This thesis examines the presence of unhu, a process of becoming and remaining human through community ties, in Nervous Conditions and The Book of Not by Tsitsi Dangarembga. Dangarembga interrogates corrupt versions of community by creating positive examples of unhu that alternatively foster community building. Utilizing ecocritical, utopian, and postcolonial methodologies, this thesis postulates that these novels stress the importance of retaining a traditional concept like unhu while also acknowledging the need to adjust it over time to ensure its vitality. Both novels depict the creativity and resilience of unhu amid toxic surroundings.

Assia Djebar’s Far from Madina retells the stories of the women who appear on the margins of the earliest sources of Islamic history from a contemporary Muslim feminist’s perspective. Djebar uses formal elements of early Islamic historiography and relies upon classical Sunni sources. These techniques place her novel in conversation with classical Islamic tradition and bring legitimacy to her subversive project which aims to shift the boundaries of that canon. Though crafted in relation to classical sources, Djebar’s critique of gender identity is also addressed to the discourses and institutions of Islamic authority that evolved over the centuries and that continue to delineate narrow roles for women, up to and including contemporary regimes. In chapter one I argue that by grounding her critique of circulating discourses on Muslim women within a project that appropriates canonical Sunni historiography, Djebar refuses the disjunction between feminism and Islam, critiquing normative Islamic discourse on women in contemporary Algeria without framing the conflict in terms of an East/West or a religious/secular binary. Chapter two examines Djebar’s treatment of Fatima in particular. I consider Djebar’s selection of classical sources and compare the earliest canonical Sunni renderings of Fatima and those found in the novel. I argue that the vision of empowered women in the first Muslim community posited in Far from Madina destabilizes the ideal of gender identity constructed in early Islamic historiography. Far from Madina focuses on the moment after the death of Muhammad when Muslims were left to interpret their scripture and recall their Prophet’s words and deeds. Djebar constructs the novel around the question of what role Muslim women would play in this process, a move which foregrounds her own choice to write the novel and embrace her role as witness and transmitter of the stories of these early women. Chapter three examines the reflexive character of Far from Madina and considers how Djebar’s narrative strategies and hermeneutical approach facilitate the articulation of identity through difference. I argue that the narrative is Djebar’s performance of contemporary Muslim identity and an example of “lived Islam.” / text

Popular opinion suggests that education is the 'silver bullet' to end poverty, famine, and all the worlds' ills. The reality of education for women, however, is not as easily classified as transformative. This paper seeks to illuminate, through historical research and literary analysis, the connections between the charity education of Victorian Britain, a system examined in Jane Eyre, and the missionary education which comprised the majority of the educational systems in the British colonies, including Nigeria and Zimbabwe, the settings of Emecheta and Dangarembga's works. Beginning with Charlotte Brontë's Victorian classic, Jane Eyre, and moving through time, space and situation to the colonial experience novels of Buchi Emecheta and Tsitsi Dangarembga, we find instead that education, particularly British philanthropic education, from charity schools for children without means in the 18th and 19th century to the mission schools that comprised the basis for British colonial education in Africa, produces women who benefit only in very limited ways. For Charlotte Brontë's title protagonist, as for many of the characters in Jane Eyre, Nervous Conditions, and The Joys of Motherhood, education represents a new life. Brontë, Dangarembga, and Emecheta all offer education as a possible escape for characters within their novels, but the length of and price for that escape differs based on a character's role within a colonial set of identities, whether the character in question is part of the colonizing power or one of its colonial victims. When taken together, Jane Eyre and these two African experience novels demonstrate that British education is largely ineffectual in granting female characters the kind of freedom that education is supposed to instill. The price of the hybridity necessary to survive in the colonial situation could very well be the complete loss of self, a disintegration of identity, as it is for Nyasha, who is, according to her own analysis of her situation, neither Shona nor British and therefore is no one at all.

Transculturalism refers to how cultural barriers are transcended and how cultures meet. Because the transcultural perspective reflects hitherto unrepresented spaces, it revises and innovates literary canons. This study investigates aspects of transculturalism in texts dealing with travel by the Canadian writer Janice Kulyk Keefer. It also explores how these aspects might alter our view of Canadian literature. The transcultural perspectives between mainstream Canada and Ukraine, Europe and Acadie have been analysed through three tropes of travel: departure, passage and arrival. Keefer’s texts have been read in accordance with Mikhail Bakhtin's dialogic theories to chart transcultural encounters and clashes. This thesis argues that a historic consciousness of their ethnic group gives the young generation a transcultural position that enables them to profit from their dual cultural competence. Although Imagined Communities are affirmed as receptacles of the cultural heritage, the impending environmental catastrophe demands that the national interests that they represent be abandoned for international co-operation. In Keefer’s European texts the transcultural aspects reflect how travel becomes synonymous with quests and epiphanies. Travelling is described as a learning process in Rest Harrow where the protagonist’s increasing cultural competence changes her from a tourist to a real traveller. The transcultural aspects also unmask prejudices, collisions and failed transitions. In this context Imagined Communities are criticized as agents of the colonial discourse, chauvinism, and intolerance. The transcultural perspective also reveals that patriarchal paradigms and the silencing of persecutions victimize the young generation. Furthermore, their ignorance of the mother tongue works as a linguistic barrier shutting them out from their ethnic group. Keefer's Acadian texts support Bakhtin's contention that isolated groups become intolerant to strangers and deviants. While the transcultural perspective unmasks tourists' perception of other countries as idiosyncratic, also the travellers' own ironic postmodernist view of themselves as tourists and of the artificiality of tourism is featured. The cultural assumptions of literary discourse are challenged by border blurring phenomena such as story-telling, the camivalesque, intertextuality and historiographic metafiction. Thus the morality of Keefer's transcultural approach lies also in her literary technique. The alternative perspective inherent in transculturalism makes individuals break away from their given cultural context to embrace a new transcultural ethos. / <p>Diss. Umeå : Umeå universitet, 1996</p> / digitalisering@umu

The aim of this thesis is to investigate the power relations in women’s farmers’ cooperatives in Nicaragua, and to see if the women feel that they have power over their decisions and if they feel that their power has changed after joining the cooperative. The theory used in this thesis is postcolonial feminism theories of women empowerment and frameworks on development efforts to women. The method used to gather data has been semi-structured one-on-one interviews. The investigated cooperatives are part of the umbrella organization Femuprocan. Femuprocan has received development funds from We Effect (formerly Swedish Cooperative Centre) and other aid agencies in order to form cooperatives and for capacity building. Previous studies show the importance of involving women in the decisions about how the development funds should be used.   The interviews showed that the women have been involved in the decisions within the cooperatives such as how the funds should be used. Most of the interviewed women perceived an increased sense of power after joining the cooperative, and can exemplify this. However, the change is slow. The women have identified that capacity building, meeting other women and gaining more money have been crucial in the empowerment process.

This study is based on 72 children's and young adult books that met the criteria of being about Muslims and published and circulated here in the U.S. They can be divided into the varied genres as 49 contemporary realistic fiction, 6 historical fiction, and 17 autobiographies, biographies, and memoirs. In-depth reading and coding were used to identify patterns based on a theoretical frame of postcolonial theory and the lens of cultural authenticity.The exploration of ideas focus on the following research questions related to children's and adolescent literature published and distributed in the US that depict Muslim cultures: What are the overall characteristics of the books? What are the background experiences of the authors, illustrators, and translators who write and distribute literature within the U.S. that reflect Muslim Cultures? How do the genres of contemporary realistic fiction, historical fiction, and biographies published for adolescents and children within the U.S. represent and frame the varied Muslim cultures? What are the relationships between the background experiences of the authors and the representations of Muslim cultures in their books?This work is grounded in the assumption that Muslims are presented in a certain manner in popular culture and literature in the U.S., and thus, postcolonial theory is relevant in unpacking issues within the literature about these people. This theory draws on these suppositions to unveil how knowledge is constructed and circulated in dealing with global power relations. It also sheds light on how the identities of natives become hybrids as the process of colonization in certain cases impacts the psyche of inhabitants of these regions.This study is a `critical content analysis' in comprehending how texts are based in the social, cultural, and political contexts in which they are created and read. Content analyses examine what texts are about, considering the content from a particular perspective. This method scaffolds and explained my research to support my analysis of the texts through postcolonial perspectives to observe how Muslims are portrayed within adolescent and children's literature in the U.S.

This study is a comparative analysis of how Hollywood portrays people from the Middle East before and after 9/11. The films used to conduct this study are True Lies (1994), The Siege (1998), The Kingdom (2007) and Body of Lies (2008). With a qualitative methodology, discourse analysis and postcolonial theory this study analysed not only how people from the Middle East is portrayed, but also how the Americans in the films are presented and how the characters in the films changed in the movies produced after 9/11.      The results show that people from the Middle East are portrayed in a negative way and that Hollywood uses stereotypes. However, people from the Middle East are more gradated in the films post-9/11. There is a bigger focus on Islam in the movies produced after 9/11 and the study also shows that family values play a less central part in the story in the films made after 9/11 and that work is of more importance. The American characters have a greater need to help their country in the war against terrorists in the films produced after 9/11 compared to the American characters in the films made before 9/11.

This thesis is premised on the notion, drawn mainly from a postcolonial perspective (which is subsumed under the poststructuralist as well as the postmodern), that Conrad's early writing reflects his abiding concern with how people construct their identities vis-a-vis the other/Other in contact zones on the periphery of empire far from the reach of social, racial and national identities that sustain them at home. It sets out to explore the problematic of race, culture, gender and identity in a selection of the writer's early works set mainly, but not exclusively, in the East, using the theoretical perspective of postcoloniality as a point of entry, nuanced by the configurations of spatiality which are factored into discourses about the other/Other. Predicated mainly on the theoretical constructs about culture and identity espoused by Homi Bhabha, Edward Said and Stuart Hall, this study proposes the idea of an in between "third space" for the interrogation of identity in Conrad's work. This postcolonial space, the central contribution of this thesis, frees his writings from the stranglehold of the Manichean paradigm in terms of which alterity or otherness is perceived. Based on the hypothesis that identities are never fixed but constantly in a state of performance, this project underwrites postcoloniality as a viable theoretical mode of intervention in Conrad's early works. The writer's early oeuvre yields richly to the contingency of our times in the early twenty-first century as issues of race, gender and identity remain contested terrain. This study adopts the position that Conrad stood both inside and outside Victorian cultural and ethical space, developing an ambivalent mode of representation which recuperated and simultaneously subverted the entrenched prejudices of his age. Conceived proleptically, the characters of Conrad's early phase, traditionally dismissed as those of an apprentice writer, pose a constant challenge to how we view alterity in our everyday lives. / Thesis (Ph.D. (English))--North-West University, Potchefstroom Campus, 2004.

Seeking to widen the existing literature on postcolonial cities, this thesis conducts an inquiry into the multilocality of postcolonial space. Through ethnographic research in Sri Lanka’s Galle Fort, it investigates how different social groups differently use and interpret the city’s former colonial built environment. Specifically, it examines how the postcolonial city is socially produced and constructed as a place of home for local communities, a World Heritage Site, and a gentrifying neighborhood. Using interviews, observations, and spatial analyses, it teases out the local, national, and transnational socio-economic forces that drive these processes, as well as the power-dynamics and resistances that come into play. It finds that postcolonial uses of space often relate to, and sometimes recall, social struggles that characterized urban space under colonialism. Drawing on these findings, it highlights the importance of studying social relations, heritage management, and gentrification in postcolonial cities in conversation with literatures on colonial urbanisms.

The object of the dissertation is British and Indian popular (commercial) cinema and the construction of identity there. The problem of identity construction in Indian and British films was researched employing three approaches found in the postcolonial theory: the critique of colonial discourse, anticolonial nationalism and the construction of national identity and the problematics of diasporic identity. The comparative analysis of the films from the two industries of the countries which were bounded by colonial relationships in the past let us see the complex ways of how identity is articulated in the postcolonial period. It also shows that the colonial memory is not merely a historical relict, but one of the ways to construct identity, which is always brought up and rethought in contemporary popular culture. The comparative analysis of British and Indian films leads us to the following conclusions: Nadion constructs itself through the constant employment of the resources of colonial memory – and does so depending on various goals: fantasy, nostalgia, fear etc. The ever-present use of colonial memory in the context of the present shows that postcoloniality is a process rather than achieved state, thus letting us observe the positions and functions of imperialism not only in the past, but present as well. British as well as Indian cinema includes the cultural “otherness” in the narratives, which is modeled and manipulated according to the historical period when the film was... [to full text] / Disertacijos objektas yra komercinis Britanijos ir Indijos kinas bei jame konstruojamos tapatybės. Tapatybės konstravimo problematika Indijos ir Britanijos filmuose yra tiriama remiantis trimis tapatybės analizės pokolonijinėje teorijoje pjūviais: kolonijinio diskurso kritika, antikolonijiniu nacionalizmu ir tautinės tapatybės konstravimu bei diasporinės tapatybės problematika. Lyginamasis dviejų, praeityje kolonijiniais saitais susietų valstybių kino filmų tyrimas leido pažvelgti į kompleksines tapatybės artikuliavimo pokolonijiniame laikotarpyje galimybes ir parodė, kad kolonijinė praeitis nėra vien tik istorinis reliktas, bet viena iš tapatybės konstravimo priemonių, nuolat sugrąžinama ir permąstoma šiuolaikinėje populiariojoje kultūroje ir kinematografijoje. Išanalizavus medžiagą disertacijoje prieita prie šių išvadų: tauta konstruoja save per nuolatinį kolonijinės atminties resursų panaudojimą – ir atlieka tai vedina skirtingų tikslų: fantazijos, nostalgijos, baimės ir kt. Nuolatinis kolonijinės atminties eskalavimas dabarties kontekste rodo pokolonializmo procesualumą, bet ne substanciškumą, atverdamas kelius pažvelgti į imperializmą ir jo poziciją ne tik praeityje, bet ir dabartyje. Tokiame kontekste tiek Britanija, tiek Indija į filmų naratyvus įtraukia kultūrinės kitybės kategoriją, kuri yra modeliuojama priklausomai nuo filmo sukūrimo laikmečio ir išreiškia skirtingas ideologines sanklodas. Kalbėjimas apie „Kitą“ tampa susietas su „Savimi“, taip sukuriant reikšmių... [toliau žr. visą tekstą]