As a policy field, nature conservation has a problematic history. Setting aside nature forprotection has often entailed the marginalization of Indigenous peoples, their claims, and their traditional lands. Some argue that a shift is occurring in Swedish nature protection policies, from top-down governing modes to collaborative forms. The thesis critically examines the national park process in Vålådalen-Sylarna-Helags, a project unique for nature conservation in Saepmie. No national park was established despite the process’ collaborative form and the inclusion of local actors, among those three reindeer herding communities. The thesis studies discursive constructions of the local Saemie actors’ inclusion and how that affects their possible influence. Moreover, it analyzes central constructions and considers their effects on the projectand change over time. The results show that inclusion is articulated differently by state actorsand reindeer herding communities, limiting and making possible varying forms of influence. The landscape and natural state are central constructions affecting the process, and the project’s aim transforms with significant consequences for the process and possibly its result.

In the last 20 years, international donors have made efforts to increase the participation of minorities into development programmes. Despite these efforts, development actors continues to receive critique from postcolonial theorists for continuing to reinforce neocolonial and Western-centered tendencies onto minorities. Given this background, the purpose of this study is to investigate how indigenous peoples in Latin America and their issues are represented and allowed to participate in and challenge the development agenda. This is done by analysing how ‘indigeneity’ and indigenous peoples’ issues are portrayed in reports by international donors. Through a discourse analysis of two reports from the World Bank and ECLAC, this study finds that indigenous peoples are still not allowed to challenge the standard development agenda. Even though improvements have been made concerning explicit representations of indigenous peoples knowledges and values as inferior, the findings of this study show that indigenous peoples’ issues are often represented to be legitimate only when its moved to Western frameworks. These findings suggest that postcolonial attitudes towards indigenous peoples are still integrated in development programmes. This study however encourages further research of postcolonial attitudes towards indigenous peoples within international donors, and how international donors can improve in these aspects.

The farm novels of southern Africa can be considered microcosms of gender stereotypes and racial attitudes. Reading these novels using post-colonial, Marxist, and feminist theory is especially useful in thinking about how these novels reflect female writers’ perspectives about the success of the imperialism in Africa and the lasting effects of colonialism on gender and race relations. In addition, these novels provide interesting insight into colonialism, allowing each author to comment on the effect of imperialism on both the colonized and those who take up the colonial project. This dissertation examines novels by three female African writers: The Story of an African Farm by Olive Schreiner, The Grass is Singing by Doris Lessing, and When Rain Clouds Gather by Bessie Head. Written at different stages of colonial power, each novel represents agrarian life in southern African colonies that share similar cultural, historical, colonial, and racial attitudes. These novels can be interpreted as building on, challenging, and “writing back” to the concept of the plaasroman, a genre central to the South African colonial experience. In addition to discussing how these novels undermine traditional forms of pastoral literature in order to comment explicitly on those forms’ failure to account for the farm experience in southern Africa, this dissertation applies postcolonial, Marxist, and ecofeminist criticism to delve into issues of postcolonial identity, racism, and the role of the farm as both a microcosm and a catalyst for change.

The goals of this project are twofold. The first goal is to articulate my sense making of reproductive health for Women of color in the United States as a postcolonial condition; one that I trace back to the logics of elimination of settler colonialism (Wolfe, 2006) and frame as maintained through the colonial institutions, or racial projects (Omi & Winant, 2015), of the Prison Industrial Complex, the welfare system, and the health care system which create and perpetuate dominant cultural narratives of “the welfare queen”, “the negligent Black mother”, and “the wily patient”. I show how these narratives colonize the minds of health care providers and contribute to the current stratification of health care. My second goal with this project is to show how postcolonial interpretive ethnography can be used as a narrative medicine educational intervention for providers. Currently, Narrative Medicine asks providers to read themselves, their patients, and their interactions as literature to emphasize the personal and interpersonal tensions that are often lost in the fast paced biomedical world (Charon, 2001). With this project I aim to expand the field of Narrative Medicine to consider the ways patient-provider interactions are postcolonial, and how analyses of these interactions can be a method of decolonization. I do so by analyzing three interpretive ethnographic narratives that I have created which story my interactions with three Women of color: Tiffany, Rose, and Jane. I then analyze each of these interactions for colonizing and decolonizing sense making.

Magister Artium - MA / Bettina Wyngaard se misdaadfiksie-trilogie, bestaande uit die romans Vuilspel (2013), Slaafs (2016) en Jagter (2019) het ’n vernuwende uitwerking in die Afrikaanse literatuur gehad. Dit kan hoofsaaklik teruggevoer word na die skrywer se gebruik van ’n (swart) lesbiese protagonis. Wyngaard is ook die eerste swart Afrikaanse vroue-outeur wat haar tot hierdie genre gewend het. Haar misdaadtrilogie toon ’n sentrale bemoeienis met die vroulike subjek se ondergeskikte posisie as deurgaans onderdruk weens verskeie identiteitsaspekte (waaronder ras, gender, klas, seksualiteit, kultuur en nasionaliteit tel). Die simbiotiese verhouding tussen identiteit en mag is dus ’n prominente tematiek in die trilogie. Hierdie bemiddeling tussen identiteit en mag toon raakpunte met die interseksionaliteitsteorie soos voorgestel deur Kimberlé Crenshaw (1989). Sy voer aan dat subjekte onderdruk word deur die tussenspel van identiteitsmerkers en sisteme van onderdrukking wat inherent is daaraan. In hierdie verhandeling word die representasie van die vroulike subjek in Wyngaard se misdaadtrilogie uit ’n interseksionele invalshoek in oënskou geneem. Vanweë die gebruik van literatuur as subjek van analise in hierdie verhandeling, word swart feministiese denkskole oor die letterkunde ingereken as ontledingsinstrumente om Wyngaard se trilogie binne die ruim trajek van swart feministiese fiksie te posisioneer. Terselfdertyd word Wyngaard se subjektiwiteit as swart vroue-outeur krities bekyk omdat sy deur middel van haar tekste verantwoordelik is vir beeldskepping en voorstellings van vroulike subjekte. Aangesien Wyngaard se fiksie dikwels identiteitsaspekte ondervang wat verband hou met haar eie subjektiewe identiteit, sal die wyse bekyk word waarop selfdefiniëring en selfaktualisering in haar trilogie tot stand gebring word.Soos reeds genoem, het Wyngaard grense in die Afrikaanse letterkunde versit deur haar tot misdaadfiksie as genre te wend. As deel van populêre fiksie, staan misdaadfiksie tradisioneel bekend as ’n behoudende genre met ’n resepmatige onderbou wat, só beskou, nie gebruik word om progressiewe argumente in te voer nie. Hierdie aspek van die genre staan dus oënskynlik in kontras met die feministiese aard van Wyngaard se misdaadfiksie-trilogie. In hierdie verhandeling word gevolglik ook die funksionaliteit van genre en die impak daarvan op die beeldskepping van die vroulike subjek bekyk. Maniere waarop Wyngaard gevestigde genrekonvensies oorskry in ’n poging om feministiese benaderings te berde te bring, word in die besonder bestudeer. / South Africa

The city of Dar es Salaam in Tanzania is still influenced by its colonial structure. This is particularly apparent in the former 'European quarter' Oyster Bay and its perception by the inhabitants of other parts of the city. On the basis of aerial photographs and interviews with people who lived in the city under British colonial rule as well as younger inhabitants this study analyses the extent to which Oyster Bay can be seen as 'heterotopia' in Foucault's sense. The focus is upon the social function of Oyster Bay as an 'other place' for the rest of the city.

This dissertation approaches the work of South African/Botswanan novelist Bessie Head, especially the novel A Question of Power, as positioned within the critical framework of the postcolonial paradigm, the genius of which accommodates both African and African American literature without recourse to racial essentialism. A central problematic of postcolonial literary criticism is the ideological stance postcolonial authors adopt with respect to the ideology of the metropolis, whether on the one hand the stances they adopt are collusive, or on the other oppositional. A key contested concept is that of universality, which has been widely regarded as a witting or unwitting tool of the metropolis, having the effect of denigrating the colonial subject. It is my thesis that Bessie Head, neither entirely collusive nor oppositional, advocates an Africanist universality that paradoxically eliminates the bias implicit in metropolitan universality.

This thesis examines whether hip hop, and rap in particular, was an infrastructure for the lower-class of Black Americans in the 1980s and early 1990s to transport their concerns, knowledge, and protest from the margins to the center. It first demonstrates what issues Black Americans from the ghetto have raised in terms of content in the first place. Next is an examination of where and how hip hop created a platform for itself and how the institutionalization process unfolded. Finally, it is discussed whether and to what extent the infrastructure was successful. In general, and in a nutshell, the research revealed that rap had an impact, especially in the late 1980s and early 1990s and more and more hip hop artists appeared in the white American mainstream public sphere. Through various media and in different circles, they addressed topics that were otherwise less part of the discourse of this public, such as racism, the situation of subalterns in the ghetto or Black history. Thus, through rap, this knowledge flowed into the Center. Although women were given far less space to talk about Black feminism, for example, they too had consistently raised these issues.

abstract: Situated within seminal debates on the questions of liberation and justice viewed from the postcolonial context, this dissertation evaluates freedom narratives from both sides of the colonial divide during the period of high imperialism. Creating a transnational grouping of three diverse historical figures, E. M. Forster, M. K. Gandhi, and James Joyce, I argue for similarities in these writers’ narrative construction of “freedom” against colonial modernity. I argue that despite these writers’ widely disparate historical and cultural determinations, which uniquely particularize each of their freedom formulas as well as freedom “ideals” – the ideal of culture for Forster, renunciation for Gandhi and aesthetic apprehension for Joyce, these writers conceive of a commensurate/globally related form of “freedom” as postcoloniality and demonstrate cosmopolitan ambition. I also argue that the global form of postcoloniality they each practice can only be articulated through a close attention to each of their specific and local difference. The key contribution of the dissertation is to establish a new significance of the notion of fetishism for postcolonial studies, from both historical and theoretical perspectives. From a background that emphasizes the primacy of the concept of fetishism in its historical evolution within colonizing narratives of various Western discourses, especially fetish’s constitutive role in Enlightenment philosophy’s othering narrative of “primitive” natives, the work foregrounds a novel theoretical and narrative insight that the fetish demonstrates a unique potential to articulate/embody freedom as post-coloniality. Through a detailed critical analysis of each freedom narrative, I demonstrate how the clashes of particular contradictory cultural ideologies, in fact, determine each freedom narrative and how these contradictions are projected onto and galvanized by a fetish object(s). The work extends the ideas of Sigmund Freud, William Pietz, Homi Bhabha, Anne McClintock and Jacques Derrida on fetishism. Employing the framework of fetishism it brings into view similarities among the said three writers’ definition and practice of freedom. The work weighs in on critical debates between Marxist and Post-structural camps in postcolonial studies and proposes a new form of cosmopolitanism. / Dissertation/Thesis / Doctoral Dissertation English 2017

Storywall follows the journey of Shagun Mathur from his dysfunctional family to his life as an itinerant actor in a street theater troupe. Abused sexually in high school and playing the roles of both men and women, Shagun is ill-at-odds with his own body, a discomfort that comes strongly to the fore when he meets, and falls in love with Marc Wyndham, an Anglo-Indian musician.