Thesis (Ph. D.)--Ohio State University, 2006. / Full text release at OhioLINK's ETD Center delayed at author's request

My dissertation, The Question of Cross-Cultural Understanding in the Transcultural Travel Narratives about Post-1949 China, aims to intervene in the genre of travel writing and its critical scholarship by studying a flourishing but under-explored archive. Travel literature about (post-) Communist China is abundant and has been proliferating since 1979 when China began to implement its open-door policy. Yet its scholarship is surprisingly scanty. Meanwhile, in the field of travel literature studies, many critics read the genre as one that articulates Western imperialism, an archive where peoples and cultures are defined within conveniently maintained boundaries between home and abroad, West and non-West. Othersin the field of literary and cultural studies as well as other disciplineshave started to question the binary power relationship. However, some of this work may well reinforce the binary opposition, seeking only evidences of the travellers powerlessness in relation to the native; and some, conceiving travel only on a geographical plane, seems unable to transcend the dichotomy of home and abroad, East and West at a theoretical level. My project is committed to further interrogating the binarism constructed by the genre of travel and its scholarship. My intervention is not to argue who gets an upper hand in a hierarchical relationship, but to challenge the stability of the hierarchy by foregrounding the contingency and complexity of cross-cultural relationships. My dissertation engages with the key issue of cross-cultural understanding and explicates various modalities of the travellers interpretation of otherness. By reading Canadian journalist Jan Wong, geophysicist Jock Tuzo Wilson, US Peace Corps volunteer Peter Hessler, American anthropologist Hill Gates, and humanist geographer Yi-Fu Tuan, I examine the ways in which the Western traveller negotiates and interprets foreignness, and probe the consequences of transcultural interactions. The overall argument of my dissertationin dialogue with other scholarship in the fieldis that travel not only (re)produces cultural differences but also paradoxically engenders a cosmopolitan potential that recognizes but transcends them. / English

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.

Two recent tendencies are brought together in this study; the emergence of a postcolonial academic discipline and the restructuring of international development aid and cooperation. Researchers have tried to advocate a postcolonial perspective in policies for international development. This study investigates to what extent this has been done in key documents from SIDA and USAID. A qualitative dimensional analysis was performed from which the results are then used for a comparative analysis. The findings show that documents from both agencies only to a limited extent express a postcolonial perspective, though; documents from SIDA show a stronger prevalence of a postcolonial perspective in some dimension and in the overall index. As demonstrated with the MIP index, both agencies policy documents have more non-postcolonialist rhetoric. The documents demonstrate a development discourse in which the donor countries own national development is prioritized at the cost of that of the receiver countries.

This thesis employs postcolonial theory, a case study methodology, semi-structured interviews, and archival research to understand Mi’kmaq and Maliseet peoples’ sporting experiences in the Maritimes region of Canada. Two publishable papers comprise this thesis. The first paper analyzes the obstacles the participants faced and the positive experiences they had in sport. The second paper examines the ways in which the concept of “difference” was reproduced and challenged through the participants’ involvement in mainstream and all-Native sporting environments. Together, these papers bring much needed scholarly attention to Mi’kmaq and Maliseet peoples’ involvement in sport in the Maritimes, while they also make a contribution to the existing body of literature concerning Aboriginal peoples’ sport participation in Canada.

The tendency to stage appreciation for and attention to nature as a passive, guiltless enterprise was necessary for eighteenth-century colonial claims to space, but it also remains a very deeply entrenched aspect of environmentalist attitudes today. Indeed, innovations that shaped the technological interpretation and inscription of place in the latter eighteenth century have strongly situated contemporary North American environmental discourses.<p>This thesis explores the methods of spatial representation in Samuel Hearnes <i>A Journey from Prince of Waless Fort, in Hudsons Bay, to the Northern Ocean</i>(1795) and William Bartrams <i>Travels Through North and South Carolina, Georgia, East and West Florida, The Cherokee Country, The Extensive Territories of the Muscogulges or Creek Confederacy, and the Country of the Choctaws</i> (1792). Both ecocritical and postcolonial methods underlay an analysis of the discourses and rhetorics of space exhibited in the North American travel writing of these two late-eighteenth-century writers. A first move monitors how landscape accrues not only as a product of descriptive techniques, frames, and screens, but also as a process whereby narrative identity is formed against and within a represented landscape. A second move locates these texts as versions of Mary Louise Pratts anti-conquest, in which the hero-explorer of colonial encounter is staged as both passive and innocent.<p>Two primary results from this research into the relationship between literature and environment are reported. First, according to conventions of ecocritical analysis, Hearne and Bartram implement two very different modes of spatial representation in travel narratives from the same period; in the broadest strokes, Hearnes text is deeply anthropocentric and only partially engages in eighteenth-century vogues of natural history, while Bartrams is compellingly and precociously ecocentric as well as deeply invested in the commerce of Linnaean systemizations of nature that revolutionized natural history in the period. Second, this disparity in representational method is correlated not only with variances in the ecological (or green) sensibilities of the authors, but also with distinctions in the colonial functionality of the texts, verifying that literature of place, despite the putative object of description, always already maintains significant valencies in social registers.

This thesis employs postcolonial theory, a case study methodology, semi-structured interviews, and archival research to understand Mi’kmaq and Maliseet peoples’ sporting experiences in the Maritimes region of Canada. Two publishable papers comprise this thesis. The first paper analyzes the obstacles the participants faced and the positive experiences they had in sport. The second paper examines the ways in which the concept of “difference” was reproduced and challenged through the participants’ involvement in mainstream and all-Native sporting environments. Together, these papers bring much needed scholarly attention to Mi’kmaq and Maliseet peoples’ involvement in sport in the Maritimes, while they also make a contribution to the existing body of literature concerning Aboriginal peoples’ sport participation in Canada.

The tendency to stage appreciation for and attention to nature as a passive, guiltless enterprise was necessary for eighteenth-century colonial claims to space, but it also remains a very deeply entrenched aspect of environmentalist attitudes today. Indeed, innovations that shaped the technological interpretation and inscription of place in the latter eighteenth century have strongly situated contemporary North American environmental discourses.<p>This thesis explores the methods of spatial representation in Samuel Hearnes <i>A Journey from Prince of Waless Fort, in Hudsons Bay, to the Northern Ocean</i>(1795) and William Bartrams <i>Travels Through North and South Carolina, Georgia, East and West Florida, The Cherokee Country, The Extensive Territories of the Muscogulges or Creek Confederacy, and the Country of the Choctaws</i> (1792). Both ecocritical and postcolonial methods underlay an analysis of the discourses and rhetorics of space exhibited in the North American travel writing of these two late-eighteenth-century writers. A first move monitors how landscape accrues not only as a product of descriptive techniques, frames, and screens, but also as a process whereby narrative identity is formed against and within a represented landscape. A second move locates these texts as versions of Mary Louise Pratts anti-conquest, in which the hero-explorer of colonial encounter is staged as both passive and innocent.<p>Two primary results from this research into the relationship between literature and environment are reported. First, according to conventions of ecocritical analysis, Hearne and Bartram implement two very different modes of spatial representation in travel narratives from the same period; in the broadest strokes, Hearnes text is deeply anthropocentric and only partially engages in eighteenth-century vogues of natural history, while Bartrams is compellingly and precociously ecocentric as well as deeply invested in the commerce of Linnaean systemizations of nature that revolutionized natural history in the period. Second, this disparity in representational method is correlated not only with variances in the ecological (or green) sensibilities of the authors, but also with distinctions in the colonial functionality of the texts, verifying that literature of place, despite the putative object of description, always already maintains significant valencies in social registers.

In this thesis I have searched for and analyzed possible mechanisms of domination and strategies for resistance in the novel La isla bajo el mar by Isabel Allende. This was done with a post-colonial and feminist perspective, focusing on the structural divisions that can be found within these frameworks and using binary oppositions to identify different unequal power relations. These oppositions showed me the unjust structures that are being present in the novel, and made it easier to identify the mechanisms used to oppress certain groups of people. After identifying the mechanisms of oppression, I could also point out the strategies of resistance used by Teté, the main character, and oppressed groups together to resist this domination and the power of the norms in society.

This essay discusses the roles of the outsider and the 'other' in the novel Life &amp; Times of Michael K, published in 1983, by J.M. Coetzee through a postcolonial reading with perspectives borrowed from narrative analysis. The protagonist Michael K is an 'other' in the eyes of the other characters in the novel and this perception is further enhanced by the narrative situation. In addition to being the 'other', and thereby deprived of power, Michael K transforms himself into an outsider. This essay claims that by being the outsider the protagonist Michael K becomes empowered.