanding women’s complicated relationships to the environment and the gendered effects of climate change policies, while challenging dominant conservation discourse around women as a monolithic group. This thesis focuses on women living in Madagascar’s largest mangrove, particularly under current mangrove reforestation efforts and emerging blue carbon climate change policies. This project explores how the women in this mangrove forest are situated along axes of power differently, the implications of social divisions for conservation, and the ways in which current mangrove conservation projects reproduce power relations in the mangrove by failing to recognize difference.

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.

[Abstract]: This is research on cultural identity and the history of design. The project, by applying aspects of postcolonial theories (third space, border theory and hybridity) to the history of the four women designers in the Art Deco period in Europe, explores the influences of Eastern cultures in developing their Western designperspective.Their experience in fighting against patriarchal society toward success is a useful analogy for my country Taiwan’s struggle to win recognition in the world. It isthrough the recognition of these four women designers’ contributions to design history that I present their stories as models to my design students in Taiwan toassist them in establishing their own design identity.The research findings indicate that these women designers’ benefited from Eastern culture and created a successful cultural mélange between the East and West. Similarly, my design students in Taiwan will have the opportunity toreverse the pathway in appropriating from the West to create new possibilities in the East. I argue that hybridity is a key component for responding to and foraddressing the identity crisis and internal disruption in present-day Taiwan. Through knowing and understanding these women designers’ achievements, Taiwanese students have a model for self-reflection to recognise the importance of our own cultural value to the world.

This study examines some of the significant challenges that Nakoda peoples encountered from 1870-1980 in the Banff-Bow Valley, Alberta. Beginning with missionary movements, the 1877 Treaty Seven agreements and the establishment of the reservation systems, I trace the emergence of a disciplinary power regime and the subsequent consequences for Nakoda communities. Canadian governments and agents of the colonial bureaucracy manipulated time, space and movement which altered the structure of Aboriginal lives in ways that attempted to increase visibility, economic productivity and docility. Race as a normalizing and dividing practice (Foucault, 1975) is used to demonstrate how levels of discipline furthered assimilation strategies through the formation of Canadas first national park and the development of the regions tourism economies. As the preeminent example of the engagement of Nakoda peoples in local tourism industries, the Banff Indian Days sporting and cultural festivals, which were celebrated from 1894-1978, are also investigated. Borrowing from poststructural and postcolonial theory, the interactions between tourists, participants, organizers and performers are problematized. It is revealed that the festivals became critical sites of cultural exchange that engendered unique socio-economic, political and cultural opportunities. In addition, the Indian Days fostered important identity-making possibilities and crucial spaces to assert, contest, and produce perceptions of Aboriginal cultures. This research privileges information obtained from oral history interviews with Nakoda peoples. However, archival materials, mainly newspaper accounts, photographs, tourism advertisements, and government documents also contribute to the primary evidence collected. As well as analyzing racial discourse, this work also considers how Nakoda peoples responded to the representations and expectations that informed the production of Aboriginal identities. I conclude this study by suggesting that it is crucial for researchers to consult diverse Aboriginal perspectives and collaborate with the communities within which they work. This research offers new understandings of the cultural histories of the Banff-Bow Valley which reflect the dynamic and complex nature of colonial power relations.

In the United States, the past twenty years has witnessed a growing academic interest in understanding 'globalization,' i.e., a series of interconnected social, cultural, and political processes occurring under integrated economies. Management scholars have tried to understand globalization in terms of its potential consequences for companies conducting business in various countries and regions. However, globalization involves more than this, for as new relationships between people and places occur, new ideas about who they/ us are in those relationships also emerge. How can international management scholars thus understand these complex relationships occurring under globalization? How can they theorize and study such relationships?Although there are multiple ways to address these questions, the approach to globalization within U.S.-based international business and management research has been insufficient. First, meta-theoretical assumptions supporting U.S.-based management theories and practices have seldom been questioned in regards to their deployment in non-Western contexts. Second, the emphasis of this research on "cultural differences" implies "separation" and may conceal social and cultural formations established through global relationships. Thus, alternative approaches to understanding business practices in the context of globalization are needed.To this effect, I first develop the notion of identity formation , based on poststructuralist and postcolonial theories, as a conceptual framework, in contrast with the modernist views of identity informing the extant international management literature. I suggest this notion as an appropriate focus of analysis for understanding contemporary relationships between people in the world. To demonstrate these arguments, I conduct fieldwork focused on the international entrepreneur, specifically the Turkish entrepreneur. Relying on an extended case study design and a multi-method approach, I examine how Turkish entrepreneurs in high-technology sectors in the U.S. and in Turkey engage in identity formation processes.The identity formation framework allows me to demonstrate how globalization processes occur relationally through embedded discourses of hybridity, gender, subalternity, and nation articulated by international entrepreneurs. I further address how postcolonial lenses allow for conceptualizing encounters between West and non-West occurring under globalization as a series of interdependent events at the locus of identity formation. As such, my dissertation offers a theoretically distinct conceptualization for globalization research in international management.

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.