abstract: This dissertation investigates a subtle yet complex contemporary issue of colorism in India that traces its ideological roots back in the British colonial period or even prior to that. It focuses on the issue of skin-color discrimination in urban Indian men, which is significantly under-researched. This project aims at investigating the issue of skin-color discrimination through analyzing a small corpus of thirteen YouTube commercials dating from 2005 to 2017 for men’s skin-lightening products of a popular skin-care brand called “Fair and Handsome” from a multimodal critical discourse analytic perspective. This study further aims to understand how the discourse of colorism is operating in these Indian commercials for men’s skin-lightening products, what kinds of semiotic and socio-cultural (discourse) elements are naturalizing the notion of “fairness,” and finally, how the construction of male gender is facilitated. Although the project’s main theoretical arc is critical discourse analysis (CDA), the methodological needs necessarily require drawing upon theoretical tools from advertisement analysis, multimodal analysis, gender studies, social psychology, history, cultural anthropology, race theory, and other related fields of study. After successfully facilitating an exhaustive analytical undertaking, this dissertation contributes to the understanding of colorism as more than intra-group racism in India and situates this perpetuating issue as a contemporary research target in the socio-cultural contexts of globalization and urbanization. / Dissertation/Thesis / Doctoral Dissertation English 2019

abstract: Since 1998 and as recently as November 2018, 165 Tibetans have burned themselves alive in public protest, both inside Tibet and in exile. This study foregrounds Tibetan refugees’ interpretations of the self-immolation protests and examines how the exile community has socially, politically, and emotionally interrogated and assimilated this resistance movement. Based upon eleven months of ethnographic field research and 150 hours of formal interviews with different groups of Tibetan refugees in northern India, including: freedom activists, former political prisoners, members of the exile parliament, teachers of Tibetan Buddhism, families of self-immolators, and survivors of self-immolation, this project asks: What does activism look like in a time of martyrdom? What are the practices of solidarity with the dead? How does a refugee community that has been in exile for over three generations make sense of a wave of death occurring in a homeland most cannot access? Does the tactic of self-immolation challenge Tibetan held conceptions of resistance and the conceived relationship between politics, religion and nation? These questions are examined with attention to the sociopolitical expectations and vulnerabilities that the refugee community face. This study thus analyzes what it means to mourn those one never knew, and examines the fractious connections between resistance, solidarity, trauma, representation, political exigency, and community cohesion. By examining the uncomfortable affect around self-immolation, its memorialization and representation, the author argues that self-immolation is a relational act that creates and ushers forth witnesses. As such, one must analyze the obligations of witnessing, the barriers to witnessing, and the expectations of solidarity. This project offers the theory of exigent solidarity, whereby solidarity is understood as a contested space, borne of expectation, pressure, and responsibility, with its expression complex and its execution seemingly impossible. It calls for attention to the affective labor of solidarity in a time of ongoing martyrdom, and demonstrates that in the need to maintain solidarity and social cohesion, a sense of mutual-becoming occurs whereby the community is reconciled uneasily into a shared fate. / Dissertation/Thesis / Doctoral Dissertation Justice Studies 2019

abstract: Situated within seminal debates on the questions of liberation and justice viewed from the postcolonial context, this dissertation evaluates freedom narratives from both sides of the colonial divide during the period of high imperialism. Creating a transnational grouping of three diverse historical figures, E. M. Forster, M. K. Gandhi, and James Joyce, I argue for similarities in these writers’ narrative construction of “freedom” against colonial modernity. I argue that despite these writers’ widely disparate historical and cultural determinations, which uniquely particularize each of their freedom formulas as well as freedom “ideals” – the ideal of culture for Forster, renunciation for Gandhi and aesthetic apprehension for Joyce, these writers conceive of a commensurate/globally related form of “freedom” as postcoloniality and demonstrate cosmopolitan ambition. I also argue that the global form of postcoloniality they each practice can only be articulated through a close attention to each of their specific and local difference. The key contribution of the dissertation is to establish a new significance of the notion of fetishism for postcolonial studies, from both historical and theoretical perspectives. From a background that emphasizes the primacy of the concept of fetishism in its historical evolution within colonizing narratives of various Western discourses, especially fetish’s constitutive role in Enlightenment philosophy’s othering narrative of “primitive” natives, the work foregrounds a novel theoretical and narrative insight that the fetish demonstrates a unique potential to articulate/embody freedom as post-coloniality. Through a detailed critical analysis of each freedom narrative, I demonstrate how the clashes of particular contradictory cultural ideologies, in fact, determine each freedom narrative and how these contradictions are projected onto and galvanized by a fetish object(s). The work extends the ideas of Sigmund Freud, William Pietz, Homi Bhabha, Anne McClintock and Jacques Derrida on fetishism. Employing the framework of fetishism it brings into view similarities among the said three writers’ definition and practice of freedom. The work weighs in on critical debates between Marxist and Post-structural camps in postcolonial studies and proposes a new form of cosmopolitanism. / Dissertation/Thesis / Doctoral Dissertation English 2017

No description available.

No description available.

This dissertation examines the ‘failed’ forced migration of the Kashmiri Sikh community after they became targets of an attack carried out by unknown perpetrators on March 20th, 2000, in Chittisinghpora, a quiet Sikh village hidden away in the mountains of South Kashmir. Claiming the lives of thirty-five Sikh men from the village, the attack was a first for Sikhs who by all accounts had been ‘spared’ the violence of the Kashmir conflict and had been living peacefully in Kashmir Valley for generations. Although no one knows who perpetrated the attack or why, speculation runs rife that its foremost purpose was to trigger a mass displacement of Sikhs from the region. Yet, after days of contemplating whether they should move, the Sikhs stayed. If indeed the aim of the violence was to trigger a mass displacement, then what explains why the Kashmiri Sikhs were not displaced? Using Chittisinghpora as an entry point, my dissertation aims to interrogate displacement as a response to violence. I use the term ‘rootedness’, which Myron Weiner describes as a sort of territorial ethnicity with which people make claims to a space, to describe the Sikh decision to stay and argue the ability (and desire) of people to continue living in a place of violence may be construed as an act of resistance not only to the intended consequence of violence, in this case displacement, but to the violence itself. Examining a failed forced migration, therefore, allows us to understand not only the circumstances under which a community resists getting displaced despite experiencing violence but also how people continue to live in the place of violence. To understand Sikh rootedness in Kashmir, I conducted ethnographic research in Kashmir over a period of eight months in 2018 and follow up visits in March 2019 and 2021, during which I collected over 100 interviews with Sikhs and Muslims in North, South and central Kashmir, and completed several hours of observation every week. Additionally, I collected data from newspaper archives located in Punjab and historical archives located in New Delhi. I explain Sikh rootedness as a function of two main factors: 1) the precarity that comes with being a group that is neither considered the ally of the Indian state nor of the Muslims, which allows Sikhs to negotiate safety and 2) the landedness of Kashmiri Sikhs, and to a lesser extent, their employment in government which are economic anchors. Together, both factors allow Sikhs to assert social and economic agency and maintain a peaceful ‘coexistence’ with Muslims, enough to justify remaining rooted. Although the focus on displacement in migration studies is certainly warranted given the massive numbers of people displaced due to conflict, the fact is that not everyone can, or wants to, leave. Given this, a focus on what keeps people rooted is urgently needed. In the scholarship on Kashmir, displacement has been a predominant theme, given the large-scale exodus of the Kashmiri Hindus (Pandits) following an escalation of violence in the state in the 1990s. This has led to an unfortunate communalization of much of the discourse that comes out of Kashmir, and also sometimes reduced it to a ‘Hindu-Muslim’ or ‘India-Pakistan’ conflict. Sikhs are predominantly absent from this scholarship. Even in the discipline of Critical Kashmir Studies which has sought to focus on the people’s experiences of conflict rather than a religious or statist narratives, Sikhs experiences in and of conflict, remain missing. Understanding their lived experience in Kashmir, therefore, attempts to correct this erasure and also disrupts binary discourses. / Geography

No description available.

No description available.

No description available.

No description available.