Thesis (Ph. D.)--UCLA, 2008. / Vita. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 233-230).

This project investigates the emergence of near-future fiction in the post-colonial African novel. Analyzing The Rape of Shavi (1983) by Buchi Emecheta, Osiris Rising (1995) by Ayi Kwei Armah, Wizard of the Crow (2006) by Ngugi wa Thiong'o, and Big Bishop Roko and the Altar Gangsters (2006) by B. Kojo Laing, I gauge the impact of African science fiction (sf) on issues of historicity, economics, statism and localized identities and how these have adapted or are adapting to an increasingly globalized and technophilic world. Identifying sf's roots in the European travelogue, I attend to the way each author codes technology in the text and the manners in which technophilic spaces exacerbate or ease the frequent tension between modernity and tradition in African literature. By reading these works against novels by, among others, Thomas Pynchon, Ishmael Reed, Robert Heinlein, and Chinua Achebe, I conclude that recent developments in the African sf novel offer a compelling critique on the genre's colonial heritage and have progressively indigenized sf by wedding it to local traditions of orature and myth. While Black African sf production has been historically overlooked in literary studies, it is important to revisit early moves in the direction of African near-future fiction in order to contextualize the rising interest in the genre on the part of African authors.

This thesis concerns the colonial subject, subjectivity, and resistance in postcolonial theory and literature. It argues that contemporary attempts within the practice of postcolonial theory to retrieve a colonial subject from a representation that issues from a dominating colonial discourse can only be met with failure. Thus, this thesis follows Spivak's claim that the colonial subject is merely a production of positions granted by its very representation, which is to say, a given. However, this thesis also recognises that Spivak's assertion cannot account for moments of resistance to colonial discourse that abound in postcolonial literature. As such, this thesis claims that the colonial subject is not wholly given; that if one approaches the colonial subject through Gilles Deleuze's re-writing of subjectivity, demonstrated in the concept of 'the body without organs', then a transcendent configuration of the colonial subject is revealed. In elucidating this claim, this thesis turns to the fiction of South African academic and novelist, J.M. Coetzee. It is argued that Coetzee writes the Other by 'staging it', that is by testing the limits and eventually going beyond the authoritarian regime of representation. Thus, this thesis is constructed by three main chapters that offer both a rethinking of postcolonial theory in light of the work of Deleuze, and a reading of a selected cynosure of texts authored by Coetzee. The first chapter is a reading of Coetzee's Dusklands that concentrates on the body as a site of resistance to the manoeuvres of representation, demonstrating it to be a site that takes authority in the production of truth from the 'objective', structured methodology of reason, while the second chapter offers a reading of Coetzee's Waiting for the Barbarians that interrogates the postcolonial concern with 'space'. It is in this novel that Coetzee renders space in terms of its dynamic relationship with the nomad, which ultimately problematises the colonial endeavour to organise, represent, and thereby, 'know' the world. The final chapter engages Coetzee's Foe by way of a sustained critique of the operation of language, and demonstrates how Coetzee manages to test the boundaries of representation through language use. As such, each chapter offers a specific account of an entire programme that tends towards the transgression of the binds organised by the operation of representation.

This dissertation employs the methodologies of postcolonial theory and hyperreal theory (following Baudrillard), in order to investigate articulations of identity, nation and representation in contemporary Australian poetry. Informed by a comparative analysis of contemporary Latin American poetry and cultural theory (in translation), as a means of re-examining the Australian context, this dissertation develops a new transnational model of Australian poetics. The central thesis of this dissertation is that contemporary Australian poetry engages with the postcolonial at its limits. That is, at those sites of postcoloniality that are already mapped by theory, but also at those that occur beyond postcolonial theory. The hyperreal is understood as one such limit, traceable within the poetry but silenced in conventional postcolonial theory. As another limit to the postcolonial, this dissertation reads Latin American poetry and theory, in whose texts postcolonial theory is actively resisted, but where postcolonial and hyperreal poetics nevertheless intersect. The original critical context constructed by this dissertation enables a new set of readings of Australian identity through its poetry. Within this new interpretative context, the readings of contemporary Australian poetry articulate a psycho-social postcoloniality; offer a template for future transactions between national poetry and global politics; and develop a model of the postcolonial hyperreal.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Hong Kong, 2007. / Title proper from title frame. Also available in printed format.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Nevada, Reno, 2005. / "August 2005." Includes bibliographical references (leaves 229-239). Online version available on the World Wide Web. Library also has microfilm. Ann Arbor, Mich. : ProQuest Information and Learning Company, [2005]. 1 microfilm reel ; 35 mm.

Dissertation (Ph.D.)--The University of North Carolina at Greensboro, 2008. / Directed by Scott Romine; submitted to the Dept. of English. Title from PDF t.p. (viewed Jan. 28, 2010). Includes bibliographical references (p. 240-254).

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of California, San Diego, 2009. / Title from first page of PDF file (viewed February 11, 2010). Available via ProQuest Digital Dissertations. Vita. Includes bibliographical references (p. 155-168).

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of California, San Diego, 2003. / Vita. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 290-300).

Thesis (Ph.D.)--McMaster University, 2003. / Advisor: Susie O'Brien. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 150-166). Also available via World Wide Web.