English Language and Literature Commons^™

The Masochian Woman: Coming To A Philosophical Understanding Of Haudenosaunee Women's Masochism, Jennifer Komorowski

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

This dissertation is a philosophical examination of women’s masochism from several different viewpoints. Beginning from a centre of Western psychoanalytic thought, I analyse what Sigmund Freud, Jacques Lacan, Gilles Deleuze, and Slavoj Žižek say about women and masochistic practices, and then continue the discussion by looking at the work of several women theorists and writers, including Angela Carter, Judith Butler, Kathy Acker, and Luce Irigaray. This analysis centres around Lacan’s theorization of the death drive through the figure of Antigone, and while he does not describe her as the original woman masochist, I believe she is a central figure in …

The Black Artiste: Politization As Racialization, Matthew Dawkins

Undergraduate Student Research Internships Conference

The idea that the personal doubles as the political is a modern analysis of socio- political regimes, popularized by second-wave feminism in the 1960s. However, this understanding has become increasingly relevant for a number of ideologies due to the ways in which modern political frameworks (ie. campaigns, policies, legislation, etc.) continue to target marginalized groups while the global social consciousness demands that political leaders rectify social issues in political arenas.

In this research project, I challenge the relationship between the personal and the political for Black artists in order to examine the extent to which Black art is inherently political. …

Let Me Tell You What It Means: Reading Beyond Humor In Selected Iranian-American Memoirs, Stand-Up Comedy, And Film In The Post-9/11 Era, Reza Ashouri Talooki

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

ABSTRACT

Since the tragic events of September 11, 2001, Muslims in America have continued to remain the subject of cultural and political debates. In their artistic endeavours, Muslim artists have tried to rectify the negative and mediated images attributed to Islam, Muslims, and their cultures. In this dissertation, I look at Iranian works from the diaspora that not only represent Iranian culture and attempt to raise public awareness in America, but also extensively wade into humor as their linking theme. It is humor embedded in socio-cultural and political implications along with cultural representations that constitute my analysis in this dissertation. …

Food Figures At The Forks: The Intersection Of Feminist And (Post)Colonial Politics Of Food Imagery In Kiran Desai’S The Inheritance Of Loss, Maryam Golafshani

2016 Undergraduate Awards

In Culinary Fictions: Food in South Asian Diasporic Culture, Anita Mannur argues that food offers ‘an alternative register through which to theorize gender, sexuality, class, and race’ in literature by and about the South Asian diaspora. The use of food in these texts is not merely a figurative flourish, but rather an ‘important vector of critical analysis in negotiating the gendered, racialized, and classed bases of collective and individual identity’ of South Asian bodies. Food is always already political; it must not merely be tasted, but must be read in terms of how it (re)presents and (re)produces intersecting power differentials. …

Creating Difference: The Legal Production Of Race In American Slavery, Shaun N. Ramdin

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

This dissertation examines the legal construction and development of racial difference as considered in literature written or set during the final years of American slavery. While there had consistently been a conceptual correspondence between black skin and enslavement, race or racial difference did not become the unqualified explanation of enslavement until fairly late in the institution’s history. Specifically, as slavery’s stability became increasingly threatened through the nineteenth century by abolitionism and racial slippage, race became the singular and explicit rationale for its existence and perpetuation. I argue that the primary discourse of this justificatory rationale was legal: through law race …

Yaari With Angrez: Whiteness For A New Bollywood Hero, Teresa Hubel

Department of English Publications

This chapter comments on the relative insignificance of whiteness to Hindi film narratives, with white characters turning up, when they do, often as peripheral figures to create the effect of historical accuracy. It argues that in Hindi cinema, whiteness cannot function as it does in the West, where the legacy of imperialism has made it an unmarked category, whose invisibility allows it to function as a norm against which the aberration of racial others may be measured. In Indian films, whiteness is marked; and it is, increasingly, markedly white—to be resisted, or desired, or dismissed.

Unmasking The Protester: The Meanings And Myths Of Collective Civil Resistance Movements In African American And Polish Postresistance Prose Fiction, Agnieszka Herra

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

My contention is that the narrative framework of social movements, especially the ones deemed “successful” such as the American Civil Rights Movement and the Polish Solidarity Movement, reflects unity and collectivity within collective memory. During the period of the movements’ duration, this provides a clear rhetorical purpose: to give the appearance of unity in order to give effective voice to the demands. I argue that the voices that did not fit into the collective movements emerge subsequently to question this monologic language in literary form. This dissertation uses Bakhtin’s notion of dialogic language to argue that novels in the postresistance …

Deconstructing History: An Analysis Of Rita Bouvier's Poem "Riel Is Dead And I Am Alive", Kate Osborne

Representing Aboriginality

No abstract provided.

Taking Back Stolen Voices: Mahlikah Awe:Ri's Poetry As Resistance For More Than 500 Missing Girls, Kate Richards

Representing Aboriginality

No abstract provided.

Resisting A Colonialist Reading: Examining The Strength And Superiority Of Native Women In Joseph Boyden's "Men Don't Ask", Victoria Fraser

Representing Aboriginality

No abstract provided.

Education, Culture And Identity In Rita Joe's "Keskmsi", Kathleen Sumpton

Representing Aboriginality

No abstract provided.

Problems Of Identity And Authenticity In Winona Linn's "Knock Off Native", Rachel Hunt

Representing Aboriginality

No abstract provided.

"A Track Is A Story Teller": Narratives Of Colonialism, Native Art And The City And The Bush In Marvin Francis's Bush Camp, Katya Heckendom

Representing Aboriginality

No abstract provided.

Mainstream Perspectives In "Indian Prince" By Trevino Brings Plenty, Angela Holmes

Representing Aboriginality

No abstract provided.

Architectures Of The Veil: The Representation Of The Veil And Zenanas In Pakistani Feminists' Texts, Amber Fatima Riaz

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

My dissertation, which works at the intersections of feminist theory, architectural theory and postcolonial literary theory, examines the spatiality of the zenana and the burqa as represented in Pakistani literary and cultural texts. I propose that the burqa creates a portable closet, an interstitial, liminal, “third space” that allows Pakistani (secluded and veiled) women to not only traverse the borders between the private (female, domestic) and public (male) spaces, but to also signal chastity and religiosity while in the public, and semi-public spaces of the cities and villages of Pakistan. I argue that the dupatta, the chador and the hijab …

Myth, Language, Empire: The East India Company And The Construction Of British India, 1757-1857, Nida Sajid

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

My thesis investigates the discursive strategies employed by the East India Company during the early colonial period to legitimize mercantile imperialism as an act of preservation for the fast-disintegrating political order that was the Mughal empire in India. By arguing that the interrelationship of myth, history and archive was essential to networks of trade and the establishment of political domination, my thesis offers a new reading of the representations of the political debates surrounding the Company’s scandals and imperial ambitions in the English public sphere. It further demonstrates the centrality of the India question in defining the contours of some …

Alternative Be/Longing: Modernity And Material Culture In Bengali Cinema, 1947-1975, Suvadip Sinha

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

Engaging in a dialogue with the recent body of scholarship on alternative/multiple modernities, postcolonial studies, Marxism and thing theory, this thesis has two main objectives: first, to examine how the transition of post-colonial India from a primarily feudal to a capitalist form of economy facilitated a historical-materialist relationship with things, objects and commodities; and second, to explore how this relationship challenges and ruptures the singularly hegemonic narrative of modern capital. Spanning a historical and political period from late-colonial India to the urban modernity of 1970s’, Satyajit Ray’s Jalsaghar (1958) and Pratidwandi (1971), Riwik Ghatak’s Ajantrik (1958), Tapan Sinha’s Harmonium (1963), …

Dr. Balachandra Rajan: From India To Canada, Fragments In Search Of A Narrative - In Memoriam, Teresa Hubel

Department of English Publications

A heartfelt memorial piece for Dr. Balachandra Rajan, an Indian diplomat and poetic scholar, written by Teresa Hubel.

Introduction:

While preparing to write this tribute to Dr. Balachandra Rajan, I found myself wondering what in his eminent life I should be recalling for your benefit. Which events or personal preferences, habits, gestures, or even political commitments and publications can be tallied up to create some kind of coherent narrative that conveys the gist of him? The dilemma is that, when it comes to Dr. Rajan (who in my memory can never be remembered as anyone other than Dr. Rajan, not …

The High Cost Of Dancing: When The Indian Women's Movement Went After The Devadasis, Teresa Hubel

Department of English Publications

Introduction:

On the other side of patriarchal histories are women who are irrecoverably elusive, whose convictions and the examples their lives might have left to us--their everyday resistances as well as their capitulations to authority--are at some fundamental level lost. These are the vast majority of women who never wrote the history books that shape the manner in which we, at any particular historical juncture, are trained to remember; they did not give speeches that were recorded and carefully collected for posterity; their ideals, sayings, beliefs, and approaches to issues were not painstakingly preserved and then quoted century after century. …

In Search Of The British Indian In British India: White Orphans, Kipling’S Kim, And Class In Colonial India, Teresa Hubel

Department of English Publications

Introduction:

Contemporary scholars struggling to keep their work politically meaningful and efficacious often, with the best of intentions, invoke the triad of race, gender and class. But though this three-part mantra is persistently and even passionately recited, usually in the introductory paragraphs of a scholarly piece, ‘attentive listening,’ as historian Douglas M. Peers asserts, ‘reveals that class is sounded with little more than a whisper’ (825). Unlike the other two, class largely remains an under-explored and, consequently, little understood category of experience and inquiry. I can say with certainty that this is true in my own field of postcolonial studies, …

Devadasi Defiance And The Man-Eater Of Malgudi, Teresa Hubel

Department of English Publications

Introduction:

In 1947, after over 50 years of agitation and political pressure on the part of a committed group of Hindu reformers, the Madras legislature passed an act into law that would change forever the unique culture of the professional female temple dancers of South India. It was called the Madras Devadasis (Prevention of Dedication) Act. Despite having the wholehearted support of the Indian women’s movement of the time, the Act represented the imposition of androcentric values on a matrifocal and matrilineal tradition, a tradition which had for centuries managed to withstand the compulsions of Hindu patriarchy. The devadasis were …

"The Bride Of His Country": Love, Marriage, And The Imperialist Paradox In The Indian Fiction Of Sara Jeannette Duncan And Rudyard Kipling, Teresa Hubel

Department of English Publications

Introduction:

For many literary scholars and general readers, the expression 'Kipling's India' neatly delineates the imperialist society that existed on the Indian subcontinent in the late nineteenth century. The phrase, however, is deceptive in its simplicity. It does not reveal, or even imply, the internal workings behind what is certainly a vast imaginative construct, a construct that involves a specific political ideology, various cultural myths, and an extraordinary emotional investment. In the words of one critic, Kipling was "a mythmaker for a culture under protracted stress" (Wurgaft xx). He voiced the bewilderment and memorialized the tragic — and sometimes pathetic …