"My thesis compares Arundhati Roy’s The God of Small Things and Anuradha Roy’s Sleeping on Jupiter in order to demonstrate how a) each text is a product of its moment and a reflection of corresponding critical thought and b) how an inversion of gothic tropes in Sleeping reflects a changed world dynamic, a melancholic exploration of epistemological and traumatic loss that can be seen not only as a recognition of the continued power of oppressive systems but a reflection on the failure of cosmopolitanism to “rescue” the global subject from her own isolation and recolonization. I claim that this is not only demonstrated by a change in form and how gothic tropes are presented, but in how homosexuality and deviant sexuality in particular is treated, a reminder that even in texts that attempt to condemn and reject colonizing tendencies, the political moment and its theoretical appendages continue to haunt postcolonial discourse, enabling recolonization and restratifying spaces of resistance. I claim that this recognition need not be totalizing or nihilistic, but that in the recognition itself lies the possibility for resistance, an act of rebellion that must be constantly re-enacted in order to deterritorialize what has been captured and displaced, a fluid and imaginative negotiation that, much like literature, is limitless in interpretation and offers readers constant and multiplicitous possibilities for agency in the face of equally fluid oppressive systems."--Provided by the author.

Frida Kahlo has become increasingly popular as a commodity to signify female empowerment or an exotic femininity, and her face has inspired numerous images by modern day artists and graphic designers. The market for posters and decorative objects which use new portraits of Kahlo is booming and often target young women as consumers.This study critically explores the ethnical, cultural and gender constructions of Frida Kahlo as a symbolic as well as literal feminist poster girl on the western market. Furthermore, it examines how these constructions function as postcolonial discursive practices. The study finds that as Kahlo is accepted as a western symbol, her embodied ethnicity and cultural belonging are erased and replaced by easily identified symbols of “strategic essentialism”, such as accessories and Mexican plants. The sexuality, frailty, and disabilities of her body are erased, and her features are westernised to make her more feminine and acceptable as a commodity. This in combination with reoccurring passivity mean that empowerment is portrayed as an act of being rather than doing and that the femininity is played up as an aspect of female empowerment.

Syftet med denna uppsats är att undersöka beskrivningen av kanadensiska urinvånare i kanadensiska historieläroböcker, från ett postkolonialt perspektiv,för att se om de innehåller någon form av fördomar. Med en kvalitativ metod,och i jämförelse med tidigare genomförda studier inom samma område, analyseras fyra kanadensiska historieläroböcker för gymnasinivå. mina sammanfattningar visar att läroböcker är mindre fördomsfulla idag än för tjugo år sedan, men från ett postkolonialt teoretiskt perpsektiv innehåller de fortfarande tendenser av en världsuppfattning som stammar från kolonialt tänkande. / The aim of this study is to examine the portrayal of Canadian Natives in Canadian history textbooks, through a postcolonial theory, to see if they contain bias or prejudices. With a qualitative method, and in comparison to previously conducted studies of textbook bias, four Canadian high-school history textbooks are analyzed. My conclusions show that textbooks are less bias than twenty years ago, but that they from a postcolonial theory perspective still carry tendencies of colonial conceptions.

The themes of empire, nationality, and self-imposed exile constitute underexplored topics in critical discussions of modernist author Malcolm Lowry (1909-1957). Until recently, most academic studies have approached his work from biographical, mythological, and psychoanalytic perspectives. While a few studies have performed historical readings of his novels, such investigations tend, primarily, to focus on his engagement with western literary and theoretical movements of the early twentieth century. Of the few studies that address the cross-cultural reach of his novels, most are limited to discussions of Mexican history and traditions, thus prioritizing a specific geographical region when they might, instead, illuminate the author’s career-long engagement with cultural developments on a world scale—historical realignments triggered by wartime anxieties and the impending dissolution of the British Empire. Employing an interpretive framework that synthesizes postcolonial theory, cultural anthropology, and contemporary theories of the transnational, I demonstrate how the exile-heroes of three of Lowry’s novels—Ultramarine (1933), Under the Volcano (1947), and Dark as the Grave Wherein My Friend is Laid (1968)—struggle to navigate the experience of social liminality, dramatizing, in the process, an increasingly fraught relationship between English expatriates and imperial models of English national identity. Rejecting the well-known mythical hero’s cyclical quest, so often culminating in a triumphant return to society, the Lowrian exile-hero, instead, remains in a liminal state, emblematizing, through persistent cultural questioning, a transnational concept of identity that resists institutionally prescribed models of thought and behavior.

This thesis explores the problem of self-empowerment for the French Caribbean Black woman as presented in the novels Moi, Tituba, sorcière...Noire de Salem and Pluie et vent sur Télumée Miracle. The respective authors, Maryse Condé and Simone Schwarz- Bart, use fiction to convey the plight of women in the French Caribbean. They successfully create characters who refuse marginalization imposed by their patriarchal and oppressive societies. Condé’s novel, set in the 17th century first in Barbados, and then in Puritan New England depicts the challenges Tituba overcomes in reaching liberation. Schwarz-Bart presents the story of Télumée, set in Guadeloupe at the beginning of the 20th century. My study focuses specifically on the characters of Tituba and Télumée to show ways that they thwart the dominant social structures and norms that seek to disempower them. It reveals ways that Condé and Schwarz-Bart make use of literature to reverse European perceptions of gender and race. Consequently, the literary fictions they create suggest possible ways of escaping marginalization and refusing racial and gendered subjugation. / Master of Arts

This project attempts to bridge conversations between the predominantly Western canon of animal studies and the frequently humanist approach to postcolonial African studies. Drawing on these sometimes incompatible fields, this thesis proposes two premises that emerge from close readings of African cultural texts. First, “Africa” as a discursive construct has long been associated with animals, animality, and the category of the nonhuman, evident in, to give some examples, the current touristic promotion across the globe of African wildlife as an essential part of its continental identity, local and global anxieties over zoonotic transmissions of disease, and the history of race science’s preoccupation with animalizing black and indigenous African bodies. My second premise suggests that in postcolonial and especially African contexts ostensibly “human” concerns are inextricably tied to both the categorical limitations imposed by imperial paradigms of animalization and the precarious existence of nonhuman animals themselves, concern for whom is often occluded in anthropocentric postcolonial discourse. In my dissertation, I examine the role that texts play in directing affective relations of concern locally and globally, reading fictional texts as well as news media, conservation literature, and tourist advertisements. Through these works I examine the complex and often cantankerous politics of cultivating interspecies concern in postcolonial contexts, ranging from the globalized commodification of African wildlife and the dubious international policies that ostensibly protect it, the geography of the North American safari park, the animalization of queer bodies by African state leaders, textual representations of interspecies intimacy, and accounts of the Rwandan genocide. / Dissertation / Doctor of Philosophy (PhD) / This thesis responds to the question of how we show concern for animals in postcolonial, globalized, and postconflict worlds. Drawing on the example of multiple texts in African literature, film, and other media, it explores how Africa itself has long been construed in the global imagination as a zone associated with animality. This association appears in texts produced within the West and Africa whose accounts of the continent imagine it to be outside the realm of human ethical concern. Demonstrating how exclusive human ethical concern is for African lives, both human and animal, this thesis argues for an ethics of concern that does not revolve around exclusively the human in postcolonial African studies.

No description available.

No description available.

No description available.

The purpose of this bachelor’s thesis is to analyze and deepen the understanding of how the tourist company “Airbnb” explains their responsibility to respect human rights as well as how they explain their involvement in the illegal settlements in the West Bank. These two aspects are the focus of the two research questions that the study aims to answer. Accordingly, this study aims to explore concepts such as ethics and human rights as well as their impact on businesses’ behavior. To achieve the purpose of the study, seven statements on Airbnb’s explanation to respect human rights, as well as four statements on their involvement in the occupied West Bank are analyzed through a discourse analysis. More specifically, analytical tools conducted by Jørgensen and Phillips are used in the analysis to reveal underlying themes and patterns. The study is conducted through postcolonialism as a theoretical prism, more specifically orientalism. A short background on the connection between colonialism and tourism, the Israeli occupation’s impact on tourism in the West Bank as well as Airbnb’s specific role in the illegal settlements is presented in the study. Thereafter the statements are analyzed with the help of the discursive analytical tools to answer the research questions. A fundamental finding of the study is Airbnb’s inconsistency in their statements contra their behaviour since they, in the statements, emphasize respecting human rights and combating discrimination while they on the other hand justify operating in the illegally occupied West Bank, knowingly contributing to legitimizing and upholding human suffering and human rights violations. Another essential finding is the importance of human rights activists and their criticism’s ability to influence businesses in fear of harming their brand and reputation.