Dissertations / Theses on the topic 'Postcolonial and literary ecocriticism'

La logique impérialiste et anthropocène a donné lieu à des pratiques dont les traces se lisent dans un hégémonisme environnemental et une difficulté à tenir compte du lien au vivant, à cet autre différent, humain ou non-humain, qui participe cependant de la relation. Par une analyse écocritique postcoloniale, il apparaît que ces exploitations qui se perpétuent dans la contemporanéité ont un lien avec la crise écologique. Une approche comparatiste des œuvres de Bessora, Patrick Chamoiseau, Nadine Gordimer et Kate Grenville éclaire cet état de crise : elle guide le lecteur vers de nouvelles réalités et annonce les contours changeants d’un environnement naturel en mutation. Les œuvres réapprennent également à l’humain à poser un regard autre sur la nature environnante et véhiculent des valeurs culturelles propres à enrichir la relation au vivant. En ce sens, la littérature contribue à montrer que la réconciliation se construit par l’éveil d’une conscience environnementale, c’est-à-dire la modélisation de l'interaction entre l’humain et l’environnement pour préserver la nature. La réconciliation se tisse en outre par un rapprochement entre l’imagination littéraire et l'inclusion de réalités socioculturelles, qui conduit à une poétique sensible de l’habitation du monde. La trajectoire culturelle d’un groupe étant liée à la terre, il est nécessaire que la prise de conscience écologique passe d’abord par les cultures locales. Autrement dit, il faut décoloniser le savoir écologique afin d’aboutir à une restauration de l’environnement naturel et des relations entre les différentes formes de vie. Le but de ce travail est donc de mettre en évidence les éléments qui rendent possible une réconciliation entre exigences anthropocentrées et éthique environnementale
The imperialist and anthropocene logic has given rise to practices whose traces are to be found in an environmental type of hegemonism and a difficult apprehension of the connection to the living, to this different, human or non-hum another, who nevertheless participates in the relation. A postcolonial ecocritical analysis shows that these exploitations which are perpetuated in the contemporary world have a link with the ecological crisis. A comparatist approach to the works of Bessora, Patrick Chamoiseau, Nadine Gordimer and Kate Grenville highlights this state of crisis: it guides the reader to wards new realities and announces the evolving contours of a changing natural environment. These works also teach humans to look at the surrounding nature in a different way and convey cultural values that are likely to enrich the relationship with the living. In this sense, literature shows that reconciliation cannot be achieved without man’s awakening to an environmental conscience, that is to say the modelling of the interaction between humans and the environment to preserve nature. Reconciliation means that the working together of the literary imagination and the inclusion of socio-cultural realities will lead to a sensitive poetics of inhabiting the world. Since the cultural trajectory of a group is linked to the earth, ecological awareness must first be developed by local cultures to then influence global cultures. In other words, it is necessary to decolonize ecological know ledge in order to restore the natural environment and the relationships between the different forms of life. The goal is therefore to identify the elements that enable a reconciliation between anthropocentric requirements and environmental ethics

This project highlights the role of locally produced children's written literature for ages six to fourteen in postcolonial Nigeria as a catalyst for national transformation in the wake of colonial rule. My objective is to reveal the perceived possibilities and pitfalls contained in Nigerian children's literature (specifically books published between 1960 and 1990), for the promotion of a new national consciousness through the reintegration of traditional values into a contemporary context. To do this, I draw together children's literature written by Chinua Achebe, Cyprian Ekwensi and Mabel Segun in order to illustrate the emphasis Nigerian children's book authors writing within the postcolonial moment placed on the concepts of nation and national identity in the aim to 'refashion' the nation. Following from this, I examine the role of the child reader in relation to the adult authors' intentions and pose the question of what the role of the female is in the authors' imagining of a 'new nation'. The study concludes by reflecting on the persistent under-scrutiny of children's literature in Africa by academics and critics, a preconception that still exists today. I move to suggest further research on the genre not only to stimulate an increased production of children's literature more conscious in content and aware of the needs of its young, (male and female) African readership, but also to incite a change in attitude toward the genre as one that is as deserving of interest as its adult counterpart.

In Orientalism, Edward Said identified how the Westerner “spoke for” and represented the silent Orient. Today with the burgeoning call-center business with India, it seems that the West now wants the Orient to speak for it. But is the voice that Western business requires in India a truly Indian voice? Or is it a manipulation which is a new form of the silencing of the Indian voice? This dissertation identifies how several Postcolonial Indian writers challenge the silence of Orientalism and the power issues of the West through various “speaking voices” of narratives representative of Indian life. Using Julie Kristeva’s abjection theory as a lens, this dissertation reveals Arundhati Roy as “speaking abjection” in The God of Small Things. Even Roy’s novelistic setting suffers abjection through neocolonialism. Salman Rushdie’s narrative method of magic realism allows “speaking trauma” as his character Saleem in Midnight’s Children suffers the traumas of Partition and Emergency as an allegorical representation of India. Using magic realism Saleem is able to speak the unspeakable. Other Indian voices, Bapsi Sidhwa, Khushwant Singh, and Rohinton Mistry “speak history” as their novels carry the weight of conveying an often-absent official history of Partition and the Emergency, history verified by Partition surviror interviews. In Such a Long Journey, Mistry uses an anthrozoological theme in portraying issues of power over innocence. Recognizing the choices and negotiations of immigrant life through the coining of the word (dis)assimilation, Jhumpa Lahiri’s writings are analyzed in terms of a “speaking voice” of (dis)assimilation for Indian immigrants in the United States, while Zadie Smith’s White Teeth “speaks (dis)assimilation” as a voice of multiple ethnicites negotiating immigrant life in the United Kingdom. Together these various “speaking voices” show the power of Indian writers in challenging the silence of Orientalism through narrative.

Sally Mann (1951- ) has spent forty years photographing scenes in the American South, including domestic scenes, landscapes, and portraits. Although scholars generally interpret her work as a reflection of the region’s history of violence and oppression, my research will consider her work through the lens of postcolonial ecocriticism. In her art and writing, Mann portrays the land as an indifferent witness to history, a force intertwined with humanity, lending matter for human lives and reclaiming it after death. However, she also describes the way the environment interferes with her the antiquated technology she uses, creating dramatic flaws that imbue the landscapes with emotion absent from the scenes themselves. My research offers new perspectives on Mann’s body of work, especially the way she grants agency to the environment, thereby giving a voice to silent ecologies or silenced histories.

Through the filters of postcolonial theory, environmental humanities, and digital humanities, this project considers the capabilities and limitations of novels to galvanize action in response to environmental crises. My findings suggest that novels are well equipped to engage in environmental education, although some of the form’s conventions must be disrupted to fully capitalize upon its strengths. The modern novel is conventionally limited in scope, often resorts to apocalyptic narratives that can breed hopelessness, is dedicated to a form of realism that belies the dramatic weather events exacerbated by climate change, defers authority to a single voice, and is logocentric. By supplementing conventional novels with a variety of paratexts, including digital tools, scientific findings, non-fiction accounts of past, present, and future activism, and authorial biography, it is my contention that the novel’s potency as a pedagogical tool increases. After addressing this project’s stakes and contexts in my Introduction, Chapter II assesses three South Asian novels in English that are concerned with sustainable development: Bhabani Bhattacharya’s Shadow from Ladakh, Bharati Mukherjee’s Jasmine, and Aravind Adiga’s The White Tiger. I conclude by considering how StoryMaps might further disrupt pro-sustainable development propaganda alongside more traditional novels. Chapter III examines how explicitly activist South Asian novelists construct authorial personae that propose additional solutions to the environmental problems identified in their novels, focusing on Amitav Ghosh’s The Hungry Tide and Indra Sinha’s Animal’s People. Chapter IV coins the term “locus-colonial novel,” a novel that decenters the human, situating place at the fulcrum of a work of historical fiction, using Hari Kunzru’s Gods without Men as one exemplar. I examine Kunzru’s novel alongside promotional materials for planned Mars missions to consider how narratives of colonialism on Earth might lead to a more socially and environmentally sustainable colonial model for Mars. Chapter V introduces the concept of a digital locus-colonial novel that allows users to develop informed, environmentally focused scenarios for colonial Mars. Through these chapters, this dissertation identifies specific rhetorical techniques that allow conscientious novels to create imaginative spaces where readers might explore solutions to the social, economic, and increasingly environmental problems facing human populations worldwide.

"Paradoxes of Particularity: Caribbean Literary Imaginaries," explores Caribbean literary responses to nationalism by focusing on Anglophone and Francophone post-war Caribbean novels as well as a selection of short fiction published in the 1930s and `40s. Because many Caribbean nations gained their independence relatively recently (Jamaica and Trinidad in the 1960s, the Bahamas, Grenada, Dominica, St. Lucia, and St. Vincent in the `70s, Antigua and St. Kitts in the `80s) and because some remain colonial possessions (Aruba, Martinique, Guadeloupe, etc.), nationalism and its alternatives are of major literary concern to Caribbean authors. This project considers how and to what extent the writings of such authors as Edouard Glissant, Maryse Condé, and Robert Antoni counter nationalist tendencies with Pan-Caribbean alternatives, arguing that the Caribbean texts under examination propose that we view the Caribbean as a unified region despite substantial differences (racial, linguistic, colonial, etc.) that otherwise tend to encourage separate, nationalist sentiments. Moreover, these Caribbean texts paradoxically emphasize discrete identities based on racial pasts and language communities, even as they forward a Pan-Caribbean ideology: uniqueness is, for many Caribbean writers, the fundamental basis for a unified sense of "Caribbeanness." This project dubs the phenomenon the "paradox of particularity," and identifies it as a postcolonial rhetorical strategy in twentieth-century Caribbean fiction. After an historical introduction, Chapter One examines the increasingly Pan-Caribbean content of Barbadian literary journal Bim, Martinican ex-patriate journal La Revue du Monde Noir, and BBC radio program Caribbean Voices. Each of these media sources encouraged contributors to focus on topics that were of central and unique concern to his/her island community. However, these concerns often overlapped: authors from multiple islands submitted fiction and essays touching on labor struggles, the plight of the poor, wartime anxieties, and racial inequalities. Thus, in printing that which was nominally unique and particular to individual islands, these widely digested media sources in fact highlighted similarities throughout the archipelago, setting the stage for bolder expressions of a particularity-based regionalism. Chapter Two focuses on the Pan-Caribbean antillanité of Edouard Glissant. In Glissant's fiction, the only character capable of both recovering this past and of uniting the Caribbean is the defiantly isolated maroon (and, occasionally, his male descendants). Set against the backdrop of Martinique's fight to become a semi-autonomous département of France and the emergence of Jamaica and Trinidad as independent national entities, Glissant's novel La Lézarde (1958) at once celebrates postcolonial zeal for independence, and emphasizes that national autonomy is the first step in a process of regional unification. Chapter Three looks at gendered and cultural counterpoints to Glissant's notion of "marooning," through novels that reimagine the history of New World slavery and the Caribbean Black Power Movement. The chapter focuses on Simone Schwarz-Bart's Pluie et Vent Sur Telumée Miracle (1972), in which an ostracized sorceress attempts to unite her fragmented community, Maryse Condé's Moi, Tituba, Sorcèriere Noire de Salem (1988), which imagines a Glissantian link between Barbados, other Caribbean islands, and North America through the benevolent workings of a black female maroon, André and Schwarz-Bart's La Mulâtresse Solitude (1972), which both recuperates an historical maroon figure (as, indeed does Condé) and imaginatively reconstructs the African past which informs her New World rebellion, and Michelle Cliff's Abeng (1984), which features a psychologically marooned heroine who imagines not only a unified Caribbean, but also a Caribbean that serves as the racially inclusive bridge between diasporic communities in North and South America. Ultimately, in identifying female maroons as the unifying agents of cultural transmission, Schwarz-Bart, Condé, and Cliff's experimental fiction not only proposes a feminist, regional alternative to patriarchal nationalism, but imaginatively links colonized Caribbean citizens to broader, nation-less communities of suffering. Chapter Four focuses even more explicitly on formal and linguistic experimentation by examining Trinidadian Robert Antoni's Divina Trace (1991), and Martinican Patrick Chamoiseau's Texaco (1992) in relation to literary postmodernism. Rather than casting a wise maroon as the oracular voice of wisdom, both novels deluge us with a heteroglossic babble of voices, paradoxically suggesting that the potential for Caribbean interconnectedness lies in the collision of multiple, idiosyncratic uses of language. Moreover, by testing the boundaries of the novel form, these texts gesture toward the possibility of formally innovative alternatives to the nation-state. Thus, this project both identifies the "paradox of particularity" (in which difference is the defining component of group identity) as a postcolonial tactic in twentieth-century Caribbean fiction and demonstrates the intense political engagement of experimental modernist and postmodern Caribbean fiction. By strategically keeping individuality and collectivity in tension with one another, these writers offer a model for postcolonial independence that both preserves autonomy and avoids mimicking the colonial Western nation-state.

This thesis examines the representation of ‘otherness’ in postcolonial neo-Victorian fiction. It analyses a selection of novels that not only engage critically with the Victorian past but specifically with the legacy of Victorian Britain’s empire. By looking at the ways in which neo-Victorian novels depict the (de)construction of their characters’ identities, this thesis investigates whether these representations are able to provide insight in present-day constructions of who is seen as being at home in British or Western European society and who is defined as ‘other’. Otherness, these novels show, is not limited to a binary of the Western ‘self’ and the stereotyped, non-Western ‘other’. Rather, many of the novels’ characters are made to discover the other(ness) within themselves. The introductory chapter considers neo-Victorianism’s postmodern background and the way it relates to postcolonial theories of race and sexuality. Chapter One focuses on two novels: Julian Barnes’ Arthur & George (2005) and Belinda Starling’s The Journal of Dora Damage (2007). Both novels are set in Britain and engage with the figure of the other coming (too) close to home. The chapter employs a potentially multidirectional ‘looking relation’ to study how postcolonial neo-Victorian fiction constructs the other against which the British characters define their own identities. Moving away from Britain, Chapter Two looks at the notion of the journey, specifically sea voyages between metropole and colony. Using Gail Jones’ Sixty Lights (2004) and Joseph O’Connor’s Star of the Sea (2002), this chapter studies how the liminal experience of travel can function as an othering device. Chapter Three, finally, examines how Daniel Mason’s The Piano Tuner (2002) and David Rocklin’s The Luminist (2011) describe British society in the colonies. Away from the imperial mother country, making stable distinctions between self and other becomes increasingly difficult for the novels’ characters. Ultimately, this thesis questions whether postcolonial neo-Victorianism maintains a binary between the Western self and a stereotyped figure of the other, or if it can play a role in changing readers’ views of those people seen as ‘other’ in Western society.

This essay explores the representation of nonhuman nature in David Malouf’s postcolonial novel Remembering Babylon. By applying a postcolonial ecocritical framework to the narrative the essay shows how nonhuman nature, including the animalised human “other”, is subject to Western ideologies that see them as resources or services to be exploited. However, the essay also reveals how the nonhuman “others” are opposing these views by resisting the Western pastoralizing practices and exposing environmental threats, as well as altering some of the Diasporic character’s views of the nonhuman “other” and their sense of displacement.

This study assesses the role of the Western publisher in the creation of African literature through an examination of Oxford University Press's Three Crowns Series, a previously overlooked series that existed from 1962 to 1976. Using archival evidence to examine the economics and the institutions of African literary publishing, and the patterns of assimilation and resistance in author-publisher relations, this study addresses some of the broader concerns of postcolonialism through a study involving the methodology of book history. Part I surveys OUP's history in Africa, and questions whether this supports the formulation of the Western publisher in Africa as an agent of a `civilising mission' or an agent of `cultural imperialism'. It charts how OUP established and maintained its dominant cultural and economic position in Africa in the 20th century, and describes the complex system adopted for the cross-subsidisation of economic and cultural capital. It also explores OUP's work in apartheid South Africa, and analyses the tension between scholarly publishing for the liberal academic establishment and publishing schoolbooks for Bantu Education. Part II examines the history and publishing strategy for Three Crowns, and considers the hierarchies of literary production and consumption that were instituted. It addresses the role of the publisher in selecting, editing, producing, promoting and distributing new postcolonial writing. Through reference to author case-studies, it assesses how the aesthetic and commercial value of African literature was negotiated, and explores the systems of inclusion and exclusion in operation. Case-studies of the publication of Wole Soyinka and Athol Fugard address the impact of the publisher in the construction of the authors' literary identities. In the case of OUP's Three Crowns series, this study concludes that the publisher exercised a decisive influence on the constitution of African literature institutionally as well as on the material form of the books, and that the processes of publication profoundly affected the reception and meaning of the texts.

This study examines what support that exists in the Swedish upper secondary school curriculum and the English 7 syllabus for teaching postcolonial literature and the postcolonial literary concepts of binary pairs and Othering. This study also illustrates how Arvind Adiga’s The White Tiger (2008) could serve as an example of a postcolonial novel to exemplify said concepts in the EFL classroom. To answer these questions, a definition of the postcolonial genre as well as a definition of the concepts within postcolonial literary theory was formulated. With the theoretical framework in place, an analysis of the steering documents was conducted. The Swedish curriculum’s focus on the teaching of every human’s equal value and rights relate to the postcolonial genre, as the genre is dedicated to telling marginalised perspectives in the modern world. The syllabus states that teaching different genres of literature and the usage of different perspectives in the classroom should be a part of the English subject. This supports the teaching of postcolonial literature as it is a successor to Western classics as well as shift in perspective from the colonisers to the colonised. The teaching of the concepts of binary pairs and Othering were indicated to be potentially challenging to practically implement, as literary didactic literature stated the difficulties of adapting literary theory to an upper secondary school level. Teaching literary concepts was indicated to be achievable provided that teachers teach theory with clear guidance of what context to use it in and where not to use it. As for binary pairs and Othering within Adiga’s The White Tiger (2008), the examples focused on were the Indias of Light and Darkness, and how this binary pair Othered one another. As such, the results were found to indicate that there is support for teaching postcolonial literature as well as postcolonial concepts, and that Adiga’s novel would be an adequate text to use for exemplifying these in the classroom.

Landscape is an enduring feature of Antipodean settler literature. Postcolonial fiction in New Zealand and Australia draws on pre-colonial, colonial, and postcolonial narratives of landscape to create compelling representations of place and people. In the adult fiction of New Zealand author Maurice Gee and Australian author David Malouf, characters typically turn to the landscape at moments of crisis or transition. Close analysis of Gee’s and Malouf’s fiction demonstrates that the physical environment serves as a touchstone for personal and national identity throughout personal and national histories. From childhood to old age, characters seek self-definition by locating themselves within their physical environment, rather than by directly referencing their social or cultural context. Individual life stages are shown to be analogous to early stages of national development for New Zealand and Australia – the journey from colonial child to mature identity for both the individual and the nation is figured through landscape images. However, Gee and Malouf also use the relationship between characters and landscape to reflect social attitudes and values, demonstrating a connection between confident identification with the ‘other’ of the landscape and the ability to integrate meaningfully with the ‘others’ of human society. Thus landscape functions in these texts as a means of both reflecting and constructing identity in postcolonial New Zealand and Australia.

This thesis explores the question of “identity” in feminism through an intertextual reading of African-American and Pakistani women’s writing. Its comparative approach to women-centred counter-narratives is also informed by a transnational, postcolonial frame alert to continuities between colonialism and neocolonialism. Although “identity” has become less central in some current linguistic and ontological modes of feminist inquiry, given the enduring relevance of identities both as social meaning-making processes and as repressive political categories, this thesis reshifts focus towards identities by foregrounding their emancipatory potential for feminist politics. Through critical engagement with Judith Butler’s and Allison Weir’s theories of relationality and with the epistemological and ontological dimensions of selected counter-narratives, this thesis reconceives identities as relations of interconnection and interdependence, thus encompassing but also moving beyond definitions in terms of restrictive social categories. Through investigating the (re)narration of histories and (re)presentation of discourses in Harriet Jacobs’s Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl (1861), Toni Morrison’s Beloved (1987), Bapsi Sidhwa’s Cracking India (1991), and Kamila Shamsie’s Burnt Shadows (2009), the thesis seeks to develop a relational conception of identities, agency, and coalition in a feminist historicist, relational framework. As well as expanding the sparse comparative scholarship on Pakistani and American literatures, this study considers the peculiar positionality of African-Americans vis-à-vis other “postcolonial” groups in the emergence of the U.S. as a neocolonial power. A valuable lens for understanding such transnational politics is found in a feminist analysis of the intersecting histories of racism and imperialism and their contemporary neocolonial manifestations. The contribution of this thesis is thus twofold: it newly brings together the arenas of African-American and Pakistani women’s counter-narratives that renegotiate identities and histories in relational terms; in doing so, it also starts to imagine an anti-imperialist transnational feminist political paradigm that conceives individual and collective identities and political alliances within a relational social ontology.

Thesis (PhD--English)--University of Auckland, 2009.
"Submitted in fulfilment of the requirements of the Doctor of Philosophy in English, the University of Auckland, 2009." Includes bibliographical references.

In 2010, Simon Estok observed that, "the most immediate question ecocriticism can ask is about how our assumptions about animals affect the natural environment". In this thesis, I respond to this challenge by generating a sustained conversation between the hitherto surprisingly distinct fields of animal studies and ecocriticism. I do this by formulating a new critical concept, that of the geomorphic animal, which I use to show how literary representations of animals often expose the many complex ways in which they constitute space rather than simply inhabiting it. This, in turn, should make them central to future ecocritical readings. I focus on two periods, medieval and modern; the broad historical and generic scope of this thesis is intended to demonstrate the conceptual validity and robustness of geomorphic readings. Chapter One shows how concerns with death and symbiosis are expressed through the earth-bound activities of the geomorphic animals of the Exeter Book riddles. Chapter Two examines geomorphic whales in texts deriving from two related traditions: the Book of Jonah and the Physiologus. Chapters Three and Four focus on modern theatre, which affords distinctive ways of articulating the spatial implications of geomorphism. Chapter Three discusses the literary representation of museums and zoos in terms of the interpretative complexities generated by staging and spectacle. Chapter Four, focusing on mediation, discusses the interplay between animals, viewpoints and place in theatre, also taking into account particular issues arising from the adaptation of plays into films. This argument paves the way to addressing the geomorphic depiction of marginalised humans and human groups, suggesting the critical potential of geomorphism as a means of furthering feminist and post-colonialist aims.

This dissertation investigates the artistic and linguistic strategies employed by the Kenyan literary magazine Kwani? during a period of intense social and political upheaval. Between the peaceful end of Daniel Arap Moi's dictatorship in 2002 and the violence that followed the contested Presidential elections of 2007, writers for the magazine used a language called sheng&mdasha youth-affiliated urban slang comprised of a complex, rapidly shifting blend of Kiswahili, English, and other local languages&mdashto negotiate between the global hunger for English and their country's complex cultural, political, and linguistic demands. The dissertation builds on a growing body of scholarship in literary criticism, linguistics, and cultural studies to document sheng's emergence as a literary idiom within Kenya, as well as the way it evolved as it traveled beyond the country's borders via inclusion in primarily English-language texts such as Uwem Akpan's short story collection Say You're One of Them.

An African (Auto)biography: Ama Ata Aidoo's Literary Quest és un estudi exhaustiu del que considero que configura la primera fase de l'obra d'Ama Ata Aidoo, escriptora ghanesa. El text que marca la primera fase del desenvolupament i consolidació de la veu d'Aidoo és Our Sister Killjoy or Reflections from a Black-eyed Squint, un text inclassificable genèricament i una presència indiscutible en la literatura africana anglòfona.
La tasca d'escriure que envolta a escriptors/es es defineix per una necessitat de trobar la seva pròpia veu en el món literari. Si bé aquesta cerca de la veu pròpia ve marcada per un impuls entusiasta per deixar una empremta en el món de les lletres, o si bé està segellada per la càrrega que suposa la superació del que Harold Bloom anomena l' "angoixa de la influència," és a dir, la presència omnipotent de totes aquelles veus d'escriptors/es anteriors que impedeixen l'articulació d'una veu indiscutiblement independent i única, la veritat és que un autor s'ha d'enfrontar i ajustar a una tradició de textos que intenta emmotllar a la seva pròpia imaginació i experiència.
Ama Ata Aidoo és una escriptora africana. Nascuda l'any 1940 a la regió central de Ghana, Aidoo ha conegut el colonialisme de primera mà -Ghana era l'antiga colònia britànica anomenada Gold Coast-, ha estat implicada directament amb la lluita per la independència del seu país -els britànics varen empresonar el seu pare, Abeadzi Kyiakor, per la seva participació en la lluita per la independència de Ghana-, ha disfrutat i celebrat els anys immediatament posteriors a la independència, ha patit i criticat l'onada neocolonialista que seguí el període d' independència i, durant tota la seva vida ha mantingut una perspectiva clarament feminista. La seva cerca literària -la seva lluita per trobar una veu pròpia- és un intent de reconciliar aquells aspectes diferents i discrepants que han configurat la seva experiència com a dona a l'Àfrica. La seva obra literària no es pot entendre sense tenir en compte les realitats sovint ambivalents, ambigües i contradictòries que forgen la seva identitat -la seva (auto)biografia- com a escriptora, dona i africana.
En l' obra d'Ama Ata Aidoo la llegendària lluita entre l'àmbit personal i l'àmbit públic de l'escriptor, entre l'individu com a ésser tancat en sí mateix i ésser polític, s'articula dintre de la realitat sobrecollidora dels estats moderns africans, un llegat que, no es pot oblidar, és patrimoni de l'època colonialista. Quan Harold Bloom mostrava, des d'una perspectiva crítica, la seva preocupació sobre la tradició literària que els escriptors es veuen obligats a confrontar per a poder definir una veu pròpia, singularment seva, ho feia trepitjant terreny occidental, és a dir, ho feia considerant únicament i exclusivament la tradició literària d'occident. Però què passa quan la veu que s'està cercant i intentant definir és el resultat d'una herència polèmica, una herència marcada per una tradició literària occidental, per una banda, i una experiència indiscutiblement i inequívocament africana, per l'altra?
L'any 1994, Vincent Odammten, dedicà un llibre sencer a l'anàlisi de l'obra d'Aidoo: The Art of Ama Ata Aidoo: Polylectics and Reading Against Colonialism. L'anàlisi que Odammten fa de l'obra d'Aidoo es centra en el fet de que els seus textos són un exemple de la lluita literària contra el colonialisme, però, en cap moment, fa referència a la cerca personal de l'autora per definir la seva veu pròpia. El meu argument és que aquesta lluita per definir la seva veu com a escriptora és fonamental per una apreciació crítica de la seva obra, i, afegeixo que aquesta cerca de la veu pròpia està indissolublement lligada a la seva essència com a dona i com a africana.
L'obra d'Ama Ata Aidoo desestabilitza el discurs eurocèntric d'una manera insidiosa, consistent i incansable. El terme "eurocèntric" és un prèstec del llibre de Patricia Hill Collins, Black Feminist Thought, i interpreto "discurs" de la manera que Foucalt ho va definir a The Archaelogy of Knowledge and the Discourse on Language. Així doncs, la meva utilització del terme "discurs eurocèntric" obeeix a, en primer lloc, la interpretació de l'adjectiu "eurocèntric" que trobem en el llibre de Hill Collins i que defineix com a la condensació de dues coordenades: blanca -occidental- i masculina; i, en segon lloc, a la interpretació Foucaldiana de "discurs" com a combinació de pràctica i manera de parlar la naturalesa de la qual determina el criteri pel qual els seus resultats es jutgen com a exitosos. D'aquesta manera, es produeix un cercle viciós, ja que, si masculinitat i occidentalitat són els dos aspectes que alimenten i determinen els criteris mitjançant els quals aquest discurs, aquesta combinació particular i específica de pràctica i manera de parlar, es considera satisfactòria, aleshores, tot sembla indicar que no hi ha cap camí el suficientment satisfactori que ens allunyi de la masculinitat i l' occidentalitat. Mes, com l'obra d'Aidoo demostra, aquest no és el cas.
La literatura africana en llengua anglesa està estigmatitzada pel fantasma de la novel.la de Conrad, Heart of Darkness (Cor de Tenebres). Aquesta novel.la, altament controvertida, publicada l'any 1898, turmenta la imaginació dels escriptors africans per la seva representació del continent africà com a buit negre. Malgrat tot, Heart of Darkness, s'ha de llegir com un text ambivalent, ambigu, terriblement i espantosament contradictori i que s'ha de tenir en compte en qualsevol estudi d'escriptors africans anglòfons que s'emprengui. La meva lectura de la novel.la de Conrad està influenciada per l'obra del crític Edward Said que defineix Heart of Darkness com a una primera i incipient crítica del discurs eurocèntric. Podem afirmar que el motiu que va empènyer a Joseph Conrad a escriure Heart of Darkness va ser el seu desig de plasmar i denunciar l'explotació cruel i brutal que Bèlgica portava a terme en el Congo. Aleshores, i aquí radica l'ambivalència i la importància de l'obra, si aquesta era la intenció de Conrad, com és que Àfrica es descriu com una terra nullius, i els africans es representen com a animals? En altres paraules, perquè la crítica del discurs eurocèntric que sembla desprendre's del text de Conrad cau en el més nefast de l'eurocentrisme: el racisme i el masclisme? Said respón a aquesta pregunta d'una manera parcial: Conrad, mitjançant la seva novel.la, copsa la incapacitat de l'individu que, volent expressar una experiència contrària a l'imperialisme, acaba caient en l'esperit imperialista que vol denunciar i això és degut al fet de que aquesta experiència l'intenta articular mitjançant un discurs eurocèntric, que Said defineix com a marcadament occidental. Com he assenyalat anteriorment, la resposta de Said és parcial perquè, en cap moment, reconeix la masculinitat que desprèn la novel.la de Conrad. Hi ha hagut re-escriptures importantíssimes de Heart of Darkness per part d'autors africans anglòfons -Paradise d'Abdulrazak Gurnah (Zanzíbar), Waiting for the Barbarians de J.M.Coetzee (Sudàfrica), Chinua Achebe, Things Fall Apart (Nigèria)- però cap ha reconegut en la seva re-escriptura crítica la masculinitat que junt amb l'occidentalitat conforma el discurs eurocèntric. Amb una excepció: Ama Ata Aidoo i la seva obra Our Sister Killjoy or Reflections of a Black-Eyed Squint, que suposa una re-escriptura brillant -i, m'agradaria afegir, poc reconeguda- de la novel.la de Conrad.
La meva tesi doctoral consta de dues parts: The Cave: Colonialism Black and White i The Cave Revisited. Towards a Subjectification of Africa and African Women. La primera part la conformen dos capítols: Unveiling the Ghost: Heart of Darkness or Africa-Chronotope Zero i (Auto) Biographical Fiction: The Facing and De-Facing of Africa-. Aquests dos primers capítols són una anàlisi de la ambigüitat del text de Conrad que encara avui dia és una realitat fantasmagòrica en l'imaginari africà anglòfon, per una banda, i una crítica de la masculinitat que amaga el moviment literari de la Négritude que sorgí com un intent per part d'autors africans d' omplir el buit que l'imaginari occidental havia deixat en el continent africà, per l'altra. La segona part se centra en l'estudi de les obres que configuren la primera fase de la cerca literària d'Aidoo -The Dilemma of a Ghost i Anowa (drama), No Sweetness Here (contes) i Our Sister Killjoy or Reflections from a Black-eyed Squint (text genèricament inclassificable)-, uns textos que s'enfronten a un legat literari que nega o, en el millor dels casos, dilueix, la experiència de les dones africanes.
Per demostrar com Ama Ata Aidoo desestabilitza el discurs eurocèntric exposant les seves ambivalències, contradiccions i inconcebibilitats m'emparo en l'obra crítica de Luce Irigaray i, concretament, Speculum of the Other Woman (1974). En aquesta obra, Irigaray desmonta el pensament filosòfic occidental evidenciant la mirada marcadament masculinista que ha interpretat el món i que ha deixat a la dona rellegada a un simple -i sovint molest- apèndix de l'home. L'última part del llibre ( Plato's Hystera) és una anàlisi minuciosa d'un dels fonaments del pensament occidental: la caverna de Plató. La seva lectura deconstruccionista de la caverna de Plató determina la línea argumental de la investigació, dividint la tesi doctoral en les dues parts prèviament definides. Part I. The Cave. Colonialism Black and White i Part II. The Cave Revisited. Towards a Subjectification of Africa and African Women. La crítica que Irigaray fa de la caverna de Plató exposa un camí de pensament linear -marcadament blanc i masculí- que allibera als presoners, sempre i quan aquests siguin homes. Dins del pensament platonià les dones no fugiran de la caverna, el camí linear no funciona per a elles però la realitat de la caverna, i això és el que demostra Irigaray, és més complexa que un simple camí linear; a la caverna hi ha bifurcacions, a la caverna s'hi pot trobar el que ella anomena "el camí oblidat" (the forgotten path) que és el que s'ha de recuperar si volem avançar més enllà del discurs eurocèntric. Irigaray no fa referència d'una manera sistemàtica a la occidentalitat blanca del discurs eurocèntric, sí que ho fa, incansablement, a la masculinitat que es desprén d'ell. L'obra d'Aidoo s'emmotlla perfectament a una crítica basada en el pensament d'Irigaray més, en aquest cas, el discurs eurocèntric que l'autora africana dissecciona desplega la seva masculinitat junt amb la seva occidentalitat blanca. En altres paraules, les dues coordenades que fixen la crítica al discurs eurocèntric en els textos d'Aidoo són el gènere i la raça.

Includes bibliographical references (leaves 136-141).
This dissertation seeks to analyse insubordination and resistance manifested in postcolonial and post-apartheid poetry as ways of subverting dominant Western discourses. More specifically, I focus my analysis on textual strategies of resistance in the poetry of Linton Kwesi Johnson and Lesego Rampolokeng. The syncretistic quality in the oeuvres of both poets is related to diaspora, hybridity and crealisation as forms of writ[h]ing against (neo)colonially-based hegemonic discourses. Postcolonial critiques at large will frame this analysis of strategies of domination and resistance, but some discussions from the domain of history, sociology and cultural studies may also enter the debate. In this regard there is a great variety of theories and arguments dealing with the contradictions and incongruities in the question of power relations interconnecting domination and resistance. This study is arranged in three pivotal debates. There is firstly an in-depth discussion of underpinning theories that deal with strategies of domination and resistance in the postcolonial domain This is a threefold task carried out by scrutinising (a) the origins of colonial discourse and its binarist tendencies, (b) the pitfalls of anticolonialist resistance based on dualistic opposites, and (c) the hybrid and insubordinate nature of resistance as an efficient alternative to transcend such binaries. Afterwards I seek to investigate how strategies of diasporic resistance and cultural hybridism employed in the poetry of Linton Kwesi Johnson can contribute to moving away from the limitations of dichotomies and also subvert hegemonic power. And finally, I look at crealisation, mockery and insubordination as strategies of resistance in the postapartheid poetry of Lesego Rampolokeng. Besides that, this project is concerned with the increasing importance of academic studies on postcolonial literatures. The present research aims therefore to analyse postcolonial and post-apartheid poems as strategic techniques to decentre dominant Western rhetoric that tries to naturalise inequalities and injustices in the relations between power holders and the powerless in both local and global contexts.

This thesis investigates identity and postcolonial nationalism as expressed in selected Iraqi and Algerian historical novels published after 1960. The study examines eight novels: Assia Djebar's Children of the New World (1962), Muhsin al-Ramli's Scattered Crumbs (2000), Yasmina Khadra's The Sirens of Baghdad (2008), Ali Bader's The Tobacco Keeper (2011), Abdul-Aziz Gramoule's Za'eem al-Aqaliyah al-Sahiqah [Leader of the Overwhelming Minority] (2005), Khadair al-Zaidi's Valyoom Asharah [Valium 10] (2015), Rashid Boudjedra's The Barbary Figs (2012) and Ahmed Saadawi's Frankenstein in Baghdad (2013).Through a critical analysis of the selected data, the study investigates how historical fiction can create and legitimatize nationalist discourse on the one hand and counter hegemonic discourses on the other hand. The thesis also explores how, and to what extent, the critical awareness and blindness of postcolonial nationalism contributes to social and cultural formations in a pan-Arabic context, and how nationalist leaders exploit and oppress their citizens. The thesis also explores - through its investigation of literary texts - the perpetuation of Western cultural imperialism in Iraq and Algeria through the imposition of modern cultural apparatus such as nationalism, the religious/secular distinction and military action such as the War on Terror. It concludes that postcolonial nationalism extends colonial imperialism both ideologically and discursively. Postcolonial nationalist regimes in Iraq and Algeria have divided and exploited citizens by perpetuating Western concepts of nationhood and identity. By examining literary responses to postcolonial nationalist states, my critique explores its divisive and exploitative practices and explores authors' imagined alternative visions for more peaceful multi-ethnic, multi-cultural, and multi-religious societies.

Place theory examines the relationship between human identity and physical locations, asking how meaningful attachments are formed between people and the spots they visit or in which they live. Literature of place exhibits this relationship and the myriad ways humans connect to their environment through storytelling, both fictional and nonfictional. Florida literature, an emerging and dynamic genre, features characters, cultures, and histories heavily embedded in place. Florida’s places also abound with animal presences, and literature about Florida almost always illustrates significant human-animal interactions that drive plots and character development. Therefore, Florida literature invites consideration of how animals influence human attachment to the land in stories written by Florida authors. Scholarly attention has noted the important relationships formed by humans and animals in literature about Florida, but no extensive study incorporating place theory, ecocriticism, and close reading has been done on the literary representation of Florida animals or their contribution to the state’s diverse reputations. This dissertation brings together theories about place attachment, ecocriticism, and critical animal studies (CAS) to illustrate the roles of fictional and nonfictional animals in works by six Florida authors: William Bartram, Marjory Stoneman Douglas, Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings, Elizabeth Bishop, Rachel Carson, and John Henry Fleming. These works contain prominent animal characters that illuminate four ways of seeing Florida: idyllic Florida, wild Florida, opportunistic Florida, and mysterious Florida. These identities build off historical views about Florida as place: explorers, tourists, and developers projected their hopes for advancement onto the state based on its reputation as an exotic paradise, wild hinterland, or untouched beacon for industry and agriculture. Literature helped to produce these ideas about Florida through travel writing, but Florida stories also critique opportunistic ideologies responsible for harming animals and the environment. Literature can also preserve Florida’s mysteries and myths, offering narratives about nature and animals that challenge notions of human superiority. Thus, literature enacts a dynamic engagement with the four faces of Florida I discuss. Florida animals are vital to the construction of these four identities. For example, Henry Bunk, the protagonist of Douglas’s Alligator Crossings, sees the Everglades as an idyllic alternative to the city for its many birds and fish. Rawlings depicts Cross Creek as a wild host to deadly snakes, predatory big cats, and ubiquitous insects. Bishop captures through poetry the ordinary activity of Florida fishing in such a way that invites us to question the harm inflicted on animals for the opportunity of recreation. Fleming’s stories suggest that exploration, industry, and science have mostly erased the mysteries of Florida’s natural world, but his enigmatic and monstrous animals, along with their ties to the land, offer hope for reviving a meaningful attachment to the land. This dissertation connects literary representations of animals to real forms of violence occurring in Florida today, including fishing, caged hunting, and animal captivity. The works examined herein can prompt readers to rethink their own relationships to place and to nonhuman nature. As a cultural force, literature holds the potential for effecting change in our world. Beginning with the local is one way of witnessing this potential for the dynamic interplay between literature and place.

This study examines the modernist fiction by three transnational women writers who turned to the ocean in their writing during the first half of the twentieth century to navigate their divided or hyphenated national identities. The Anglo-Irish writer Elizabeth Bowen (1899-1973), the Finland-Swedish author Hagar Olsson (1893-1978), and the New Zealand short story writer of English descent, Katherine Mansfield (1888-1923), use ocean space in their fiction, in the form of both sea imagery and material seascape settings, to unsettle ideologically limiting and culturally anchored categories of identity, gender, class, place and time. The modernist aesthetics and marginal ethics of these white colonial women who existed at a slant to the geographical and cultural center of the British, masculine metropolis pivot on two competing ocean views. First, the sea features in their work as a historically compliant, smooth surface in the service of the establishment, enabling and justifying imperial expansion and colonial settlement, as well as defining and patrolling the uncompromising borders of the land-based modern nation state. Alternately, the ocean comes to disrupt progressive imperial models of history, to inspire fluid and transgressive ideologies, to bear witness to violent histories submerged by official records, and to confound our sense of scale and chronological time through outsized subterranean ecologies that blur the line between land and water, and, as a consequence, throw into question larger fundamental, ontological distinctions, such as that between the ‘human’ and the ‘non-human,’ or ‘more-than-human.’ By bringing postcolonial and ecocritical perspectives to bear on Bowen, Mansfield and Olsson’s literary representations of the ocean, my study contributes to the current expanding reach of modernist studies, ushering into the critical spotlight global regions previously overlooked and misfit writers traditionally dismissed, to locate that which modernity originally defined itself against at the vibrant heart of that construction.

Notre thèse aborde la présence des personnages féminins dans le roman italien contemporain du point de vue des relations de care, du rapport à l'écologie et à la démocratie. Selon une perspective écoféministe et postcoloniale, nous étudions le rapport des femmes protagonistes du roman italien contemporain aux 'lieux' qu'elles habitent. À travers l'analyse littéraire de trois romans essentiels, notre travail consiste à montrer le rôle de la littérature dans la réinscription de l'esthétique dans l'éthique en présentant la femme dans la littérature comme un symbole de résistance à la crise écologique, au déracinement et au néolibéralisme effréné.Dans le vaste panorama de la littérature italienne contemporaine, nous avons choisi de nous rapprocher de ces femmes qui, comme les terres polluées ou confisquées et les populations colonisées, n'ont pas vraiment de voix car subalternes à la culture néolibérale. Étudiée d'un point de vue écoféministe, postcolonial et selon une éthique du care, l'image de la femme protagoniste du roman italien contemporain peut proposer une nouvelle lecture des enjeux du féminisme actuel. Marilina Labruna de Carmen Covito dans La bruttina stagionata, Estrellita, L'Iguane d'Anna Maria Ortese ou les femmes immigrées dans l’Italie contemporaine dans les romans Amiche per la pelle de Laila Wadia, Adua d'Igiaba Scego et Pecore nere sont toutes des expressions différentes de la démocratie dans le sens où elles représentent des figures de résistance au déracinement et à l'assimilation culturelle
This thesis addresses the presence of female characters in the contemporary Italian Novel from the viewpoint of care relationships, in relation to ecology and democracy. From an ecofeminist and postcolonial perspective, we attempt to study the relationship of the female protagonists of the contemporary Italian Novel to the 'places' they inhabit. Through the literary analysis of three essential novels, our work consists of showing the role of literature in the reinstatement of aesthetics in ethics by presenting women in literature as a symbol of resistance to the ecological crisis, to uprooting and unrestrained neoliberalism. In the vast panorama of contemporary Italian literature, we have chosen to get closer to these women who, like polluted or confiscated lands and colonized populations, are voiceless because they are subordinate to neoliberal culture. Studied from an ecofeminist, postcolonial point of view and according to the ethics of care, the image of the protagonist woman of the contemporary Italian novel can offer a new reading of the challenges facing current feminism. Marilina Labruna by Carmen Covito in La bruttina stagionata, Estrellita in L'Iguana by Anna Maria Ortese or immigrant women in contemporary Italy in the novels Amiche per la pelle by Laila Wadia, Adua d'Igiaba Scego and Pecore nere are all different expressions of democracy in the sense that they represent figures of resistance to uprooting and cultural assimilation

This thesis takes as its starting point Chandra Talpade Mohanty’s argument that it is the way in which “Third World” women’s narratives are read and understood that is crucial, together with the need to locate them contextually. My original contribution to knowledge is to develop a deconstructive, cultural analysis through the re–reading of a selection of core postcolonial women’s texts written in former colonial societies, at a time prior to the full emergence of postcolonialism as a set of theoretical concepts and before feminism had developed its major contribution to academic scholarship. These theories are examined in the first three chapters of the thesis. This re–reading is of texts which arguably prefigured in many ways some of the main debates later articulated in postcolonial feminist criticism, thus (re–)interpreting them through a contemporary, critical lens. The objective of the textual analysis, among other things, is to underline the function of literary mapping in postcolonial women’s writing and the ways in which this resonates with key issues in postcolonial feminist studies. For example, the texts subvert the figure of the “universal woman” challenged by several critics, undermine images of women’s sameness, and transform marginalising spaces such as prison and home into sites of possible resistance. Overall, the main contribution of this thesis is twofold. Firstly, the interpretation of postcolonial women’s writing as a metachronous discourse of literary mapping in order to reclaim rather than deny the difference and complexity inherent in women’s texts and identities. This lends a wider dimension to the literary representations of women and justifies my attempt to order the texts as following an inverted rite of passage. Secondly, this thesis demonstrates that postcolonial women’s writing constitutes a discourse of literary activism and a cultural archive of prismatic female narratives which demands a responsive reading of the texts. This is to form a collective, critical consciousness from which, it is hoped, present and future communities of women can learn to change their lives.

This thesis undertakes a literary study of contemporary novels published by metropolitan French writers between 1980 and 2000, and analyses their representation of the changing relationship between France and North Africa. It begins by analysing the specificity of the situation in France, arguing that this is largely due to the functioning of the French Republican tradition, which equates inassimilable difference with inferiority. Consequently, France’s former colonies represent a privileged site of the Republican relationship with difference. This is particularly acute in the case of Algeria, by virtue of its former status as an integral part of the French Republic, and as a result of the large population of Algerian origin resident within France. It therefore offers a useful perspective from which to assess the extent to which French identities and systems of representation have been problematised in the post-colonial era. Part One examines contemporary French attitudes towards the wider Maghreb, including examples from Morocco, Algeria and Tunisia. Drawing on traditions which extend back to Montaigne and Montesquieu, it considers contemporary updating of Orientalist traditions within which French writers have explored other countries as seen from the Hexagon. Part Two concerns the singularity of Algeria’s relationship with France. By focusing on a case-study – representations of the Paris massacre of 17 October 1961 – the thesis draws wider conclusions about the way in which attitudes to the Algerian War are changing, and the key role potentially played by literary and other artistic representation. The final chapter looks at recollections of life in Algeria in the work of two women writers, Marie Cardinal and Hélène Cixous. It concludes that their early experience there of conflict and otherness was fundamental in shaping the development of their writing project, and that their literary memories destabilise notions of a unified ‘Frenchness’.

Over the past two decades the contribution of postmigrant literature to Germany's literary landscape has attracted significant scholarly interest. This study investigates selected prose of Turkish-German authors. Six primary texts are reconceived as "transgressive" as they intervene in contemporary spatial, especially urban and global discourses. They employ diverse "spatial tactics" by citing conventional dichotomies (local-global, West-East) in order to abandon and replace them subsequently with dynamic views on space and time. This thesis proposes a new theoretical model of literary analyses in order to grasp the multidimensional aspects of space. Thereby, Lotman's cultural semiotics is used as springboard to expand the model throughout the readings of the texts. By including additional theories on space from disciplines such as gender studies (Gleber; Weigel), urban geography(Lynch; Downs/Stea), cultural-historical psychology (Nora; Assmann) and postcolonial criticism (Said), this analysis focuses on narrative strategies that challenge physical and conceptual concepts of boundaries. The originality of this approach lies in a perceptive, thorough reading of textual productions of space that refrains from pinpointing the texts as homogenous minority literature. The theoretical model examines spatial motifs and themes inherent in the primary texts while disregarding the alleged "foreignness" of the authors. Each of the main chapters discusses two works focusing on the dimensions gender-space, memory-space and geography-space: Emine S. Ozdamar's Die Brikke vom Goldenen Horn and Aysel Ozakin's Die Blaue Maske are analyzed as novels transgressing gender-coded urban spaces. The Berlin settings in Aras Oren's Berlin Savignyplatz and Zafer Senocak's Gefahrliche Verwandtschaft are conceived as multi-discursive fragments shedding new light on German "realms of memory". Yade Kara's Selam Berlin and Feridun Zaimoglu's Zwolf Gramm Gluck are investigated in relation to "glocal" dislocations and Oriental imaginations. This dissertation makes two key contributions to German literary studies: First, it proposes an alternative reading to the common practice of categorizing postmigrant literature by cultural heritage and generation by putting forward the idea that writers adopt manifold perspectives on spatial configurations. Second, by reading literary spaces through an alternate disciplinary lens, this dissertation reads the texts as multilayered complexities of spatial presentations and advocates a comparative, text-centered method of literary analysis.

Cette thèse présente une analyse comparée des œuvres de deux écrivains contemporains, John Maxwell Coetzee (1940-), originaire d’Afrique du Sud, et Wu Ming-yi (1971-), de Taïwan, que l’on associe au genre de la « littérature écologique postcoloniale ». À partir de leurs travaux, cette thèse propose une étude interdisciplinaire couvrant trois dimensions de leurs travaux : la théorie, la politique et le littéraire. Les textes choisis pour l’analyse sont ceux qui cherchent à la fois à fournir une image dystopique de l’exploitation des environnements naturels et des êtres non-humains et à représenter l’oppression coloniale des peuples colonisés et de l’exploitation des ressources naturelles dans différentes parties du monde. En ce qui concerne la dimension théorique, la thèse aborde le questionnement suivant : comment la philosophie occidentale contemporaine prend en compte les animaux et les êtres écologiques (êtres non-humains et non-animaux), afin de reconsidérer la question plus générale de l’altérité. Quant à la dimension politique, la thèse adopte une posture philosophique afin de questionner les contextes historiques des pays postcoloniaux, notamment ceux de l’Afrique du Sud et de Taïwan. Enfin, la dimension littéraire examine les écrits de Coetzee et de Wu afin de montrer comment leurs textes décrivent l’« autre écologique » (ecological other) en tant que moyen pour lutter contre l’identité politique postcoloniale
This thesis presents the literary works of two contemporary writers—John Maxwell Coetzee (1940-), originally from South Africa, and Wu Ming-yi (1971-) from Taiwan—whom it analyses as key exponents of postcolonial eco-literature. The thesis offers an interdisciplinary study of their works in their theoretical, political and literary aspects. The texts selected for analysis are those that seek to present a dystopian image of the exploited natural environment or nonhuman entities, while, at the same time, associating and articulating these representations with the suppressions and exploitations carried out within colonial frameworks in different parts of the world. As regards the theoretical perspective of the thesis, it addresses the subject of how contemporary continental philosophy takes nonhuman animals and other kinds of ecological beings into account and rethinks the philosophical question of the other. With respect to politics, it contextualises this philosophical questioning by looking at the history of various postcolonial countries, notably South Africa and Taiwan. Lastly, as far as literature is concerned, it examines the writings of Coetzee and Wu in order to show how their texts depict the ecological other as a way of contesting postcolonial identity politics

Recent interest in environmental crises has inspired literary critics to consider how the history of ideas shapes our current ecological debates. Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night's Dream sets the stage for assessing how Renaissance attitudes towards nature have influenced current ideologies. While the play appears to be a fantasy, it reveals a relationship with nature, both physically and figuratively. The play's excursion into the woods shows an attempt to heal human relationships. Shakespeare's use of the imagery of nature argues in favor of the green world, for it is a world inhabited by shadows and shamen -- or, as Shakespeare calls them, fairies. A key element for ecocritics concerns the apparent silence of nature in literature and other cultural forms. Christopher Manes' article, "Nature and Silence," alerts readers to nature's lack of voice as a symptom of humanism, especially of theories such as the Great Chain of Being, which place nature in a subordinate role to humans, giving homo sapiens the dubious power to speak for nature. I wish to present Shakespeare's fairies as the speakers of the forest and of nature's values, according to the Early Modern period. By liberating fairies from demonic associations, Shakespeare's forest appears to us as inviting and healing. Furthermore, I argue that the pastoral tradition, which informs the Early Modern attitude towards nature, is superceded by picaresque and shamanic figures within the text. These elements allow for a subversive understanding of nature and our relationship to it. If humans adapted to their environment by developing consciousness, what has been the effect of that consciousness on their environment? Shakespeare's forest and fairies help to confront this issue because they restore human awareness to a healthy state of consciousness. By showing fairies in this light, Shakespeare provocatively proposes that humans "mend" their relationship to their surroundings as well as their own human relationships.

As the title suggests, this essay is a feminist and postcolonial literary analysis of the main character Okonkwo´s downfall and demise in acclaimed author Chinua Achebe´s 1958 novel, Things Fall Apart. A recurrent theme within the narrative is the concept of gender differences and gender roles, in the strict traditional and patriarchal system which serves as the setting of the narrative. Okonkwo, who is a traditional and proud Igbo man, has an aversion toward what is considered to be weak and feminine. Okonkwo is therefore struck with depression when he finds himself in a weak and helpless position, as well as emasculated emotional state of mind. Furthermore, Okonkwo becomes a victim to colonialism in the latter part of the narrative, which consequently adds to his already helpless and emasculated state of mind. The purpose with this essay is therefore to investigate if feelings of emasculation are the cause for Okonkwo´s final decision to end his own life. Based upon the analysis included in this essay, one of the conclusions that could be drawn was that the helplessness and feelings of emasculation Okonkwo experiences within the narrative are too much for him to cope with and therefore cause his downfall and demise.

Através deste trabalho de investigação, pretendemos estudar um corpus de Cante Alentejano, perspetivando esse estudo a partir do conceito de literatura entendida como um polissistema, em que o texto verbal é um sistema em interação com outros sistemas, de acordo com as propostas teóricas desenvolvidas por Itamar Even-Zohar, e, desta forma, acrescentarmos novos olhares aos que foram já apresentados na Academia, sobre esta forma de expressão oral da arte verbal portuguesa, com fortes vínculos regionais. O conceito que norteia a nossa análise é o da relação estabelecida com o espaço, o lugar-Alentejo, entendida como construção de produção de presença segundo as teorias de Hans U. Gumbrecht, reforçadas pelas de Paul Zumthor, acerca da materialidade, da voz, da performance, e da receção, e que de igual modo, contribuem para a expansão do conceito de literatura. A relação é aqui perspetivada como procedimento fundamental para o conhecimento das diferentes manifestações do Cante Alentejano, sendo pensado como interação com o espaço, e, numa vertente performativa, em que os interstícios comunicativos entre o grupo que atua, atualizando o texto, e o efeito nos ouvintes são importantes. Os usos da relação enquadram-se ainda no âmbito da ecocrítica, onde são verificadas as diversas cartografias literárias que o enunciador/recetor pode traçar para o mesmo lugar-Alentejo. Assim, pretendemos averiguar se o Cante Alentejano se apresenta como uma máquina literária, no encalço da noção de lugar, servindo-se da performance como seu sistema operativo. Neste sentido, corpo/voz, sentido/presença, pensamento metafórico e lugar apresentam-se como conceitos que servem de base à análise efetuada no nosso trabalho. O lugar deverá ainda assumir-se como o próprio lugar do texto das modas, no sistema literário, já que é aqui, mesmo indissociável de outras práticas culturais, e artísticas, que o Cante naturalmente vive, que encontraremos a atitude e a técnica que transforma a linguagem verbal em Arte; Abstract: Through this investigative work we intend to study a corpus of the Cante Alentejano, having its perspective rooted upon the concept of literature as a polysystem in which the verbal text is a system interacting with other systems, supported by the theoretical proposals developed by Itamar Even-Zohar, thus adding new approaches to the ones former presented by the Academy on this particular form of oral expression of the Portuguese verbal art with strong regional bindings. Our analysis directive is that of the connection with the space -the local-Alentejounderstood as the build up of the production of “presence/existance” according to the theories of Hans U. Gumbrecht upheld by Paul Zumthor´s on the materiality, voice, performance and reception, all contributing to the expansion of the concept of literature. The connection/relationship is then perspectivated as a fundamental procedure towards the knowledge of the many manifestations of the Cante Alentejano interacting with the space, and, a performative view in which the communicative interstices among the group that perform updating the text and its effect upon the listeners, are both important. The usage of the relationship still fits in the range of ecocriticism, being possible to assert the various literary cartographies that the sender/receptor may draw for the same placeAlentejo. Thus, we intend to inquire whether the Cante Alentejano presents itself as a literary machine in the pursue of the concept of place, using its performance as an operating system. Bearing this in mind, body/voice, sense/presence, metaphorical thought and place, present themselves as the basis of our analysis. The “place” should define itself as its own origin of the lyrics of the songs, in the literary system,-even if inseparable from other cultural and artistic practices- since it’s where it (the “Cante Alentejano”) lives and where we can find the attitude and technique which transform the verbal language into Art.

In my thesis, I examine Aminata Sow Fall's sixth novel Douceurs du bercail "The Sweetness of Home" through three lenses: race, gender, and nature. I analyze the way Sow Fall approaches each of these three areas in terms of paradox to emphasize her understanding of the complexity of these issues and her reluctance to outline them rigidly. Instead of putting forth hard opinions about how race, gender, or nature should be understood, Sow Fall exhibits a propensity to allow each area to remain complicated. I study why she allows racial, gendered, and environmental paradoxes to circulate around one another in her text rather than attempting to resolve them, concluding that she uses this strategy both as an organizing principle and as an invitation to her readers to question the extant theories surrounding these three issues. Sow Fall's use of language in all three areas signals an underlying fascination with the paradoxes inherent in each. In the chapter on race, I discuss the contrasting narrative styles Sow Fall uses to describe European airport officials versus the protagonist Asta's best friend, a French woman named Anne. Sow Fall's language is significant here because she contrasts two white Europeans, one characterized as systematic and cold, the other warm and open, respectively. I also discuss the way Sow Fall uses an informal and lethargic narrative voice to characterize a black secretary living in Senegal, further highlighting the disconnect between the two racial groups. In the chapter on feminism, I discuss a shift in Asta's language as she becomes more assertive. I also analyze the various aspects of femininity in Douceurs du bercail which have led some scholars to carry out feminist readings of the text, such as Asta's decision to leave her domineering and abusive husband, but recognize the more traditional aspects of the novel, such as Asta's marriage to Babou at Naatangué, as problematic to a purely feminist reading of the text. In the chapter on nature, I study Sow Fall's problematic use of Westernized language to describe the development of the untouched land of Naatangué into a lucrative farm. Throughout the chapters, I interpret Naatangué as the ultimate paradoxical space which is at once wrought with complicated language and conflicting ideals yet acts as a quasi-paradise where Asta and her friends balance the conflicting forces of tradition and modernity. Naatangué also acts as an organizing principle where all three areas of my study intersect.

This thesis explores the construction and use of the hijra figure in fictional literature. It argues that hijras are utilised as both symbols of deviance and central points around which wider anti-sociality circulates. In order to contextualise these characters and offer a deeper understanding of the constructed nature of their representations, this thesis works with four frames of reference. It draws respectively on Hindu mythology (chapter one), the Mughal empire and its use of eunuchs, which the authors of fiction use to extend their representations of hijras (chapter two), British colonialism in India and its ideological frameworks which held gender deviance to be a marker of under-civilisation (chapter three) and the postcolonial period, in which hijras continue to fight for their rights whilst attempting to survive in an increasingly marginal social position (chapter four). Examining the literary material through the lens of these four frameworks shows, historically, the movement of the hijras in the public imaginary away from being symbols of the sacred to symbols of sexuality and charts the concurrent shift in their level of social acceptance. In terms of their literary representations, it is seen that authors draw upon material informed by each of the four frameworks, but never in simple terms. Rather, they work imaginatively but often restrictively to produce an injurious or detrimental image of the hijras, and they apply multiple historical frameworks to the same narratives and individual characters, with the result of marking them as timeless figures of eternal otherness. The image of hijras as sacred beings in Hindu mythology is recast as them being terrifying figures who are liable to curse binary-gendered citizens if their extortionate demands are not met (chapter one). The political prominence of Mughal eunuchs and their position as guardians of sexual boundaries and purity become treasonous political manipulation through the enactment of secret plots, often involving sexual violence, to impact on political events (chapters two and three). The criminalisation of hijras as a means of pushing them out of public visibility becomes naturalised anti-sociality and a shadowy existence at the social margins (chapter three). Finally, in a public environment which has both seen a major increase in campaigns for hijra rights and acceptance, but which has met with fierce opposition, the hijras are overburdened with associations which render them as hyperbolic and ultimately unsustainable figures (chapter four). Ultimately, these constructions facilitate sensationalised storylines set in the criminal underworld. Whilst the thrilling nature of these stories has the potential to capture a readership, this comes at the expense of the hijra characters, who are rendered as inherent criminals, sexual aggressors and wilfully anti-social. Campaigns to protect hijras as a third-gender category, guarantee their legal rights and end their criminalisation for the first time since 1860 have been publicly prominent since 2001; these campaigns are now coming before parliament and formal decisions are expected imminently. Examining understandings of hijras outside of their communities is thus politically timely and necessary for disrupting the cycle of overburdening them as society's gendered scapegoats, contributing to a project of more nuanced understandings necessary for their social integration.

The aim of this essay is to provide a perspective on literature inculpating colonialism using postcolonial literary theory and method. The subject material incorporates four novels studied during the literature modules for the English course at Högskolan Gävle (HIG). The four novels combine to highlight various issues that affect the Self-identity through hybridization and colonial discourse as well as the detrimental nature of the colonial project for indigenous value systems during the period of colonialism. There is also application of theories and concepts raised in academic literature from within and outside the curriculum of HIG. The use of the postcolonial literary methodology provides a critical perspective of the aforementioned literature while implementing theories associated with that movement such as hybridity and the redefining of borders as well as focusing on the social, cultural, political and religious impact of the coloniser’s activities in the colonies as raised in the novels.  The most significant findings of this essay include the roles of isolation and disconnection within the colonial project and the subsequential effects on the colonised and their descendants. There are findings and observations of the level of strategic application of universalistic colonial discourse and the intrinsic application of the language used in the objectification of the indigenous and the subjugation of their value systems. The role of perception is also highlighted including findings on the social implications for the colonies inhabitants, both dissident and conformist, raised within the chosen literature and this essay. The essay also examines the application of various strands of literary theory incorporated within postcolonialism including poststructuralism and psychoanalytic criticism as well as anthropology material.  The conclusion of this essay culminates with the conflicting interpretations of progress as a universalism that counters the theories of postcolonialists and poststructuralists and their subsequent refusal to succumb to literature’s prevalence. The subjectivity of the postcolonial literary theorist and the self-imposed parameters restrict the interpretation of the colonial and postcolonial literature. The aforementioned progress defined by improved standards of health, education and social justice is lacking in presence in both the postcolonial literature and the accompanying literary theory counterpart. Subsequently, the disconnected voice of isolation and the split/double identity take precedence over higher standards of living and the appreciation of access to improved human rights and social justice within postcolonial society.

This thesis provides a comparative reading to selected writings from Anglophone Trinidadian writer Sam Selvon and Japanophone Taiwanese writer Weng Nao, demonstrating the link between these two authors’ specific representation of multiple diasporic models of Caribbean diaspora and Taiwanese diaspora respectively and its influence on diasporic identity narratives. This study provides a cross-linguistic/ cultural perspective on comparative postcolonial literary studies, which helps to move beyond the primary focus of Anglophone texts and contexts. Although the focused two authors Sam Selvon and Weng Nao come from different historical specificities and linguistic backgrounds that urge them produce their narratives in different ways and tones of tackling issues that they have encountered in each socio-political and cultural contexts respectively, their works provides outstanding examples of how contemporary diasporic routes—both geographically and metaphorically, have significant influence on literary productions that should not be categorised by its geographical or linguistic boundaries, and can only be fully understood by linking one to another from the legacies of colonialism and the triangle models of diasporic routes. The diasporic identity, as being illustrated in both of their works, has been evolved with geographical movements and transformed into an iconic concept that makes new forms of artistic production possible. Diasporic literature, therefore, should not be limited into traditional disciplinary compartmentalisation of national literary studies. By bringing the focus on the multiple diasporic journeys, the identity representation reflected in the literary work in this study helps to identify the complexity and boundary crossing within Anglophone literature and Japanophone literature, which have already transformed into literary works of being able to depict a more complex model of modern cultures—endless traveling and hybrid. By bringing forth the excluded Japanophone texts in the field of postcolonial studies to be compared with the texts from the prominent Anglophone postcolonial writer Sam Selvon, this thesis hopes to offer some insights into the reassessment of the literary status of Weng Nao and the significance of his works in the world literary stage, and, furthermore, to identify how Japanophone literary works might be compatible with postcolonial analysis.

This thesis focuses on the production, circulation, and reception of contemporary Middle Eastern literatures in Britain and the United States. I'm particularly interested in the novel form, and in assessing how both translated Middle Eastern novels and anglophone novels by migrant writers engage with dominant Anglo-American discourses of politics, gender, and religion in the region. In negotiation with Edward Said's Orientalism, I develop a materialist postcolonial critical model to analyse how such discourses undergird publishing and marketing strategies towards novels by Ibrahim Nasrallah, Hisham Matar, Yasmin Crowther, Orhan Pamuk, and others. I argue that as Middle Eastern novels travel, whether via translation or authorial acts of migration, across cultures and languages, they are reshaped according to dominant audience expectations. But, I continue, they also retain traces of their source cultures which must be brought to the surface in critical readings. Drawing on the work of David Damrosch, Pascale Casanova, Franco Moretti, and Aamir Mufti, I thus develop a reading practice, what I call 'post-Orientalist comparatism', that allows me to read past the domesticating strategies framing these novels and to newly reveal their more local, thus potentially transgressive, takes on Middle Eastern socio-political issues. I cumulatively suggest that Middle Eastern novels in English formally embody a dialectic of 'East' and 'West', of the local and the global, thus have important implications for our understanding of the English and world novel traditions. I conceive of my thesis as a dual intervention into the fields of postcolonial studies and world literature. I am primarily concerned to reorient postcolonial theory around questions of Middle Eastern literary and cultural production, areas that have been traditionally neglected due to an entrenched, but unsustainable, anglophone bias. To do so, I turn to the work of Edward Said, and rethink the foundational problematic of Orientalism with an eye towards political, material, and cultural developments since 1978, the year in which Orientalism was first published, and towards the unique transnational positionality of the genre of the Middle Eastern novel in English. I also turn to theorists of world literature such as David Damrosch in order to develop a reading practice thoroughly attentive to issues of circulation, but, along the lines set out by Aamir Mufti, seek to interrogate their work for its occlusions of the impact of orientalist discourse in the historical development of the category of 'World Literature'. My thesis thus not only draws on postcolonial and world literary theory to analyse its object, the Middle Eastern novel in English, but also demonstrates how proper attention to this object necessitates a theoretical recalibration of these fields.

This thesis reads the fiction and poetry of Spokane/Coeur d’Alene writer Sherman Alexie as predominantly urban Indian literature. The primary experience of the growing majority of American Indians in the twenty-first century consists in the various threats and opportunities presented by urban living, yet contemporary criticism of literature by (and about) American Indians continues to focus on the representations of life for those tribally enrolled American Indians living on reservations, under the jurisdiction of tribal governments. This thesis provides critical responses to Alexie’s contemporary literary representations of those Indians living apart from tribal lands and the communities and traditions contained therein. I argue that Alexie’s multifaceted representations of Indians in the city establish intelligible urban voices that speak across tribal boundaries to those urban Indians variously engaged in creating diverse Indian communities, initiating new urban traditions, and adapting to the anonymities and visibilities that characterise city living. The thesis takes a broadly linear chronological structure, beginning with Alexie’s first published collection of short stories and concluding with his most recent works. Each chapter isolates for examination a distinct aspect of Alexie’s urban Indian literature, so demonstrating a potential new critical methodology for reading urban Indian literatures. I open with a short piece explaining my position as a white, British scholar of the heavily politicised field of American Indian literary studies, before the introductory chapter positions Alexie in the wider body of Indian literatures and establishes the historical grounds for the aims and claims of my research. Chapter one is primarily concerned with the short story ‘Distances’, from The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven (1993), and the Ghost Dance religion of the late nineteenth century, reading Alexie’s representations of this phenomenon as explorations of the historical and political tensions that divide those Indians living on tribal lands and those living in cities. Chapter two discusses the difficulties of maintaining a tribal identity when negotiating this divide towards the city, analysing the politics of indigenous artistic expression and reception in Alexie’s first novel, Reservation Blues (1995). Alexie’s second novel, Indian Killer (1996), signals the relocation of his literary aesthetics to the city streets, and chapter three detects and unravels the anti-essentialist impulse in Alexie’s (mis)use of the distinctly urban mystery thriller genre. Grief, death and ritual are explored in chapter four, which focusses on selected stories from Ten Little Indians (2003), and explains Alexie’s characters’ need for new, urban traditions with reference to an ethics of grieving. Chapter five connects the politics of time travel to the representation of trauma in Flight (2007), and addresses Alexie’s representations of violence in Ten Little Indians and The Toughest Indian in the World (2000), proposing that it is the structural violences of daily life, rather than the murder and beatings found throughout his work, that leave lasting impressions on urban Indian subjectivities. My conclusion brings together my approaches to Alexie’s urban Indian literature, and suggests further areas for research.

En s’intéressant aux écrits entourant l’histoire houleuse de la mouvance écoféministe, cette thèse dresse le portrait des différentes manifestations littéraires de l’écoféminisme contemporain en soutenant l’idée selon laquelle la critique littéraire constitue le cœur de cette mouvance, plutôt qu’une simple manifestation de celle-ci. La première partie de notre travail reprend l’histoire complexe de l’écoféminisme et de la critique littéraire écoféministe, depuis les années 1970 jusqu’à nos jours, en opérant une remise en contexte historique. Ceci permet d’aborder le problème de l’essentialisme souvent associé à l’écoféminisme en faisant apparaître la stérilité de ce débat au regard des évolutions que la mouvance peut apporter, d’une part, et, d’autre part, d’insister sur les racines (éco)féministes de l’écocritique. Notre seconde partie établit les grandes lignes d’une praxis écoféministe transversale, avant de se concentrer plus particulièrement sur la façon dont l’écocritique féministe articule le rapport au lieu, à la corporéité et le rapport au langage. Enfin, la troisième partie de la thèse porte sur l’objet d’étude de l’écocritique féministe : la littérature. Nous y proposons nos propres analyses écocritiques féministes d’une sélection de textes contemporains. La troisième partie offre ainsi une application concrète de la praxis écoféministe transversale à laquelle la seconde partie s’intéresse, afin d’illustrer notre point clef : la théorie sert à guider et informer la lecture, bien entendu, mais la littérature et la critique littéraire ont également alimenté et enrichi la pratique critique et l’activisme
By focusing on the writings which have accompanied the ecofeminist movement’s heated history, this thesis offers an overview of the literary manifestations of contemporary ecofeminism and argues that literary criticism is in fact at the heart of the ecofeminist movement instead of being a mere manifestation of it. The first part of our work retraces the complex history of ecofeminism and feminist ecocriticism, from its beginnings in the 1970s to the present day, which puts it back into its historical context. This allows a closer look at the essentialist problem which is often associated with ecofeminism, this debate’s sterility appears by itself when one takes into account the changes that this movement can help establish from the one hand, and from the other, this allows us to concentrate on the (eco)feminists roots of ecocriticism. Our second part offers a broad outlining of a transversal ecofeminist praxis by unearthing ecocriticism’s feminist roots and by focusing on the way feminist ecocriticism deals with the sense of place, corporeality and its relationship towards language; three main themes of feminism and environmentalism of the past forty years. Finally, the third part of the thesis emphasizes the object of feminist ecocritical studies: literature. We offer our own feminist ecocritical analysis of a selection of contemporary texts. This allows for a practical use of the transversal ecofeminist praxis which our second part sheds light on and illustrates our main argument: theory is, indeed, useful to guide and inform a critical reading, but literature can also guide and inform critical practice and activism

In this study I investigate the spectrum of authoring, publishing and everyday reading of three texts - My Place (Morgan 1987), Jandamarra and the Bunuba Resistance (Pedersen and Woorunmurra 1995) and Carpentaria (Wright 2006). I have addressed this study within the field of production and consumption, utilising amongst others the work of Edward Said (1978, 1983) and Stanley Fish (1980). I locate this work within the holism of Kombu-merri philosopher, Mary Graham's 'Aboriginal Inquiry' (2008), which promotes self-reflexivity and a concern for others as central tenets of such inquiry. I also locate this work within a postcolonial framework and in recognition of the dynamic nature of that phenomenon I use Aileen MoretonRobinson's (2003) adoption of the active verb, "postcolonising"(38). In apprehending selected texts through the people who make them and who make meaning from them - authors, publishers and everyday readers, I interviewed members of each cohort within a framework that recognises the exercise of agency in their respective practices as well as the socio-historical contexts to such textual practices. Although my research design can be applied to other critical arrangements of texts, my interest here lies principally in texts that incorporate the subjects of Indigenous worldview and Indigenous experience; and in texts that are Indigenous authored or Indigenous co-authored.

In this dissertation, I argue that contemporary cultural narratives are infused with ongoing ideologies of Euro-American imperialism that prioritizes Western bodies and ways of engaging with living and nonliving beings. This restriction severely hinders possible responses to the present environmental crisis of the era often called the 'Anthropocene' through constant creation and recreation of imperial power relations and the presumed superiority of Western approaches to living. Taking inspiration from postcolonial theorist Edward Said and theories of cultural studies and empire, I use interdisciplinary methods of narrative analysis to examine threads of imperial ideologies that are (re)told and glorified in popular American science fiction television series Star Trek: Voyager (1995-2001). Voyager follows the Star Trek tradition of exploring the far reaches of space to advance human knowledge, and in doing so writes Western imperial practices of difference into an idealized future. In chapters 2 through 5, I explore how the series highlights American exceptionalism, Manifest Destiny, a belief in endless linear progress, and the creation of a safe 'home' space amidst the 'wild' spaces of the Delta Quadrant. Each of these narrative features, as presented, rely on Western difference and superiority that were fundamental to past and present Euro-American imperial encounters and endeavors. Through the recreation of these ideologies of empire, Voyager normalizes, legitimizes, and universalizes imperial approaches to engagement with other lifeforms. In order to move away from this intertwined thread of past/present/future imperialism, in my final chapter I propose alternatives for ecofeminist-inspired narrative approaches that offer possibilities for non-imperial futures. As my analysis will demonstrate, Voyager is unable to provide new worlds free of imperial ideas, but the possibility exists through the loss of their entire world, and their need to constantly make and remake their world(s). World making provides opportunity for endless possibilities, and science fiction television has the potential to aid in bringing non-imperial worlds to life. These stories push beyond individual and anthropocentric attitudes toward life on earth, and although such stories will not likely be the immediate cause of change in this era of precarity, stories can prime us for thinking in non-imperial ways.
Doctor of Philosophy
In this dissertation, I argue that contemporary cultural narratives feature continuing Euro-American imperialism that prioritizes Western bodies and ideas. These embedded narratives recreate centuries of Western imperial encounters and attitudes, and severely hinder possible responses to the present environmental crisis of the 'modern' era. Taking inspiration from postcolonial theorist Edward Said, I use interdisciplinary methods of narrative analysis to examine threads of imperialism written into popular American science fiction television series Star Trek: Voyager (1995-2001). Voyager follows the Star Trek tradition of exploring the far reaches of space to advance human knowledge, and in doing so inscribes Western imperial practices of difference and power into an idealized future through features of exploration, modernity, and progress. In order to move away from these imperial modes of thinking, I then propose alternatives for new narrative approaches that offer possibilities for non-imperial futures. As my analysis will demonstrate, Voyager is unable to provide new worlds free of imperial ideas, but the possibility exists through the loss of their entire world, and their need to constantly make and remake their world(s). World making provides opportunity for endless possibility, and science fiction television has the potential to aid in bringing non-imperial worlds to life. These stories push beyond individual and human centered attitudes toward life on earth, and although such stories will not likely be the immediate cause of change in this era of environmental crisis, stories can prime us for thinking in non-imperial ways.

This thesis examines the presence of unhu, a process of becoming and remaining human through community ties, in Nervous Conditions and The Book of Not by Tsitsi Dangarembga. Dangarembga interrogates corrupt versions of community by creating positive examples of unhu that alternatively foster community building. Utilizing ecocritical, utopian, and postcolonial methodologies, this thesis postulates that these novels stress the importance of retaining a traditional concept like unhu while also acknowledging the need to adjust it over time to ensure its vitality. Both novels depict the creativity and resilience of unhu amid toxic surroundings.

This essay examines J.R.R Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings through the application of a theoretical framework of postcolonial ecocriticism, endeavoring to discern the author’s concerns and the environmental and colonial underpinnings interwoven in the novel through a thematic analysis focusing on the concepts of pastoral, nature, wilderness and development. The results show that Tolkien undoubtedly projected his profound sentiments for environmental disruption as a product of a rapidly changing world during his lifetime. Although Tolkien’s trilogy is a work of high fantasy written in a different context, this essay argues that it is valid for scrutiny in relation to contemporary society. Furthermore, this study investigates the implementation of the text in the Swedish EFLclassroom with the purpose of raising students’ awareness for, and investment in the environment, whilst improving their all-round communicative skills, ultimately educating for a sustainable future.

This thesis considers the understudied issue of genetic engineering as it has been deployed in the literature of the late 20th century. With reference to the concept of the enlightened gender hybridity of Cyborg theory and an eye to ecocritical implications, I read four texts: Joan Slonczewski's 1986 science fiction novel A Door Into Ocean, Octavia Butler's science fiction trilogy Lilith's Brood – originally released between 1987 and 1989 as Xenogenesis – Simon Mawer's 1997 literary novel Mendel's Dwarf, and the first two books in Margaret Atwood's speculative fiction MaddAddam series: 2003's Oryx and Crake and 2009's The Year Of the Flood. I argue that the inclusion of genetic engineering has changed as the technology moves from science fiction to science fact, moving from the fantastic to the mundane. Throughout its recent literary history, genetic engineering has played a role in complicating questions of sexuality, paternity, and the division between nature and culture. It has also come to represent a nexus of potential cultural change, one which stands to fulfill the dramatic hybridity Haraway rhapsodized in her “Cyborg Manifesto” while also containing the potential to disrupt the ecocritical conversation by destroying what we used to understand as nature. Despite their four different takes on the issue, each of the texts I read offers a complex vision of utopian hopes and apocalyptic fears. They agree that, for better or for worse, genetic engineering is forever changing both our world and ourselves.
ID: 031001413; System requirements: World Wide Web browser and PDF reader.; Mode of access: World Wide Web.; Adviser: James Campbell.; Title from PDF title page (viewed June 14, 2013).; Thesis (M.A.)--University of Central Florida, 2012.; Includes bibliographical references (p. 180-187).
M.A.
Masters
English
Arts and Humanities
English; Literary, Cultural, and Textual Studies

This essay examines the use of literary theory when teaching literature before higher education. The objective isto see how and if the integration of literary theory facilitates students’ engagement with and understanding of literature. The study is conducted with the qualitative method of interviews. Four teachers, certified for upper secondary school, were deemed appropriate to interview about their current use of literary theory, as well as their attitudes towards an increased use of literary theory. Besides the data collected through interviews, this study finds its theoretical foundation in the literary theories feminist, Marxist and postcolonial theory as well as in the Swedish curriculum for English at upper secondary level. Presently, the teachers do not use literary theory distinctly; however, they do consider the use of literary theory together with literature to be beneficial for the students’ understanding of literature and the world around them. Teachers stated that while some students only will grasp the idea of the theories, other students will be able to use and apply them. The curriculum supports the use of literary theory in the core values for students of upper secondary level.

Écrits à la croisée des langues, les textes postcoloniaux sont marqués par ce phénomène que Rainier Grutman a appelé «hétérolinguisme», à savoir la coprésence des langues différentes dans un texte littéraire. Se focalisant sur un corpus de dix romans francophones postcoloniaux, publiés en France à partir des années 2000, cette thèse se propose d’une part d’étudier la mise en scène de l’hétérolinguisme dans les textes sources – ses formes et son fonctionnement – et, d’autre part, d’analyser son devenir en traduction en s’appuyant sur les versions aussi bien italiennes qu’anglaises et espagnoles. C’est le problème de la restitution de l’hétérogénéité linguistique qui est au centre de cette étude. L’analyse nous permettra de montrer comment la traduction peut relever le défi de l’hétérolinguisme. Loin de représenter un problème insoluble, l’hétérogénéité linguistique peut être restituée pourvu que la traduction dépasse les préceptes de la transparence et de la lisibilité sur lesquelles elle se régit
Written at the intersection of languages, postcolonial texts show evidence of the phenomenon that Rainer Grutman has called “heterolingualism”, that is to say the coexistence of different languages in a literary text. Focusing on a corpus of ten postcolonial novels written in French, published in France from the year 2000 onwards, this thesis, on the one hand, deals with the inclusion of heterolingualism in source texts – its forms and the way it works – and on the other hand, analyses how it is translated in the Italian as well as the English and Spanish versions. The problem of rendering linguistic heterogeneity is the core of this research. Our analysis will allow us to demonstrate how translation can take up the challenge of heterolingualism. Far from being an insoluble problem, linguistic heterogeneity can be rendered as long as the translation overrides the principles of transparency and readability on which it is usually based

Literary texts of medieval England feature trees as essential to the individual and communal identity as it intersects with nature, and the compelling qualities and organic processes associated with trees help vernacular writers interrogate the changing nature of this character. The early depiction of trees demonstrates an intimacy with nature that wanes after the tenth-century monastic revival, when the representation of trees as living, physical entities shifts toward their portrayal as allegorical vehicles for the Church's didactic use. With the emergence of new social categories in the late Middle Ages, the rhetoric of trees moves beyond what it means to forge a Christian identity to consider the role of a ruler and his subjects, the relationship between humans and nature, and the place of women in society. Taking as its fundamental premise that people in wooded regions develop a deep-rooted connection to trees, this dissertation connects medieval culture and the physical world to consider the variety of ways in which Anglo-Saxon and post-Norman vernacular manuscripts depict trees. A personal identification with trees, a desire for harmony between society and the environment, and a sympathy for the work of trees lead to the narrator's transformation in the Dream of the Rood. The Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil in the Junius 11 manuscript, illustrated in Genesis A, Genesis B, and manuscript images, scrutinizes the Anglo-Saxon Christian's relationship and responsibility to God in the aftermath of the Fall. As writers transform trees into allegories in works like Genesis B and Geoffrey Chaucer's Parson's Tale, the symbolic representations retain their spontaneous, organic processes to offer readers a visual picture of the Christian interior-the heart. Whereas the Parson's Tale promotes personal and radical change through a horticultural narrative starring the Tree of Penitence and Tree of Vices, Chaucer's Knight's Tale appraises the role of autonomous subjects in a tyrannical system. Forest laws of the post-Norman period engender a bitter polemic about the extent of royal power to appropriate nature, and the royal grove of the Knight's Tale exposes the limitations of monarchical structures and masculine control and shapes a pragmatic response to human failures.