This essay discusses how Mark Twain in the novel Adventures of Huckleberry Finn uses the description of the white American Christian civilization in order to overturn the colonial notion of white supremacy. This is done through juxtaposing the characterization of the people of the white American civilization and the people that are alienated or ‘other’. The Grangerford family, the Widow and Miss Watson, and Colonel Sherburn are brought up as examples of the white American civilization’s hypocrisy and double standard in the novel. The analysis focuses on how these supposedly Christian characters do not follow the Christian ethics and sermon teaching even though they claim to do so. The colonial notion of the white western civilization’s supremacy over other people’s societies is thus overturned by Twain’s description of the immorality of this white American society. As opposed to this, the people who are outside of this society and who do not label themselves as Christians, prove to be those who in reality follow the Christian notion of brotherly love towards everybody, no matter the social standing or skin color of the person in need. Furthermore, Huck’s moral fight whether or not he should continue to help the runaway slave Jim to freedom or turn him in to the slave owner Miss Watson, is crucial. Through the portrait of this inner struggle, Twain pinpoints the absurdity of the supremacy of such an immoral law. The law of society was upheld with an almost religious devotion, and the irony in this works to further overturn the notion of the white American civilization’s supremacy.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Oregon, 2000. / Typescript. Includes vita and abstract. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 372-391). Also available for download via the World Wide Web; free to University of Oregon users.

This dissertation is concerned with the gendered discourse of nation and home where women carry the symbolic duty of holders of a pure, uncontaminated culture passively confined to the domestic space. I consider two commonplace tropes, the woman-as-nation metaphor and the Victorian angel in the house, both of which convey a limited view of women's agency and her significance in simultaneously resisting and ratifying patriarchal visions of nation and gender. The novels in this study document various phases of nation building under periods of colonialism and postcolonialism, and each features the plight of women affected by the realities of sham democracies and political instability. My analysis rests on the claim that postcolonial authors continue the inquiries into the ironic and futile foundations on which nation and identity is built which define modernist despair. I assert the value in understanding how women respond to disillusionment across cultures in an attempt to recover the experience of women and her political consciousness, granting a relevance to the role women play in textual deliberations on political skepticism and political idealism often reserved for male actors.

This dissertation examined how identity was negotiated through dance and how African dance pedagogies challenged colonial legacy and decolonized the body from cultural and political oppression. To explore this topic, I examine two distinct dance contexts, one in Kampala, Uganda (East Africa) and the other in Tucson, Arizona (United States). The Kampala Study focused on the dance practices of a young man named Mugisha Johnson. Johnson was a member and dance teacher for Umbanno, a Rwandese cultural organization that formed as a consequence of the 1990s genocide; they taught Rwandese youth their cultural dances, songs, music, and language in Uganda. The Tucson Study took place in Tucson, Arizona and highlighted the work of the Dambe Project, a nonprofit organization that specialized in African performing arts education. More specifically, it examined the dance program at a local high school and focused on the experiences of the dance students.Four common threads ran through each of the research studies. First, both studies dance pedagogies derived from community-based organizations doing dance education. Second, both organizations served youth populations. Third, the organization both promoted dance expressions that had been historically oppressed. Lastly, my research positionality as a dance student in the Kampala Study and as a dance teacher in the Tucson Study provided a holistic ethnographic picture of an overarching autobiographical narrative about African dance of the diaspora.This research adds to the professional literature an examination of a bodily discourse as emphasized by Desmond (1994); it considers the way dance helps people shed the negative cultural and psychological effects of colonialism.The methodology used was dance ethnography, which looks at the body experiences and "treats dance as a kind of cultural knowledge and body movement as a link to the mental and emotional world of human beings" (Thomas, 2003, p.83). Data was collected through participant- observation, interviews, personal dance study and performance, video recordings, and photography. The research found in two separate ethnographies, dance pedagogies stimulating identity work that challenged colonial power by affirming an indigenous body practice and knowledge.

In this critical inquiry, I look at how individuals who experience social, cultural and economic exclusion in postcolonial societies construct cultural identities and relationships with what they perceive as the dominant cultures of their countries through the process of schooling. Here, the term 'postcolonial' refers to events, places, and conditions that are situated after periods of colonization, and implicate individuals whose histories are linked to colonizers and colonized peoples. / This thesis discusses theoretical, political, philosophical and methodological issues around the design, implementation, interpretation and report of an ethnographic inquiry carried out in Brazil (Sao Paulo area) and southern France in 2004-2005. In this project, I organized focus groups of adolescents from marginalized communities in those two locations with the intention to generate critical dialogues about their experience of schooling and the dynamics between what they perceived as their cultural identity, their school's culture, and the culture of their countries. More than a mere survey of the accommodation and representation of 'minority' histories and peoples in France and Brazil, this study strives to explore and compare how the societal apparatuses of those two countries, with a particular emphasis on schooling, produce categories of cultural difference and inscribe them onto societal subjects. Thus, I carried out my inquiry with the belief that schooling is not simply a site of cultural transmission and reproduction, but also of cultural and identity production: a matrix that recreates, renegotiates, and institutionalizes hierarchical boundaries of difference that become actualized in students' subjectivities (Hall, 1999).

No description available.

This thesis will read James Joyce's novel A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man as a text that is fundamentally concerned with ecological issues, demonstrating awareness of the land beyond and outside of Dublin. Joyce frequently depicts the colonization of Ireland as centered on the control of land in the form of agriculture, which he brings into the political foreground of the novel's characters. I will argue further that this novel is critical of the violent nationalist rhetoric and insurrections of early 1900s Ireland, a movement which perpetuated the agricultural control of land. As an effective rebellion to this aporia, which Joseph Valente has termed “the metrocolonial double bind,” I will read the novel’s queer ecology, a non-violent resistance that moves beyond constricting categories of human/animal, urban/rural, and opens up the world for novel ways of living and being.

The volume of poetry Kleur kom nooit alleen nie (Colour never comes on its own) by Antjie Krog, is analysed extensively in this thesis. The main focus of the study is the way in which metaphors associated with boundaries, bordering, transgression and the crossing of boundaries are used to represent the struggle to come to terms with a traumatic past and to rethink new possibilities of co-existence in the future. In the poems the boundaries of the word, the text and the genre of poetry, as well as geographical and political boundaries and the boundaries of gender, especially the boundaries instituted by the patriarchal order, are challenged. The narration of alternative histories to supplement and correct documented history may also be considered as a boundary-crossing activity. Although colour is the most obvious metaphor of the divisions between people and is indeed used as the central metaphor throughout the volume, many other, sometimes more subtle examples of boundaries and bordering are explored and developed. There is for instance a strong focus on the psychological complexity of creativity and of writing poetry. The poet's withdrawal to a liminal zone which incorporates the almost spiritual dimension of her creative activities clearly forms a kind of leitmotiv in the collection. The text clearly suggests that the artist as a liminal figure achieves an enhanced ability to understand the forces at work in a community. Sharing the results of this insight from the liminal zone with the community implies that the artist can stimulate innovative processes which will obliterate boundaries and enable people to co-exist peacefully. Although the crossing of borders in most cases result in being wounded, there are also the possibilities of recovery and healing. The resultant scars are often regarded as strong identity-shaping features in people. Krog argues that language plays a decisive role in processes of reconciliation and that the text itself becomes a threshold area where different discourses interact and cross-fertilise one another. The structure of the thesis reflects the theoretical approach and is an attempt to present a balanced discussion of the aesthetic and the ideological aspects of Kleur kom nooit alleen nie as a poetic text. Appropriate theories are implemented to do justice to both the aesthetic qualities and the ideological undercurrents of single poems as well as the volume as such. Two discourses are therefore superimposed in order to present an adequate reading of this polyphonic and ambivalent text. 'The exploration of the varied manifestations of the boundary forms a continuous thematic line throughout the thesis but related themes such as identity, liminality and hybridity are also incorporated. On account of the postmodernistic nature of the text, the basic theoretical framework is that of literary postmodernism, with narrativity of the text, intertextuality, post-colonialism and feminism as its most significant manifestations. / Thesis (Ph.D. (Afrikaans and Dutch))--North-West University, Potchefstroom Campus, 2007.

The volume of poetry Kleur kom nooit alleen nie (Colour never comes on its own) by Antjie Krog, is analysed extensively in this thesis. The main focus of the study is the way in which metaphors associated with boundaries, bordering, transgression and the crossing of boundaries are used to represent the struggle to come to terms with a traumatic past and to rethink new possibilities of co-existence in the future. In the poems the boundaries of the word, the text and the genre of poetry, as well as geographical and political boundaries and the boundaries of gender, especially the boundaries instituted by the patriarchal order, are challenged. The narration of alternative histories to supplement and correct documented history may also be considered as a boundary-crossing activity. Although colour is the most obvious metaphor of the divisions between people and is indeed used as the central metaphor throughout the volume, many other, sometimes more subtle examples of boundaries and bordering are explored and developed. There is for instance a strong focus on the psychological complexity of creativity and of writing poetry. The poet's withdrawal to a liminal zone which incorporates the almost spiritual dimension of her creative activities clearly forms a kind of leitmotiv in the collection. The text clearly suggests that the artist as a liminal figure achieves an enhanced ability to understand the forces at work in a community. Sharing the results of this insight from the liminal zone with the community implies that the artist can stimulate innovative processes which will obliterate boundaries and enable people to co-exist peacefully. Although the crossing of borders in most cases result in being wounded, there are also the possibilities of recovery and healing. The resultant scars are often regarded as strong identity-shaping features in people. Krog argues that language plays a decisive role in processes of reconciliation and that the text itself becomes a threshold area where different discourses interact and cross-fertilise one another. The structure of the thesis reflects the theoretical approach and is an attempt to present a balanced discussion of the aesthetic and the ideological aspects of Kleur kom nooit alleen nie as a poetic text. Appropriate theories are implemented to do justice to both the aesthetic qualities and the ideological undercurrents of single poems as well as the volume as such. Two discourses are therefore superimposed in order to present an adequate reading of this polyphonic and ambivalent text. 'The exploration of the varied manifestations of the boundary forms a continuous thematic line throughout the thesis but related themes such as identity, liminality and hybridity are also incorporated. On account of the postmodernistic nature of the text, the basic theoretical framework is that of literary postmodernism, with narrativity of the text, intertextuality, post-colonialism and feminism as its most significant manifestations. / Thesis (Ph.D. (Afrikaans and Dutch))--North-West University, Potchefstroom Campus, 2007.

This essay argues that Jamaica Kincaid’s The Autobiography of My Mother depicts how the indigenous colonized in Dominica are living ‘unhomely lives’ and that their experience is one of the double consciousness. i.e. when a person see the world through different "lenses." The person does not only have a dual personality but also feels the notion of having different roles in society, such as having a black identity and at the same time conforming to the stereotypical norms of the white society for a black person. Therefore, the person sees the world, and oneself, through one’s own “black” lens and the “white” lens at the same time. Subsequently, with a setting full of diversities, the novel depicts a colonial background where the characters have been ascribed certain features to their persona. Furthermore, the novel uses metaphors to show a futile endeavor of finding identity of the main characters in an ineluctable power structure. By utilizing the postcolonial theoretical framework; mainly Du Bois’s notion on ‘double consciousness’ and Bhabha’s term ‘unhomely lives’ which means to grow up between two cultures, to live on borders and in margins and not feel at ease in either sides, expands the readers understanding of the text. A central aspect of the novel is the alienation of an individual’s personal identity in the context of a postcolonial society. Therefore, the psychology of the novel’s characters will be a major theme of this essay. Nevertheless, the novel shows that it is hard for the characters Alfred and Xuela to break free from the bonds of society.