Thesis (M.A.)--Miami University, Dept. of French and Italian, 2004. / Title from first page of PDF document. Includes bibliographical references (p. 60-62).

This dissertation is an ethnographic study of how members of the Indo-Guyanese community traveled from Guyana to New York City, carrying with them distinct understandings of Hinduism informed by their multiple dislocations and how they utilize religion as ideology and practice to help cultivate their identities as Indo-Guyanese Americans. I argue religion as a mobile concept, what I have termed as ‘religion on the move,’ gives a theoretical frame to understand how devotees adapt religion to help them navigate their identities in unknown territories. By studying more than devout individuals in places of worship, I have followed Caribbean Hinduism and Indo-Guyanese Hindus in New York City to various sites to appreciate how religion informs their experiences, operates on different scales (spatially, politically, and temporally), and negotiates power structures. I found that the Indo-Guyanese Hindu community asserts their ethnicity through Caribbean Hinduism to become visible, to overcome marginalization and to claim belonging in the United States. / 2019-10-17

This thesis examines the ways in which the interwar global order came to be theorised by African writers, and those of African descent, in specific territories bordering the Atlantic. It asks how those views can inform a richer understanding of the construction of our contemporary world. In particular, it seeks to understand the centrality of race to the imperial order and to many of the oppositional projects that emerged in relation to the order. A global order perspective can, it is argued, help to explain the salience of race to the interwar world as well as its enduring power beyond that period. Using as its primary sources the vibrant black print cultures and circuits of the interwar period, the thesis examines the close concomitance of national and transnational thinking during the 'Belle Époque'; the global vision of Marcus Garvey's black nationalism in the United States; the emergence of critical theorisations of colonialism across British-controlled West Africa; the languages of race and whiteness in interwar France, from the black press of Paris to the early texts of Négritude; and the role played by Haiti, Liberia, and Ethiopia - the only independent states of the period governed by Africans or African-descended people - as instantiations of the racialised nature of interwar sovereignty, targets of both imperial designs and anticolonial activism. Interrogating the conceptual boundaries between race, nationalism, and pan-nationalism, the thesis suggests that such affinities are best understood not as abstractly-definable and opposing doctrines, but as political projects that have emerged historically in relation to global order as a whole and out of specifically enabling material conditions. As well as assessing diverse bodies of writing in terms of their contribution to international theory, the thesis explores how changes in material conditions and imperial infrastructures - particularly the spread of newspapers - facilitated a range of counter-readings of dominant discourses, imaginative acts of traversal, and other practices of oppositional power, whose consequences reach far beyond the interwar period.

This study investigated Balinese ways of knowing, locating where they were found, their modes of transmission within the community, and the role schooling played in this transmission. Through this inquiry, the research interrogated the construction of identity in a Balinese village and the relationship of identity to indigeneity in Bali. Undertaking a praxis of decoloniality by adopting indigenous methodologies to center Balinese voices is key to producing research about Indigenous people. Adopting indigenous methodologies helped uncover Balinese practices that were crucial in the active construction of Balinese identity in Pejarakan Village. The researcher interviewed Elders in a Balinese village and supplemented their testimonies with digital multimodal artifacts. Balinese ways of knowing were found in practices within the village adat community, through testimonies of elders who were knowledge keepers of religious practices, healing traditions, performing arts, and village governance institutions of the adat and the subak. Every type of knowledge existed within a smaller community of practice within the village adat community. The village adat community was the Indigenous community of practice where these ways of knowing were found both in practices and textual traditions. People in Pejarakan Village constructed their Balinese identity by enacting Indigenous practices, which have evolved as a form of resistance to survival events and external forces of change. Including religion in schooling and community practices was critical for constructing identity and indigeneity. The revival of the Balinese language also played a critical role in articulating indigeneity. Through a local, regional, and national analysis of indigeneity, it was evident that the Balinese had moved towards emergent Indigeneity and were actively seeking self-determination. The inclusion of Balinese ways of knowing within education research creates methodological diversity by including indigenous methodologies to create testimonial and epistemic justice for people from the non-Western worlds. Like those from Bali, indigenous ways of knowing offer critical pathways an opportunity to learn about language, religion, schooling, sustainability of nature, and the community. The inclusion of Balinese ways of knowing within an ongoing Indigenous knowledge generation within the academy contributes to epistemic diversity.

No / The Crises of Postcoloniality in Africa is an assemblage of transdisciplinary essays that offer a spirited reflection on the debate and phenomenon of postcoloniality in Africa, including the changing patterns and ramifications of problems, challenges and opportunities associated with it. A key conceptual rhythm that runs through the various chapters of the book is that, far from being demised, postcoloniality is still firmly embedded in Africa, manifesting itself in both blatant and insidious forms. Among the important themes covered in the book include the concepts of postcolonialism, postcoloniality, and neocolonialism; Africa’s precolonial formations and the impact of colonialism; the enduring patterns of colonial legacies in Africa; the persistent contradictions between African indigenous institutions and western versions of modernity; the unravelling of the postcolonial state and issues of armed conflict, conflict intervention and peacebuilding; postcolonial imperialism in Africa and the US-led global war on terror, the historical and postcolonial contexts of gender relations in Africa, as well as pan-Africanism and regionalist approaches to redressing the crises of postcoloniality.

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The contentious topic of female circumcision brings together medical science, women's health activism, and national and international policy-making in pursuit of the common goal of protecting female bodies from harm. To date, most criticisms of female circumcision, practiced mainly in parts of Africa and Southwest Asia, have revolved around the dual issues of control of female bodies by a male-dominated social order and the health impacts surrounding the psychology of female sexuality and the functioning of female sex organs. As such, the recently-evolved campaign to eradicate female circumcision, alternatively termed "Female Genital Mutilation" (FGM), has formed into a discourse intertwining the politics of feminist activism with scientific knowledge and medical knowledge of the female body and sexuality. This project focuses on the ways in which this discourse constructs particular definitions of bodies and sexuality in a quest to generalize the practices of female circumcision as "harmful" and therefore dangerous. Given that the discourse aimed at eradicating practices of female circumcision, referred to in this study as "anti-FGM discourse," focuses mostly on harm done to women's bodies, this project critiques the assumption of universalism regarding female bodies and sexuality that is explicitly/implicitly embedded in such discourse. By questioning such universals, I look at the ways in which different stories regarding bodies and sexuality can emerge at the gaps of the anti-FGM discourse regarding female circumcision practices. I.e., are there other possible avenues for envisioning bodies which are subjugated and hence eliminated from the view by their rhetoric? While the main assumption within anti-FGM discourse is that bodies and sexuality are naturally given and therefore universal, contemporary theories in STS and feminism have stressed that bodies and sexualities are figures of historical and political performances, and that knowledge about them is locally situated. These perspectives redirect the typical assumption of bodies and sexuality as simply "biological" to a view of bodies as products of cultural imagination. This project shows that such perspectives have profound implications for understanding female circumcision practices by allowing different body narratives to emerge in the gaps of already established "truths." / Ph. D.

Yes / International Relations (IR) has increasingly paid attention to critical pedagogy. Feminist, post-colonial and poststructuralist IR scholarship, in particular, have long been advancing the discus-sions about how to create a pluralist and democratic classroom where ‘the others’ of politics can be heard by the students, who can critically reflect upon complex power relations in global politics. Despite its normative position, Critical Security Studies (CSS) has so far refrained from join-ing this pedagogical conversation. Deriving from the literatures of postcolonial and feminist pedagogical practices, it is argued that an IR scholar in the area of CSS can contribute to the pro-duction of a critical political subject in the 'uncomfortable classroom', who reflects on violent practices of security. Three pedagogical methods will be introduced: engaging with the students’ lifeworlds, revealing the positionality of security knowledge claims, and opening up the class-room to the choices about how the youth’s agency can be performed beyond the classroom. The argument is illustrated through the case of forced migration with specific reference to IR and Pol-itics students’ perceptions of Syrian refugees in Turkey. The article advances the discussions in critical IR pedagogy and encourages CSS scholarship to focus on teaching in accordance with its normative position. / The research was partly supported by HM Government funding to MK Dhami.

India’s foreign policy behaviour often challenges conventional theories of international relations (IR). Why for instance, did India wait 24 years after its first nuclear test to conduct another test? In the wake of its nuclear tests, why did the political leadership highlight the scientific achievements more than the military implications and why did it characterise India’s nuclear program as being unique in terms of its restraint and its commitment to total disarmament? Why did India engage in a discourse of friendship with China rather than adopt the anti-communist stance of other democratic states? These are just some of the questions that cannot be adequately explained by the positivist and ahistorical traditions of IR that down-play the connection between state identity and foreign policy or analyse foreign policy as the product of pre-existing realities, subjectivities and interpretive dispositions. An approach that takes into account the historical and cultural context of the construction of state identity however, offers a fuller understanding of India’s foreign policy behaviour. Using genealogy and the idea of identity performativity, this thesis analyses India’s foreign policy discourse as a representational practice which, through various codings of sex, gender and race, enacts India’s postcolonial identity. The thesis uses the findings of five case studies – India’s relationship with China, its nuclear politics, its relations with its South Asian neighbours and its interventions in Pakistan and Sri Lanka – to suggest that a deep ambivalence toward Western modernity lies at the heart of India’s postcolonial identity and, therefore, the foreign policy discourse that enacts it. This ambivalence arises because, on the one hand, Indian nationalists accepted colonial narratives in which the backwardness of ‘Indian civilisation’ led to its degeneration, but on the other hand, they recognised the need to advance a critique of Western modernity and its deep imbrication with colonialism. The result is a striving for a postcolonial modernity that is not only imitative but strives to be distinctly different and superior to Western modernity by being culturally and morally grounded. Thus, India is fashioned as a postcolonial civilisational-state that brings to international affairs a tradition of morality and ethical conduct which it derives from its civilisational heritage. This thesis argues that in order to comprehend the apparently inexplicable aspects of Indian foreign policy it is crucial to understand this self-fashioning. / Thesis (Ph.D.) -- University of Adelaide, School of History and Politics, 2008

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Oregon, 2002. / Typescript. Includes vita and abstract. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 151-166). Also available for download via the World Wide Web; free to University of Oregon users.