Dissertations / Theses on the topic 'Transnational Writing'

My dissertation explores how journalists who self-identify as “transnational” shape their journalism to make human rights claims that trouble, open up and go beyond the nation-state. The project is a multi-sited, ethnographic, comparative case study of journalism education among two different transnational peoples: Romani/Gypsy and Saami (the Indigenous peoples in the current states of Norway, Sweden, Finland and Russia). Drawing upon 45 interviews with journalists and journalism educators, my research suggests there are two distinct strategies in how transnational peoples’ journalism is conceived, taught and assessed. These strategies influence and are influenced by larger socio-political contexts: the Saami media work within an Indigenous rights framework; their goal is to engage with journalism as a form of self-determination. This differs from Romani media programs, which are funded by non-state donors who aim to use Romani media as a form of claiming citizenship. These citizenship claims are both within a specific state as well as within Europe. In short, the political, economic and cultural contexts shape the journalism, and the journalism in turn shapes the politics. Although the differences are significant, both transnational groups recognized the power of journalism in agenda setting within, between and across borders. Through the framing of information in particular ways, journalists, editors and the media outlets, as well as the funding sources for this journalism, were all engaged in a form of agenda setting (Carpenter, 2007; 2009) and productive power (Barnett & Duvall, 2005). My findings indicate that a unique feature of transnational peoples’ journalism is recognizing and operationalizing power beyond that of the state; another contribution is a more robust understanding of objectivity in journalism – one that demonstrates how journalists can be credible, without pretending to be neutral. These are all important contributions to reimagining human rights advocacy beyond current discussions of transnational advocacy which still often privilege the state and tends to pay scant attention to journalists themselves. Learning from transnational peoples who are creating, teaching, and participating in journalism education in its many places, forms, and media allows us to make more sound connections between human rights and journalism.
Education, Faculty of
Educational Studies (EDST), Department of
Graduate

Drawing on poststructuralist theories of gender, nation and modernity, this dissertation is an interdisciplinary exploration of American experimental women's writing and their linkages to and explorations of colonial and U.S. imperialist histories. "Between Fact and Fiction: Writing by American Women in a Transnational Context" considers experimental literary texts by women writing from diverse spaces across places and times as cultural texts that can provide important insights for understanding transnational politics of power and possibilities for disrupting power. The project examines a broad range of experimental literary texts by women including Gertrude Stein, Theresa Hak Kyung Cha, Alicia Gaspar de Alba, and Iranian-American women writers from the first literary anthology of Iranian-American women's work entitled Let Me Tell You Where I've Been: New Writings by Women of the Iranian Diaspora .;Each author, in her own way, produces nuanced readings of power and domination on a structural (macro) level. Power and domination work both in terms of a culture's official narratives about itself, for example its history and its politics, as well as the literary stories it cherishes. These readings of power often remain unacknowledged in critical discourse because they are bracketed as aesthetic only. However, through an examination of American experimental writing by women, I argue that the aesthetic, the historical, and the political are all part of the same kind of discursive structure. and, for this reason, it is imperative to make known those discursive structures which masquerade as only historical or only aesthetic when basic discursive structure is left intact. I argue that together, these writings provide new ways of understanding U.S. culture and studying "America" within a transnational historical framework.

Though the study of life writing within postcolonial contexts has witnessed a steady acceleration of critical interest in the last two decades, it has largely been focused on questions of either marginality and difference or hybridity and transnationalism. These are seen as exemplifying their exilic perspective which seems to evoke an aesthetic capable of transcending spatio-temporal constraints under conditions of globalisation As a consequence of this over-emphasis on the disruptive and the singular in diasporic aesthetics, other aspects of their life writing which signal towards specific historical continuities and shared legacies get undermined. This thesis responds to this critical omission by critically analysing examples of contemporary life writing by writers belonging to the South Asian diaspora whose histories have been shaped by both colonial and postcolonial migration. A context-sensitive reading of their memoirs reveals not only the interconnectedness between histories of colonialism and the global present but also the ethical charge that informs their self-referential aesthetic. The ethical commitment in their autobiographical aesthetic is manifested in the form of a grounding of their itinerant subjectivities in the granular histories of colonialism and a neo-colonial globalised present, as well as a commitment to an autobiographical ‘truth’ which is both experiential and epistemological. These postcolonial memoirs demonstrate that diasporic subjectivities can be experienced in ways that are both ethically ‘specific’ and aesthetically ‘singular’. While the specific mode is ‘relational’ in which identity is foregrounded in personal memory and collective history, the singular privileges an autobiographical ‘truth’ about these relational ties or an ‘event’ in both experiential and epistemological registers. I demonstrate that focusing our analysis on the ethical impulse that drives their diasporic subjectivity can illuminate how the genre of postcolonial life writing offers a productive site for mapping literary resistance to globalisation’s culture of ‘presentism’. To substantiate this interpretation of postcolonial life writing as a form of ethical mediation into the cultural effects of globalisation this research focuses on contemporary memoirs written by both descendants of the Indian diaspora of nineteenth century British colonialism and those who migrated to the west under late capitalism. While both demonstrate a commitment to an ethics of memory through which they resignify the importance of family ties, religious communities, and cultural histories in shaping their ‘specific’ diasporic identities, some also invest in a ‘singular’ aesthetic through which they unsettle conventional notions about autobiographical ‘truth’. The relational ethic is evident in the two memoirs by M G Vassanji, Rediscovering India: A Place Within (2008) as well as And Home Was Kariakoo: Memoir of an Indian African (2014), in which diasporic nostalgia for the author’s ancestral homeland and native birthplace is refracted through a critical lens. Similarly, in Brij V Lal’s ‘factional’ narrative On The Other Side of Midnight: A Fijian Journey (2005) the ethics of memory takes on the function of an ‘interventionist autobiography’ by a historian who shows how his life’s journey is mediated by the collective history of his Indo-Fijian community. By contrast, the relational imaginary of Satendra Nandan’s memoir Requiem for a Rainbow: A Fijian Indian Story (2001) takes the form of a melodramatic aesthetic. For Kirin Narayan’s ‘we-moir’ My family and Other Saints (2007), her anthropological interests converge with her autobiographical gesture as she contextualises her family’s spiritual quest within the specific cultural milieu of India of the late 1960s. And while Michael Ondaatje’s memoir Running in the Family (1982) is ostensibly a filiation narrative like Narayan’s, its aesthetic experimentation both reaffirms the relational ethic and calls into question the protocols of evidentiary knowledge by which autobiographical ‘truth’ is conventionally bound. Finally, as the case of Salman Rushdie’s memoir Joseph Anton (2012) demonstrates a ‘singular’ aesthetic can also be used for autobiographical defence. By deploying the third person pronoun to chronicle his life after the fatwa, Rushdie foregrounds his subjective interpretation of the ‘event’ of the controversy generated by his novel The Satanic Verses (1989) over its more politically inflected readings. Notwithstanding the diversity of their transnational contexts and aesthetic concerns however, I argue that the relational ethic embedded in their life writing elucidates how contemporary diasporic subjects can be critically reflexive about their cultural history and religious identities, and can use the self-referential aesthetic of autobiography to problematize the notion of truth itself. In this sense South Asian diasporic life writing provides a significant archive for investigating how postcolonial literature intervenes in some of the disruptive cultural effects produced by globalisation.

In this thesis, I make an in-depth study of the travel-related work of three authors: Michael Ondaatje, Vikram Seth, and Arnitav Ghosh. They have all written travelogues, the importance of which - in terms of the centrality of the idea of travel to their identities and works - has been critically underestimated; my work is intended to redress this imbalance, and to assert the importance of the experiences and consequences of travel to the lives and authorships of these three authors. I explore the importance of travel through a focus on the concept of transnationalism in the work of all three - whether this transnationalism is textual, personal, or geopolitical, it provides a crucial lens through which to view the work of Ondaatje, Seth, and Ghosh. This dual focus on travel and transnationalism is reflected in the structure of the thesis. After a critical introduction, in which I map out the terrain of my argument and accept and reject certain key methodological terms, the work falls into three main, author-focused chapters. In each of these, I start with a biographical analysis of the author and his situation; this leads into an analysis of his principal work of travel writing (Ondaatje's Running in the Family, Seth's From Heaven Lake: Travels through Sinkiang and Tibet, and Ghosh's In an Antique Land); and in the final section of each chapter I study an example of the author's transnationalliterature from the end of the twentieth century (respectively, Anil's Ghost, An Equal Music, and The Glass Palace).

English
Ph.D.
This dissertation examines the representation of foreign language in nineteenth-century American travel writing, analyzing how authors conceptualize the act of translation as they address the multilingualism encountered abroad. The three major figures in this study--James Fenimore Cooper, Herman Melville, and Mark Twain--all use moments of cross-cultural contact and transference to theorize the permeability of the language barrier, seeking a mean between the oversimplification of the translator's task and a capitulation to the utter incomprehensibility of the Other. These moments of translation contribute to a complex interplay of not only linguistic but also cultural and economic exchange. Charting the changes in American travel to both the "civilized" world of Europe and the "savage" lands of the Southern and Eastern hemispheres, this project will examine the attitudes of cosmopolitanism and colonialism that distinguished Western from non-Western travel at the beginning of the century and then demonstrate how the once distinct representations of European and non-European languages converge by the century's end, with the result that all kinds of linguistic difference are viewed as either too easily translatable or utterly incomprehensible. Integrating the histories of cosmopolitanism and imperialism, my study of the representation of foreign language in travel writing demonstrates that both the compulsion to translate and a capitulation to incomprehensibility prove equally antagonistic to cultural difference. By mapping the changing conventions of translation through the representative narratives of three canonical figures, "Transnational Translation" traces a shift in American attitudes toward the foreign as the cosmopolitanism of Cooper and Melville transforms into Twain's attitude of both cultural and linguistic nationalism.
Temple University--Theses

Migrant women use life writing not only to share pieces of their own lives, but also to write powerful narratives which confront racism, patriarchal oppression, and US imperialism. The four texts I have selected represent skillful negotiation between drastically different languages, cultures, and social systems, evinced both through the experiences the authors represent within the text and through their careful rhetorical and narrative strategies, which are tailored for particular audiences. As these narratives demonstrate, migrant women can use life writing to contest and destabilize dominant narratives of history and race. In I’ve Come a Long Way (1942), Chinese author Helena Kuo demonstrates the worth, dignity, and superiority of Chinese culture in order to convince US readers to ally with China in their fight against Japan. Kuo’s work was intended not only to garner military support for China, but also to create a more positive view of the Chinese people. Rosario Morales and Aurora Levins Morales, a mother and daughter born in New York City and Puerto Rico, respectively, write together in Getting Home Alive (1986), layering stories from the mainland United States and the island of Puerto Rico while protesting US imperialism and US military presence on the island. By enacting resistance from a variety of subject positions, the authors are able to share pieces of their life stories while also creating an alternate history of Puerto Rico, one that reveals the violence and imperial domination of the US government. In When Heaven and Earth Changed Places (1989), former Vietcong collaborator Le Ly Hayslip tells the story of the Vietnam War from the perspective of a Vietnamese villager, explaining why some Vietnamese resisted US forces. Through her narrative, Hayslip transforms herself from a Vietcong enemy into a reliable narrator for US readers, detailing her own suffering, empathizing with her US readership, and encouraging peace and forgiveness between nations, while still questioning the ethics of US involvement in the war. By retelling stories from her childhood on the US-Mexico border in Canícula: Snapshots of a Girlhood en la Frontera (1995), Mexican author Norma Elia Cantú challenges the impermeability of borders, both between fact and fiction and between nations. By simultaneously retelling and fictionalizing her past, Cantú is able to preserve and reclaim her childhood while creating a subversive counternarrative of border life which contests dominant governmental and patriarchal narratives. All of these authors use life writing in an innovative way, tailoring their texts to the political and social context in which they were publishing and striving to build a relationship with readers at a particular time in US history. By challenging conventional, governmental, and media representations of events and contesting existing social structures, these authors provide a more comprehensive understanding of US history and society.

This project examines the ways in which several texts written in the late twentieth century by African American and Caribbean writers appropriate history and witness trauma. I read the representational practices of Toni Morrison, Ernest Gaines, Paule Marshall, and Fred D'Aguiar as they offer distinct approaches to history and the resulting effects such reconstituted, discovered, or, in some cases, imagined histories can have on the affirmation of the self as a subject. I draw my theoretical framework from the spaces of intersection between diaspora and postcolonial theories, enabling me to explore the values of the African diaspora cross-culturally as manifested in the representational practices of these writers. This study creates an opening into recent discourses of the African diaspora by comparing texts in which the effects of history rooted in diaspora are explored, both in how this history cripples with the impact of trauma and how it empowers dynamic self-actualization and the resistance of the status quo. I argue that in these novels, challenging hegemonic historical narratives and bearing witness to the past are necessary for overcoming the isolating and disempowering effects of trauma, while affirming diasporic consciousness enhances the role of communal belonging and cultural memory in the process of self-actualization.

Because the first part of the twentieth century in Ireland was marked with nationalist milestones like the Easter Rising and the Anglo-Irish War, most accounts of modern Irish literature and culture are nation-centered. This dissertation offers a new understanding of modern Irish writing by placing national identity in conversation with global consciousness, a burgeoning concept in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. In particular, this project explores three aspects of globalism: the attachments to foreign countries that Irish writers form; the ways in which these attachments affect their relationships with Ireland; and their subsequent articulation of global consciousness based on these transnational experiences. The introduction provides a critical and historical context for the project by negotiating between the established discipline of Irish Studies and the emerging field of Irish Diaspora Studies. Each chapter then investigates an Irish writer whose work indicates a relationship between global and national consciousness. The Irish-Argentine writer William Bulfin and the evolution of his relationship with gauchos, as it is suggested in his Tales of the Pampas, forms the subject of the next chapter. The second chapter juxtaposes Helen Waddell's The Princess Splendour and Other Stories, which retells fairytales from the Middle and Far East as well as from Ireland, with Lady Gregory's and Douglas Hyde's nationalistic collections of Irish folklore. The third chapter investigates the connection between the feminist underpinnings of Kate O'Brien's novels with the transnational movements that frequently accompany them. The fourth chapter examines the cosmopolitan imperative of Brian Moore's Irish-American novels. Finally, in the epilogue I briefly suggest the ways in which contemporary Irish writing extends the projects begun by these earlier figures.

This thesis argues that women writers of the South Asian diaspora are inscribing a literary aesthetic which is recognisably feminist. In recent decades women of the South Asian diaspora have risen to the forefront of the global literary and publishing arena, winning acclaim for their endeavours. The scope of this literature is wide, in terms of themes, styles, genres, and geographic location. Prose works range from grave novelistic explorations of female subjectivity to short story collections intent on capturing historical injustices and the experiences of migration. The thesis demonstrates, through close readings and comparative frameworks, that an overarching pattern of common aesthetic elements is deployed in this literature. This deployment is regarded as a transnational feminist practice.

This study considers Thomas Hoccleve’s role, throughout his works, as a “religious” writer: as an individual who engages seriously with the dynamics of heresy and ecclesiastical reform, who contributes to traditions of vernacular devotional writing, and who raises the question of how Christianity manifests on personal as well as political levels – and in environments that are at once London-based, national, and international. The chapters focus, respectively, on the role of reading and moralization in the Series; the language of “vice and virtue” in the Epistle of Cupid; the moral version of Chaucer introduced in the Regiment of Princes; the construction of the Hoccleve persona in the Regiment; and the representation of the Eucharist throughout Hoccleve’s works. One main focus of the study is Hoccleve’s mediating influence in presenting a moral version of Chaucer in his Regiment. This study argues that Hoccleve’s Chaucer is not a pre-established artifact, but rather a Hocclevian invention, and it indicates the transnational literary, political, and religious contexts that align in Hoccleve’s presentation of his poetic predecessor. Rather than posit the Hoccleve-Chaucer relationship as one of Oedipal anxiety, as other critics have done, this study indicates the way in which Hoccleve’s Chaucer evolves in response to poetic anxiety not towards Chaucer himself, but rather towards an increasingly restrictive intellectual and ecclesiastical climate. This thesis contributes to the recently revitalized critical dialogue surrounding the role and function of fifteenth-century English literature, and the effect on poetry of heresy, the church’s response to heresy, and ecclesiastical reform both in England and in Europe. It also advances critical narratives regarding Hoccleve’s response to contemporary French poetry; the role of confession, sacramental discourse, and devotional images in Hoccleve’s work; and Hoccleve’s impact on literary tradition.

This research began as an attempt to question to what extent a politics of solidarity and the evolution of a ‘transnational feminism’ which travels across borders can be established within Arab and Western literary novels. While this study, in spirit, takes its lead from the call for ‘feminism without borders’ within the writings of two contemporary women writers, the Canadian Margaret Atwood and the Lebanese Hanan Al-Shaykh, it responds to the notion of transnationalism and literary ambassadorship from the perspective of Arab-Western relations. This process raises key questions for the reading of women’s writings across sensitive cultural divides: How can the literary contributions of Margaret Atwood and Hanan Al-Shaykh help in reshaping the form and content of a transnational and cultural interaction between the Arab World and the West? Do women writers articulate their concerns in the same manner across cultures? To what extent can literature cross borders and be fully engaged within diverse women’s concerns? And what might hinder the circulation of a transnational literary interaction? These contemporary women writers have been studied in the belief that their novels are committed to a transnational feminist agenda. Both writers place their feminist concerns within a national framework that they constantly negotiate. However, this comparison to test the value of women’s writings across borders has been challenged by a more complex study of factors that intervene along the way. The politics of reception, the processes of production, circulation, and consumption of the writers’ literary texts, the writers’ own shifting allegiances moving from nationalism to broader multicultural, cosmopolitan and transnational frameworks, are all factors to be taken into account. These factors have a direct impact on the context through which the literary texts have to be studied. Hence, this study seeks to contribute to this task by showing how these writers are engaged in the process of adjusting, reconstructing and even transcending their cultural milieus.

Cette thèse vise à étudier des egodocuments dans une période de transformations politiques et sociales qui s’étend des années 1890 aux années 1930. Notre réflexion se base sur des études de cas : un journal intime, des agendas, des lettres, des carnets de famille, des albums de photographies, des photographies d’intérieurs ainsi qu’une corpus de sources publiées. A partir de la fin du XIXe siècle de nouvelles formes de représentation de soi se développaient dans l’Empire ottoman, souvent reliées aux discours politiques émergents. La diffusion de la photographie et des nouvelles techniques de reproduction des textes et des images a certainement contribué au développement de ces nouvelles formes de représentation. Notre objectif est d’analyser dans une démarche englobante des moyens écrits et visuels de représentation de soi qui s’entremêlaient dans la plupart des cas. L’étude de cette documentation permet d’analyser à l’échelle individuelle la façon dont les sujets de cette étude ont fait l’expérience d’un monde en transformation, comment ils/elles ont construit et gardé leurs souvenirs, comment ils/elles se sont projetés au futur dans une époque de bouleversements politiques et sociaux. Cela nous permet aussi de suivre la circulation transnationale des objets et des pratiques, ainsi que les manières avec lesquelles ils sont adaptés et réappropriés par une « nouvelle base sociale ». Nos sources sont l’objet-même de notre étude. L’intérêt est aussi bien porté sur la matérialité et les usages de ces documents que sur ce qu’ils nous apprennent sur l’expérience, les émotions, les sens, la mise-en-scène ou la performance de soi que mettent en œuvre chacun.e.s de nos auteurs
This thesis aims to study egodocuments in a period of political and social transformations, from the 1890s to the 1930s. Our study is based on case studies: A diary, almanacs, letters, photo albums, interior photographies as well as a series of published sources. From the end of the 19th century, new forms of self-representation developed in the Ottoman Empire, often related to emergent political discourses. The diffusion of photography and the new techniques of reproduction of texts and images contributed to the development of these new forms of self-representation. Our aim is to analyze written and visual tools of self-representation, that are most of the time intermingled, in an all-encompassing approach. The study of this documentation enables us to analyze, at the individual level, the ways in which the subjects of this study made experience of a world in transformation, constructed and preserved their memories, imagined their future. This also allows us to follow the transnational circulation of objects and practices, as well as their adaption and reappropriation by a “new social base”. Our sources are also the objects of our study. We are also interested in the materialities and uses of these documents as well as in what they tell us on the experiences, emotions, senses and the mise-en-scène or the performance of the self

Cette thèse explore les connections entre la littérature canadienne contemporaine féminine et le féminisme transnational. Le « transnational » est une catégorie qui est de plus en plus importante dans la critique littéraire canadienne, mais elle n’est pas souvent evoquée en lien avec le féminisme. À travers cette thèse, je développe une méthodologie de lecture féministe basée sur le féminisme transnational. Cette méthodologie est appliquée à la littérature canadienne féminine; parallèlement, cette littérature participe à la définition et à l’élaboration des concepts féministes transnationaux tels que la complicité, la collaboration, le silence, et la différence. De plus, ma méthodologie participe à la recontextualisation de certains textes et moments dans l’histoire de la littérature canadienne, ce qui permet la conceptualisation d’une généalogie de l’expression féministe anti-essentialiste dans la littérature canadienne. J’étudie donc des textes de Daphne Marlatt, Dionne Brand, et Suzette Mayr, ainsi que le périodique Tessera et les actes du colloque intitulé Telling It, une conférence qui a eu lieu en 1988. Ces textes parlent de la critique du colonialisme et du nationalisme, des identités post-coloniales et diasporiques, et des possibilités de la collaboration féministe de traverser des frontières de toutes sortes. Dans le premier chapitre, j’explique ma méthodologie en démontrant que le périodique féministe bilingue Tessera peut être lu en lien avec le féminisme transnational. Le deuxième chapitre s’attarde à la publication editée par le collectif qui a été formé à la suite de la conférence Telling It. Je situe Telling It dans le contexte des discussions sur les différences qui ont eu lieu dans le féminisme nord-américan des dernières décennies. Notamment, mes recherches sur Telling It sont fondées sur des documents d’archives peu consultés qui permettent une réflexion sur les silences qui peuvent se cacher au centre du travail collaboratif. Le trosième chapitre est constitué d’une lecture proche du texte multi-genre « In the Month of Hungry Ghosts, » écrit par Daphne Marlatt en 1979. Ce texte explore les connexions complexes entre le colonialisme, le postcolonialisme, la complicité et la mondialisation. Le suject du quatrième chapitre est le film Listening for Something… (1994) qui découle d’une collaboration féministe transnationale entre Dionne Brand et Adrienne Rich. Pour terminer, le cinquième chapitre explore les liens entre le transnational et le national, la région – et le monstrueux, dans le contexte du roman Venous Hum (2004) de Suzette Mayr. Ces lectures textuelles critiques se penchent toutes sur la question de la représentation de la collaboration féministe à travers les différences – question essentielle à l’action féministe transnationale. Mes recherche se trouvent donc aux intersections de la littérature canadienne, la théorie féministe contemporaine, les études postcoloniales et la mondialisation. Les discussions fascinantes qui se passent au sein de la théorie transnationale féministe sont pertinentes à ces intersections et de plus, la littérature contemporaine féminine au Canada offre des interventions importantes permettant d’imaginer la collaboration féministe transnationale.
This dissertation explores connections between contemporary Canadian women’s writing and transnational feminism. The category of the transnational is increasingly important within Canadian literary criticism, but it is infrequently evoked in relation to feminism. Throughout this thesis, I develop a transnational feminist reading methodology that can be brought to bear on Canadian women’s writing, even as the literature itself participates in and nuances transnational feminist mobilizations of concepts such as complicity, collaboration, silence, and difference. Furthermore, my transnational feminist reading strategy provides a method for the rehistoricization of certain texts and moments in Canadian women’s writing that further allows scholars to trace a genealogy of anti-essentialist feminist expression in Canadian literature. To this end, I read texts by Daphne Marlatt, Dionne Brand, and Suzette Mayr, alongside Tessera, a collectively-edited journal, and conference proceedings from the 1988 Telling It conference; these texts speak to national and colonial critique, post-colonial and diasporic identities, and the potentials of feminist collaboration across various borders. In the first chapter, I situate my reading methodology by arguing for a transnational feminist understanding of Tessera, a bilingual feminist journal that began publishing in 1984. My second chapter examines the collectively-edited publication that emerged from Telling It in the context of North American feminist evocations of difference in recent decades. Notably, my research on Telling It benefits from rarely-accessed archival material that grounds my discussion of the gaps and silences of collective work. In my third chapter, I perform a close reading of Daphne Marlatt’s 1979 multi-genre text “In the Month of Hungry Ghosts” as it explores the complex connections between colonialism, post-colonialism, complicity and globalization. The subject of my fourth chapter is the 1994 film Listening for Something…, a transnational feminist collaboration between Dionne Brand and Adrienne Rich. Finally, my fifth chapter discusses the place of the transnational in relation to the regional, the national – and the monstrous in the context of Suzette Mayr’s Venous Hum. In all of these close textual readings, my dissertation asks how Canadian women writers represent, theorize, and critique the kinds of collaboration across differences that lie at the heart of transnational feminist action. My research is therefore located at the crossroads of Canadian literature, contemporary feminist theory, and postcolonial and globalization studies. The vibrant field of transnational feminist theory is relevant to this disciplinary intersection and, furthermore, contemporary Canadian women’s writing provides important interventions from which to imagine transnational feminist collaboration.

Consists of two components, a major creative component (Soulträume), a novel; and, a shorter, critical component (Der traum vom Moulin Rouge), an essay that discusses Soulträume within the field of transnational and interlingual literature.
Thesis (Ph.D.) -- University of Adelaide, School of Humanities, 2005

The thesis comprises a novel that is written from four points of view and an exegesis on how a multiple-narrative text affords a useful means of depicting a divided society. In the creative work, each of the interconnected stories is presented from a different perspective, with its own distinct voice and dominant images. The theoretical component attempts to lodge the polyphonic experiment within a postcolonial, post-apartheid and transnational context. “The Parts” turns on what appears to be a home invasion in contemporary South Africa as Lily Blake is attacked by Siyaya Songongo in her suburban house. However, in a land that is still torn by the effects of historical separation and discrimination, things are seldom what they seem and the central characters have more in common than they suspect. For Riaan Niemand, whose girlfriend is Lily’s daughter, the violent assault is a reminder of why his family immigrated to Australia. Set further back in time, Cikiswa’s tale is told by a group of women affected by HIV/AIDS. Lily’s version of events reveals an absorption in art, detaching her from harsh realities. And Siyaya’s rite of passage into adulthood is twisted into a journey of another kind. “The Parts” deals with themes of identity and belonging. The quartet of separate vantage points offers a method for aligning form and content, with a composite picture emerging from the accounts. Research questions pivot on finding the strongest ways to set up and sustain the disparate approaches while deciding how best to reconcile them. William Faulkner’s The Sound and the Fury serves as the structural model while André Brink’s A Chain of Voices establishes apartheid’s legacy of conflict. Close analysis of point of view in Phaswane Mpe’s Welcome to our Hillbrow, Zakes Mda’s Ways of Dying, Antjie Krog’s A Change of Tongue and Yvonne Vera’s Butterfly Burning helps to locate “The Parts” within a broader literary framework.
Thesis (Ph.D.) -- University of Adelaide, School of Humanities, 2015

碩士
國立中興大學
台灣文學研究所
98
This theses attempts to show the dietary map of homeland, colony, and globality from the experiences of Wen-Yueh Lin, Jewel Tsai, and Ang Li''s dieting writing works. The writer, Wen-Yueh Lin, has the dietary background from Shanghai, Taipei, and Japan. She used her her artistic exquisite writing way and bilingual experiences between Japanese and Mandarin to build up the city with tasty-scenery. Through her cuisine, it not only warmed up the affection with friends, relatives, and teachers, but delivered her feeling about the memory of her homeland. Jewel Tsai, born and grew up in Taiwan, studied in United Kingdom, and now lives in Hong Kong where had been colonized by UK. Tsai, as dual identity of local and immigrate, observed the social cultural images in Hong Kong by visiting traditional markets, supermarkets, restaurants, and country-sides. By culture studied viewpoint, she found that there were wars of food between countries and journey of colonial and immigrate food in the history of food. Through all these, she gained reflection and selfness from the dietary history and culture.She had been inspired from the diet culture and then developed a philosophy of new life. Ang Li began her pursuit and imagine about the diet from Lukong, where is dark and closed. In the reality, she becomes a glutton, also as gamer and gourmet, to enjoy all the fine cuisines from the whole wide world. In her dietary imagine, she is not deeply describing the relation from food to personal body and the gender, but expand to the social and national imagine, even more its impact into the global consumer culture. This theses interactively cut into three writers'' dietary writings by four ways: body, time, space, and symbol. They have different living attitudes and writing style. In their diet map, it could be shown that Lin emphasizes on the natural humanity; Tsai focus on the culture and history of the diet; and Ang Li pays close attention to global economy, politics, sex, and gender awareness.

In April and May 2015 Nepal suffered two massive earthquakes of 7.5 and 6 5 magnitudes in the Richter scale, killing 8856 and injuring 22309. Two years later in September 2017, Puerto Rico underwent the Category 5 Hurricane Maria, killing an estimate of 800 to 8000 people and displacing hundreds of thousands of Puerto Ricans (Kishore et al., 2018). This dissertation project is the comparative study of Nepal’s and Puerto Rico’s networked communities, their actors, participants (Potts, 2014), and the users (Ingraham, 2015; Johnson, 1998) who used crisis communication practices to address the havoc created by the disaster. Using a mixed-methods research approach and with framework created with the Assemblage Theory (DeLanda, 2016), I argue that disasters create situations in which various networked communities are formed into transnational assemblages along with an emergence of innovative digital technical and professional communication practices.

Cette thèse de doctorat renouvelle les réflexions autour du « carcéral » afin de le repenser comme un instrument politique et social coercitif, qui saisit et emprisonne des sujets, des collectivités, des alternatives émancipatrices et des capacités imaginatives. S’appuyant sur des récits de femmes du « tiers monde » (We Lived to Tell : Azadeh Agah, Sousan Mehr, Shadi Parsi, 2007 ; Memoirs from the Women’s Prison : Nawal El Saadawi, 1984 ; Imaginary Maps : Mahasweta Devi, 1994 ; Zoo City : Lauren Beukes, 2010 ; Moxyland : Lauren Beukes, 2008), nous explorons de multiples tropes et sites d’emprisonnement, d’enfermement, de sujétion et d’immobilisation, qui renforcent les logiques carcérales et qui entravent l’agence collective. Nous présentons une critique genrée des mécanismes locaux et mondiaux, micropolitiques et macropolitiques de la violence contre les sujets captifs et les communautés précaires. Ce dispositif de déconstruction se base sur une analyse multidisciplinaire des arrangements carcéraux, qui incluent des institutions punitives, des États-nations hétéronormatifs, des discours patriarcaux, le trafic sexuel, la servitude pour dettes, le capitalisme, la surveillance numérique, la privation économique et la déshumanisation politique. Ce travail de recherche invite également à une relecture de récits carcéraux qui permettent la réinvention des vocabulaires, des pratiques et de l’éthique de résistance, ainsi que l’émergence de projets collectifs de libération qui transgressent les confins politiques, sociaux, discursifs et épistémologiques de l’agenda néolibéral. À travers ses différents cadres théoriques, notre lecture s’engage dans un dialogue critique entre les études littéraires, féministes, postcoloniales et matérialistes, afin d’élucider de nouvelles façons de penser la carcéralité, la liberté et la résistance.
This dissertation seeks to produce new understandings of the “carceral” as a mode of subject formation and social production that captures and contains subjects, collectivities, emancipatory alternatives, and imaginative capacities. Drawing on “Third-World” women’s narratives (We Lived to Tell : Azadeh Agah, Sousan Mehr, Shadi Parsi, 2007 ; Memoirs from the Women’s Prison : Nawal El Saadawi, 1984 ; Imaginary Maps : Mahasweta Devi, 1994 ; Zoo City : Lauren Beukes, 2010 ; Moxyland : Lauren Beukes, 2008), this dissertation investigates multiple tropes and sites of imprisonment, enclosure, subjection, and immobilization that reinforce carceral logics and impede collective agency. Through a multidisciplinary examination of carceral arrangements that include punitive institutions, heteronormative nation states, patriarchal discourses, sexual trafficking, debt bondage, global capital, political dehumanization, digital surveillance, and corporate violence, this dissertation offers a gendered critique of the local and global, micropolitical and macropolitical mechanisms of violence against captive subjects and precarious communities. The dissertation also invites a rereading of carceral narratives that enable the reinvention of vocabularies, ethics, and practices of resistance and the emergence of collective liberatory projects that transgress the political, social, discursive, and epistemological confines of the neoliberal agenda. Through its different theoretical frameworks, this dissertation engages in a critical dialogue between literary, feminist, postcolonial, and materialist studies in order to elucidate new ways of thinking about carcerality, freedom, and resistance.

碩士
國立中興大學
台灣文學與跨國文化研究所
101
The increasing opportunity for Taiwanese women to travel abroad leads to the trend of women’s travel writings. Graphic travel books whose contents include pictures and travel writings highly developed in the publishing market. Women’s graphic travel writings as a kind of travel products become to show concrete results of Taiwanese women’s transnational travel experience. My research explores three women''s graphic travel books: Yu Beauty''s FUN Holiday, Wake up in One Corner of the Globe and Travel: The World of 19-year-old. The discussion of gender, globalization and capitalism in this research will be interwoven with women’s own lives in different ages, their transnational travel experiences, and women’s graphic travel writings in Taiwan. The first section with the focus on gender examine the reasons and purposes for women to travel abroad, and the difficulties faced by female travelers in transnational trips and their solutions to overcome the being-questioned identity. The second part explores how female travelers respond to travel experiences that have been deeply affected by globalization and transnational capitalism. Highly developed transportation and information networks lead female travelers to cross national boundaries. The commercialization of sensory feast experienced by female travelers shows class-bounded characteristics of consuming tastes deeply packed by capitalism and globalization but, sometimes, they trust their own taste to enjoy exotic diet culture. Through graphic travel writings, female travelers show their surrender, reflection and criticism of globalization and capitalism in different ways. The third part demonstrates the rendezvous of transnational travel writing and women’s life energy. Taiwanese female travelers continue dialogue with the Self and the Other throughout transnational trips. In the gaze of the inner self, Taiwanese female travelers rethink the life experiences and obtain the growth of their inner selves. Women’s graphic travel writings with different packaging and marketing practices show various concerns with readership, which separates graphic travel publishing markets. Through transnational travel experience in women’s graphic travel writings, three Taiwanese female travelers with distinct identities and in different life stages provide an alternative world view from the mobile transnational perspective.

In this dissertation I analyse the dynamics of history, memory, and identity as represented in the published English-language memoirs of Mizrahim (also known as ‘Middle Eastern Jews’ or ‘Arabic Jews’) who were displaced during the mid- to later-twentieth century from Iraq, Iran, and Egypt. I take a thematic approach, analysing the memoirs through a focus on metaphor, sensescapes, dreams, urban landscapes and sacred sites, as well as the different perspectives of key stakeholders. I demonstrate that the culture wars model is inadequate for the study of the experiences of displacement and dispersal. Rather, I argue that the framework of multidirectional memory (Michael Rothberg), in combination with the notion of screen memory, provides a far more accurate reflection of the memory dynamics represented across this body of texts. I also draw on the concepts of postmemory (Marianne Hirsch) and the ‘off-modern’ (Svetlana Boym) as productive ways of understanding the intergenerational transmission of histories and memories, and the construction of diverse identities in post-displacement life. Furthermore, I show that memory dynamics are multidimensional and are shaped by the senses, emotions, and spirituality. They are multilayered, encompassing diverse experiences of temporality, place, and ontology. They are also highly entangled and interweave different perspectives, power relations, locations, histories, and peoples. Through examining the dynamics of memories, histories, and identities in published English-language Mizrahi life writing, I seek to contribute to a more accurate understanding of the diversity of Jewish experiences and the complexity of Jewish life and history in a Middle Eastern and North African context. I aim to develop a nuanced understanding of situations of displacement, dispersal, and resettlement. I demonstrate that memoir writing is a crucial genre for recording migratory experiences and transnational histories. This medium provides a vital and powerful tool that can aid in the recovery of psychological wellbeing and emotional resilience among women and men who have been displaced. An improved understanding of memory dynamics as well as the construction of identities and histories is all the more important in this present moment where dangerously simplistic divisions are often made at the expense of equity, diversity, and true human complexity.