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(Re) Mapping The Black Atlantic: Abject Blackness And Arabness Across The Atlantic In African-American, French And Maghrebian Literature, Hicham Mazouz Aug 2018

(Re) Mapping The Black Atlantic: Abject Blackness And Arabness Across The Atlantic In African-American, French And Maghrebian Literature, Hicham Mazouz

Open Access Dissertations

This dissertation draws on a wide range of U.S. and Francophone postcolonial theories and criticism, including that of Omi and Winant on Racial Formation, Julia Kristeva on abjection and Pascal Blanchard on the construction of the "indigène". My research aims at critically envisioning how the "racial formation" of the North African subject within the French colonial (and post/neo-colonial) realm was part of an ideological process of Arabness. This can be also conceived in a structural homology with the notion of Blackness in the U.S., and how this constructed racialization was transferred to and mediated by post-colonial Maghrebian literature. My dissertation …


Contested “Chineseness” In Transnational Narratives: Works By Post-1979 Chinese/American Immigrant Writers Ha Jin And Geling Yan, Ping Qiu Aug 2018

Contested “Chineseness” In Transnational Narratives: Works By Post-1979 Chinese/American Immigrant Writers Ha Jin And Geling Yan, Ping Qiu

Open Access Dissertations

This dissertation aims to claim immigrant literature as an essential part of Chinese American studies. It responds to the challenge by considering how “Chineseness” is negotiated, challenged, and transformed in the literary texts produced by both writers. I argue that “Chineseness” as presented by post-1979 immigrant writers Ha Jin and Geling Yan is a transnational process of defamiliarization, radicalization, and transformation. In their work, new immigrant writers are self-consciously and strategically positioning themselves as both insider and outsider. They engage in, negotiate, and challenge the troubling term “Chineseness” as defined in either U.S-centric/Eurocentric or Sinocentric points of view. For writers, …


The Impact Of The 2014-2016 Ebola Epidemic On Sierra Leonean Immigrants In The United States, Daphne J. Cole Jan 2018

The Impact Of The 2014-2016 Ebola Epidemic On Sierra Leonean Immigrants In The United States, Daphne J. Cole

Open Access Dissertations

The 2014-2016 Ebola epidemic represented the largest outbreak in the history of the disease and it took a tremendous toll on the West African countries of Guinea, Liberia, and Sierra Leone who were impacted by a disease that had never been seen in their part of the world. While the epidemic significantly impacted those three nations, reported cases also spread to African countries such as Mali, Nigeria, and Senegal, as well as countries in the western world, such as Spain and the U.S. prior to the West African epidemic. Ebola was perceived in the U.S. as a distant threat dramatized …


The Children Of The Cuban Revolution In The Diaspora: From Internationalism To Transnational And Cosmopolitan Imaginaries, Marelys Valencia Aug 2017

The Children Of The Cuban Revolution In The Diaspora: From Internationalism To Transnational And Cosmopolitan Imaginaries, Marelys Valencia

Open Access Dissertations

My dissertation investigates the intermingling of discourses of migration and aesthetics within global market dynamics in the cultural production of late Cuban émigrés in the U.S. and Europe, to whom I refer as “the children of the revolution” —following Mette Louise Berg. I argue that this understudied migratory generation has replaced the diasporic teleology of return of the exile community with other imaginaries. As such, my dissertation sheds light not only on the varying ways of being Cuban in today’s world, but also on the different routes of the children of the revolution in the diaspora. By engaging in a …


Over The Edge Of The World: Irish Convict Writing And Contemporary Australian Literature, Barbara M. Hoffmann Apr 2017

Over The Edge Of The World: Irish Convict Writing And Contemporary Australian Literature, Barbara M. Hoffmann

Open Access Dissertations

This dissertation explores the ways that Irish convicts transported to Australia in the nineteenth century influenced Australian nationalism and national culture. Using the principle of oceanic studies that the material conditions of sea travel are shaping influences, I look in the first chapter at journals as well as a manuscript newspaper written by Irish Fenian political prisoners on board the convict ship Hougoumont. The restrictions and conditions of the ship encouraged these Fenians to practice a subtle, personal, and metaphoric form of nationalism, carried out through telling stories of themselves and the Irish experience. The second and third chapters turn …


At Home In The Diaspora: Domesticity And Nationalism In Postwar And Contemporary Caribbean-British Fiction, Kim Caroline Evelyn Jan 2015

At Home In The Diaspora: Domesticity And Nationalism In Postwar And Contemporary Caribbean-British Fiction, Kim Caroline Evelyn

Open Access Dissertations

This project investigates the ways in which home is conceptualized and represented in sixty years of the literature of the Caribbean diaspora in Britain by balancing texts from the post-World War II period with contemporary texts and considering how the diaspora has been imagined and reimagined. Making a home of a diaspora—typically considered as a collection of scattered and ostracized migrants— requires a conceptual leap, act of agency, and, sometimes, a flight of imagination. Through the imagery of domesticity and the rhetoric of nationalism, literary analyses of representations of diaspora allow us to explore the imagined constructs of diasporic homes. …


Queer Transnationality: Narrative, Theatre, And Performance Across Temporal, Spatial, And Social Geographies, Alexandra Gonzenbach Perkins May 2014

Queer Transnationality: Narrative, Theatre, And Performance Across Temporal, Spatial, And Social Geographies, Alexandra Gonzenbach Perkins

Open Access Dissertations

This study investigates the ways narrative, theatre, and performance art negotiate identities across Cuba, the Dominican Republic, Puerto Rico, the United States, and larger global contexts. I research how physical, social, and temporal spaces transform enactments and receptions of text and performance. Particularly, I investigate the effects of transnationality in works that represent queer subjectivities. I intervene in Queer Studies, expanding the notion of queer beyond sexuality to include nationality, race, and class. While identity politics emerges around fixed categories of identity, I argue that representations of subjectivity in transnational networks of production dissociate politicized identification from the rigid geographic …


(Re)Placing Nation: Postcolonial Women's Contestations Of Spatial Discourse, Michelle N. Ramlagan Jun 2011

(Re)Placing Nation: Postcolonial Women's Contestations Of Spatial Discourse, Michelle N. Ramlagan

Open Access Dissertations

“(Re)Placing Nations: Postcolonial Women’s Contestations of Spatial Discourses” reads the proliferation of literary representations of landscapes in recent work by Jamaica Kincaid, Shani Mootoo, Edwidge Danticat, Yvonne Vera, Monica Arac de Nyeko and Toni Morrison as a trope for rethinking the nation as a space with physical boundaries. In this project I make the distinction between space as an ideological construct and place as a physical entity. Both place and space are connected to ideologies yet have specific implications for constructions of gender and sexuality. My project considers the dual yet dialectically related processes of creating physical space and identity …


Haunting Witnesses: Diasporic Consciousness In African American And Caribbean Writing, Brandi Bingham Kellett Dec 2010

Haunting Witnesses: Diasporic Consciousness In African American And Caribbean Writing, Brandi Bingham Kellett

Open Access Dissertations

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 …


Symbolic Exchanges: Haiti, Brazil And The Ethnopoetics Of Cultural Identity, Myriam Mompoint May 2008

Symbolic Exchanges: Haiti, Brazil And The Ethnopoetics Of Cultural Identity, Myriam Mompoint

Open Access Dissertations

This work is a comparative study of the influence of the pan-Africanist discourse of ethnographers Dr. Jean Price-Mars of Haiti and Dr. Arthur Ramos of Brazil, and its impact on the respective literatures and cinemas of the two nations. Beginning in the first quarter of the 20th Century, and stemming from a developing auto-ethnography undertaken by the two scholars, a growing concern over defining cultural identity inspired a generation of writers to appropriate ethnographic methodology and apply it to their fictional works. The discourse of representation, which looked to popular sources for inspiration (Haitian Indigénisme and Brazilian Regionalismo, or which …