The Dark Valley Period and its resultant Asia Pacific War remains an open question in Japan; this era is consistently revisited in both public debates over textbooks and state apology as well as in popular culture and literature. The discussion of the Dark Valley Period and the conflicts it generated also exists within manga, a widely consumed media, and has shifted genres multiple times in the decades following the Japanese surrender. Some genres, such as early senki-mono, portrayed the war as a heroic, although ultimately futile, action undertaken by self-sacrificing youth. Semiautobiographical works, such as those created by the late manga artist Mizuki Shigeru, countered this narrative by showing the war as brutal, senseless, and useless. Often, the popularity or decline of a genre skewed closely to the general attitude concerning the wartime period. Due to its wide-scale consumption by youth, manga has the potential to both represent and forward shifts in public perception. Additionally, historical revisionists and anti-Article 9 proponents have shifted their discourse into manga in order to appeal to and influence a younger audience. This strategy is further strengthened by previous genre works, such as the Space Battleship Yamato series, which reframed the Dark Valley Period and the Asia Pacific War in a positive light indirectly through their narrative. This dissertation posits that the discussion has recently shifted into shōnen/seinen fantasy manga and that this discussion reflects a level of sympathy with revisionist historians that would normally cause a public backlash against the series in question if this sympathy was not masked by genre.

The thesis explores a multidisciplinary approach, bridging together perspectives from art-historical, philosophical and anthropological fields of knowledge to question and outline the way materiality has been thought about, and how this in turn can be informative to developing a curatorial methodology. By looking at Moderna Museet Stockholm, the thesis will demonstrate the mileage of thinking materially in the act of exhibition making and the curatorial position. In doing so, the thesis explores various discursive arenas of the institution such as the museum, the temporary exhibition and the permanent collection. Central to developing the methodology are concepts such as agency, revisionist history and cultural modernity.

This thesis examines the lives of Senior Chief Koinange wa Mbiyu and his eldest son, Peter Mbiyu Koinange. It joins with the growing rise of biographical work within African Studies. It challenges the historical understanding of late colonial rule in Kenya and the role of official myth in pre- and post-independence historical narratives. Koinange wa Mbiyu was the patriarch of one of the most respected, wealthy, and politically influential Kikuyu families of Kenya's colonial and post-colonial period. His eldest son, Peter Mbiyu, received a prestigious education abroad and returned to Kenya where he became a prominent leader for African independent education African political action. Koinange and Peter bear frequent mention in academic discussions of collaboration, discontent, nationalism, and militancy in Kenya's colonial era. This thesis challenges the widely held narrative that Koinange and Peter embraced militant politics opposing colonial rule during the 1940s. While fitting larger understandings of decolonisation, it is not an honest depiction of the Koinange's political actions. As a result, this thesis is intentionally a work of revisionist history that looks to the profound changes in the culture and nature of colinal rule during the 1940s, rather than a political shift in the Koinanges. In addition to challenging the prevalent understanding of Koinange and Peter's political action, this thesis raises a number of areas - gender, wealth, elite and family dynamics, to name a few - where the Koinange family history would further illuminate the historical understanding of the colonial era. This thesis is a dual biography, crafted as a work of narrative history. It challenges a breadth of current scholarship, utilizing the largest collection of pre-Mau Mau archival records to date. This thesis engages with a number of historiographical challenges related to biography, the individual, the family, and the challenges of oral history shaped in the crucible of cultural crisis.

Magister Artium - MA / The focus on space and spatiality is relatively new in literary studies and also not unproblematic. Problems arise from the way in which these concepts are constructed, described, defined and interpret~. It is possible to derive numerous kinds of space, such as historical space, physical space, metaphysical space and religious space, to name a few, from the structure or thematics of a novel. This in itself presents a problem, since the literary scholar must differentiate between these spaces in order to determine which will be most useful for study of a particular aspect. There does not seem to be a coherent theoretical position in literary scholar regarding space, and thus various views of theorists will be considered. Gullon (1975:21), in a seminal article on space entitled On Space in the Novel provides a possible definition of space, with reference to another seminal article, this time by Joseph Frank when he states that "Frank calls 'spatial' the form of those works that at a given instant in time concentrate actions that can be perceived, but not related, simultaneously". This definition denotes a further complication engendered by space, namely the notion that different spaces intersect and interrelate with each other, and consequently that it is very difficult - if not impossible - to separate the various kinds of literary spaces in order to analyse the occurrence of a single space in a text. It also seems bound to time, but in a sense bridges the temporal gaps in a novel since it brings together parts that are not necessarily adjacent to each other temporally. Time becomes spatialized by treating events in the novel as separate chunks which can be rearranged and linked to each other. 1bis creates a more coherent and comprehensive picture of events in a text. namely the notion that different spaces intersect and interrelate with each other, and consequently that it is very difficult - if not impossible - to separate the various kinds of literary spaces in order to analyse the occurrence of a single space in a text. The main point in this regard seems to be creating patterns. This brings together more elements for the reader to be viewed at once, allowing him or her to attain a broader perspective on the text.

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This thesis is an examination of the influence and impact of the ‘Troubles’ in Northern Ireland, post 1968, on the practice of Irish history, on southern Irish broadcast media and on the southern Irish modernisation process. I will examine the uneasy and contested transition in systems of hegemony in a society where the state is not coterminous with perceptions of nationhood, where society is anxiously suspended between conservation of its existence and popular nationalist aspirations, where southern economic dependency interacted uneasily with northern political instability and sectarianism. The thesis examines the ‘Ulsterisation’ of the War of Independence by some historians and its aftermath as an ideological project. It pays particular attention, using the case-study method, to the imposition of a sectarian character on republican forces during the war of independence by the highly influential Newfoundland historian Peter Hart, and will explain why this research is ideologically problematic within Irish historiography. I will link this to (in a second case-study) the project undertaken in the early 1970s by Irish government minister (also an academic historian and political scientist) Conor Cruise O’Brien to undermine and eradicate from popular awareness secular anti-imperialist aspects of Irish nationalist consciousness, primarily through, in case-study three, the imposition of broadcasting censorship and support for repression. I question O’Brien’s positing of a ‘Catholic nationalism’ as an overarching basis for Irish statehood by, in case-study four, an examination the largely unexplored socio-economic position of Protestants in southern Ireland and the forms of social control imposed on and within that community. The thesis examines how official reaction to the conflict combined repression and broadcasting censorship during the 1970s to revise popular perceptions of Irish history and Irish society. Control of understanding of the present was combined with attempts to take control of perceptions of the past, in order to circumscribe the parameters of what is feasible in the present, so as to preserve the socio-economic status quo. It specifically explores the impact of the post 1968 Northern Ireland conflict on: • The attempt by proponents of Irish revisionist historiography to portray Irish resistance to British rule as ‘Catholic nationalism’ and as a mirror image generally of Ulster unionist sectarianism; in the context of • The simultaneous transformational change of economic direction in the southern Irish economy and society, which imparted to this project increased impetus, opportunity and political scope.