South and Southeast Asian Languages and Societies Commons^™

A Diasporic Mythography: Myth, Legend And Memory In The Literature Of The Indian Diaspora By P.M. Biswas, G. Connor Salter

Mythlore: A Journal of J.R.R. Tolkien, C.S. Lewis, Charles Williams, and Mythopoeic Literature

Scholarship continues to explore how postcolonial Indian authors use speculative fiction to explore their country's identity, but book-length studies on the diasporic Indian experience are hard to find. Poet, novelist and scholar Pooja Mittal Biswas examines noted fantasy books by four acclaimed Indian authors born during the first two generations of the Republic of India: Salman Rushdie, Shashi Tharoor, Suniti Namjoshi, and Vikram Chandra. Each author offers a different vision of Indianness, drawing on their complicated experiences as Indians living outside their country of origin, shaped by and responding to colonialism's past, offering different views of how diasporic Indians should …

Kicau Kericau: The Chirps And Warbles Of A Bird-Human Story, Airien Ludin

Masters Theses

This thesis tells the tale of bird-human relationships and what it means to live alongside one another, subverting the hierarchical view of humans as above birds inherited from colonial history. It asks how the practice of illustration can function as a site of Two-Eyed Seeing, where scientific and local knowledge are held together as an entangled narrative. It also examines how mendongeng (storytelling), as I have experienced it within Indonesian culture and everyday contexts, can help us understand birds as a companion species with their own agency.

This project takes two forms: first, a picture book titled Sun Bird …

Inherited By “Merit”: What Caste Carries Across The Indian American Diaspora, Aarushi V. Jaiswal

English Undergraduate Distinction Projects

This project traces the rhetorical formation termed “meritocratic nationalism,” a political vocabulary that makes national belonging conditional on moralized merit, converting structural advantage into the language of individual character. Meritocratic nationalism is traced across three political figures whose rhetoric represents successive moments in a single ideological trajectory. Reading Narendra Modi’s 2014 and 2018 Independence Day addresses and his 2014 Madison Square Garden speech to the Indian American diaspora as the formation’s originating texts, this project argues that Modi’s recurring moral tetrad of conduct, values, traditions, and ability translated the structurally concentrated advantages of India’s upper-caste professional class into a universalist …

Exploring Two Approaches Towards Gender Inclusive Language In The Philippines, Eduardo Victor J. Valdez

Marketing and Law Faculty Publications

In this paper, we shall take a look at the role of the Philippine government in encouraging the use of gender-neutral Philippine-English. We shall also glimpse at Philippine gayspeak as a player in the development of the Filipino language game. We endeavor to learn if a top to bottom program for language inclusivity from the government down to the citizenry is effective in promoting inclusivity in Philippine-English. On the other hand, a minority to majority development was the route that Philippine gayspeak took in adding their form of life into the gender-neutral Filipino language.

Laila: A Doll Memoir Of 1947 Partition Of India And Pakistan, Maleeha Malik, Maleeha Fatima Malik

Children's Literature (MFA) Theses

This abstract examines a creative and critical work centered on the 1947 Partition of India, which displaced approximately fourteen million people and caused one million deaths. The narrative introduces Laila, an anthropomorphized doll who functions as both witness and archive, embodying the memories and traumas of multiple child survivors. Through Laila’s journey across India, Pakistan, and the diaspora, the text explores themes of identity, belonging, loss, and intergenerational memory.

Blending personal family history with historical analysis, the author situates Laila within lived experiences of migration, silence, and religious marginalization, particularly as part of the Ahmadi Muslim community. The narrative foregrounds …

Children Past Curfew: Surveillance, Resistance, And Childhood In Philippine Martial Law Children's Literature, Krisna Marie T. Balolong

Children's Literature (MA) Theses

This paper examines how two Philippine children's books depict state surveillance and its effects on a child's perspective of family, authority figures, and childhood. Through analysis of Augie Rivera's Isang Harding Papel and Sandra Nicole Roldan's At the School Gate, this project makes a connection between children's literature and surveillance studies, offering new framework to engage with children’s literature depicting authoritarian regimes and state violence, especially in cases where children were targets of their governments. Each book is examined by their representations of state surveillance during the Martial Law era of the Philippines, as well as each characters’ individual …

From Ghorer Golpo To Global Voices: Digital Storytelling As A Decolonial Pedagogy For English Language Learning In Bangladesh, Tamanna Sharmin Kabir

Dissertations and Doctoral Documents, University of Nebraska-Lincoln, 2023–

From Ghorer Golpo to Global Voices: Digital Storytelling as a Decolonial Pedagogy for English Language Learning in Bangladesh highlights how Digital Storytelling operates as a culturally sustaining and technologically supported approach within Bangladeshi undergraduate English education. Informed by my own navigation of Western and South Asian narrative traditions, the study responds to a longstanding challenge in English instruction: exam-focused, Eurocentric pedagogies often marginalize learners’ cultural identities and lived experiences. The research investigates how participants engaged with Digital Storytelling as a multimodal, technology-enhanced practice that supports language development, identity expression, and intercultural communication.

The study employed an arts-informed case study design …

Book Review Of The Squad By Christina Soontornvat And Joanna Cacao, Simon Boonsripaisal

Journal of Southeast Asian American Education and Advancement

The Squad by Christina Soontornvat and illustrator Joanna Cacao is a follow-up to the indie bestseller The Tryout (2022). The graphic memoir is written for educators, parents, and students in K-12. The illustrations are beautifully drawn, the dialogue is humorous, and the facial expressions describe how the characters are feeling. The main character, Christina, is now an 8^th grader in Texas. Set in the 1990s and the cover page shows her friends lifting her up as she strikes a cheerleading pose. Christina tries out for cheer again, encounter’s identity conflict, and grapples with her parents’ divorce. This review discusses …

Modernist Transitions: Cultural Encounters Between British And Bangla Modernist Fiction From 1910s To 1950s, Shamika Shabnam

Critical Humanities

A Review of Modernist Transitions: Cultural Encounters between British and Bangla Modernist Fiction from 1910s to 1950s

Chasing The Albino Pygmy Giraffe, Charles H. Haddad

School of Communication and Journalism Faculty Publications

It's never a good sign when someone is knocking on the door of your hotel room at seven in the morning. That's especially true if you have been schlepping eight college students across Western China, as I had been for the past week. I now heard in this soft rapping the death knell of my fledgling professorial career. Wrapping a ratty, threadbare pillow around my head, I tried to shut out the insistent rapping. Of course, that didn't work. Bad news has a way of butting in.

So begins my novel “Chasing the Albino Pygmy Giraffe.” It is a laugh-aloud …

Book Review Of The Tryout By Christina Soontornvat And Joanna Cacao, Simon Boonsripaisal

Journal of Southeast Asian American Education and Advancement

Soontornvat’s graphic memoir, The Tryout diversifies the Thai American experience to an audience intended for K-12 teachers and educators, parents, caretakers, and children. Canadian Filipino Joanna Cacao serves as the illustrator for The Tryout and does superb drawing expressions and emotions aligning with text in bubbles and boxes implying thinking or speaking. The story centers on Christina, who is a 7th grader living in a small town in Texas trying out for the middle school’s cheerleading squad. She tries to fit in, deals with racism, maintains friendships, develops new hobbies, and learns more about herself as a multiracial Asian American. …

Book Review Of Drawn Together By Minh Lê And Dan Santat, Simon Boonsripaisal

Journal of Southeast Asian American Education and Advancement

Drawn Together, written by Minh Lê and illustrated by Dan Santat, depicts the story of a grandson and grandfather spending time in the afternoon together. Lê and Santat’s shared experiences and cultures influence the picturebook’s construction. The greatest strength in Drawn Together is the inclusion of family in the creation process. Lê’s meaningful words and phrases complement Santat’s colorful and energetic illustrations. The setting is in the grandfather’s house and away from the site of Thai restaurants and Thai Buddhist temples, to which most of the existing research on Thai Americans hones it on (Bao, 2015; Padoongpatt, 2017). Drawn Together …

Catastrophe Of War, Sujit Kumar Singh, Ayushi Jaiswal

Critical Humanities

The paper selects the novel Palpasa Café (2005) by Nepali author Narayan Wagle to highlight the factors that contributed to the Maoist insurgency and counter-insurgency that punctured the Nepali consciousness. It will also critique Eurocentric trauma theory for diminishing the South Asian perspectives of trauma (incidents) from the main discourse of trauma theory. In addition, the paper will explore the detrimental impacts of war and conflict as experienced by Nepalese cops and civilians together, and its long-lasting imprint on their psyche as manifested in different forms of trauma in the text. The dissemination of the 'inarticulable trauma' concept into something …

Research Bibliography For Philippine English (2008–2023), Kingsley Bolton, Priscilla T. Cruz, Isabel P. Martin

English Faculty Publications

The research bibliography presented here is intended to complement the earlier research bibliographies from Bautista on Philippine English (Bautista, 2004; Bautista & Bolton, 2008a). It includes 11 sections dealing with book-length studies of Philippine English, as well as book chapters and journal articles on such topics as code-switching, code-mixing and linguistic hybridization; critical linguistics; discourse analysis; language attitudes and intelligibility; sociolinguistic description; language policies; multilingualism and multilingual education; Philippine literature in English; Philippine English features; and summative perspectives. While the bibliography is essentially contemporary in orientation, this article also emphasizes the foundational contributions of earlier scholars in the field.

Foreign Expert: A Memoir Manuscript, Jenny L. Rowe

Graduate Student Theses, Dissertations, & Professional Papers

This is a full memoir manuscript that I wrote for my MFA thesis, which is tentatively titled Foreign Expert. In this manuscript, we follow myself as narrator as I struggle to adapt to life in Beijing (prior to the pandemic) while also recovering from a recent divorce. The man I’d been married to for five years back in Iowa had become violently mentally ill, and though I’d been fortunate enough to remove myself from him, I quickly learned that being a foreign expert in China—my residential visa title—required more work than basic survival. By the end of my two years …

Emi (English-Medium Instruction) In Cambodian Higher Education, Benedict Lin, Kingsley Bolton, John Bacon-Shone, Bophan Khan

English Faculty Publications

This article is based on empirical research carried out at the Royal University of Phnom Penh (RUPP), Cambodia, between 2018 and 2019. The research involved both quantitative and qualitative approaches. In the case of the former, the researchers conducted a large-scale survey of students involving 956 respondents, of whom 79 were postgraduate students, while the overwhelming majority were studying at the undergraduate level. The qualitative data collected in this project comprised detailed interviews with undergraduates studying at RUPP. The results of both types of data collection indicated that, although many students faced difficulties in studying through the medium of English, …

Emi (English-Medium Instruction) In Indonesian Higher Education, Kingsley Bolton, Christopher Hill, John Bacon-Shone, Karen Peyronnin

English Faculty Publications

This article reports on the investigation of English-medium instruction (EMI) in Indonesian higher education. Two separate but related studies were carried out. In Phase One, a mixed method approach using a questionnaire and interviews was used at a private university in Jakarta in order to gauge the responses of undergraduates studying a range of subjects through English. The results of Phase One suggested that the students at this university generally had high levels of proficiency in English and coped rather well with EMI. Phase Two of the study involved interviewing 17 educators across multiple institutions, and the results of this …

Historical Trauma: Literary And Testimonial Responses To Hiroshima, Mariam Ghonim

Theses and Dissertations

The concept of trauma is controversial in literature. While one may be able to come up with ways to describe trauma in fiction, representing historical trauma is a hard task for writers. Some argue that trauma can not be described through those who did not experience it, while others claim that, provided some elements are added, one can represent trauma to the reader. This thesis focuses on twentieth-century historical traumas related to a nuclear catastrophe and explores the different literary and testimonial responses to the catastrophic man-made event of Hiroshima (1945). In this thesis, Kathleen Burkinshaw’s historical fiction The Last …

Beast And Man In India: Undoing John Lockwood Kipling’S Imperial Citation, Oishani Sengupta

Criticism

This article posits that John Lockwood Kipling’s Beast and Man in India (1891), the illustrated compendium on animals that mixes discussions of colonial cross-species entanglements with personal reflections on transforming local arts and crafts in India in the service of imperial power, is a multiauthored book. Centering the presence of Indian illustrators as central to Beast and Man’s texture, this essay uses the term “imperial citation” to highlight the range of strategies Kipling uses to overtly and covertly appropriate the labor of Indigenous creators within the fabric of this volume. By placing the material text within the context of colonial …

Citizens Of The English Language: Sociolinguistic Perspectives On Postcolonial India, Prateek Shankar

Masters Theses

This paper introduces the concept of "extralingual citizenship," which I define as an expansion of translingualism to include the ethnoracial logic of the nation-state and demonstrates the entanglement of language, governance, and education in the policing of knowledge infrastructures and discursive practices. I am interested in the codification of postcolonial disparity into the teaching, social performance, and material assessment of English language users, and the infrastructural disqualification of World Englishes (and their amalgams) in favor of a standardized English. I frame extralingualism as a kind of citizenship, shifting the focus of English pedagogy/practice from the syntactical/etymological concerns of language …

International Student Orientations: Indian Students At American Universities Around The Turn Of The Twentieth Century, Param S. Ajmera

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation examines the writings and experiences of five Indian international students in the United States during late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. By drawing attention to these students, I attend to the ways in which notions of freedom, progress, and inclusivity associated with American higher education, and liberalism more generally, are related to structures of racialized and colonial dispossession in India. I build these arguments by reading archival sources such as university administrative records, student publications, personal and official correspondence, as well as understudied aesthetic works, such as memoirs, travel narratives, essays, doctoral dissertations, and public lectures. These historical …

Diasporic Women’S Mutability In South Asian Postcolonial Literature, Tasnim S. Halim

Theses and Dissertations

Though Western scholarship tends to homogenize South Asian experiences, researchers and novelists shed light on different classes of South Asian postcolonial and migratory women who experience mutability, or the internal and external changes as a trauma response after British colonial rule ended and the 1947 Partition abruptly fractured national identity. Though this mutability has positive and negative transformative qualities, it also allows women characters the power to remove themselves from cycles of oppression, work towards healing, and transforming their physical bodies from sites of repressed trauma to sites of expression and agency. What binds them is not only their physical …

Ruptures In Indentures In Jhumpa Lahiri's Interpreter Of Maladies And Unaccustomed Earth, Prabal D. Gupta

College of Graduate Studies: Theses & Dissertations

Jhumpa Lahiri (1967) is one of the prominent American writers of Bengali descent, contributing mainly to diaspora literature to depict the nuanced aspects of Bengalis in their immigrant lives. Lahiri’s stories in Interpreter of Maladies (1999) and Unaccustomed Earth (2008) illustrate the challenges of the Bengali diaspora due to their indentured identity, which I have used to refer to the Bengali people’s culturally-rooted identity. This study investigates how the diaspora’s native cultural identity fluctuates in connection with the host culture. The research renders a reconfigured image of “home” because the concept of home changes for these people after migration in …

Tropical Faustian: Nick Joaquin’S Spenglerian Imagining Of Colonial History In The Post-Authoritarian Philippines, Hidde Van Der Wall

Fine Arts Department Faculty Publications

This article discusses how Philippine writer Nick Joaquin applied the ideas of Oswald Spengler in his historiography; notably the collection Culture and History (1988); his contribution to the post- authoritarian renegotiation of a national history fraught with colonial conflict and loss. This article argues that Joaquin adapted Spengler’s ideas; proposing the presence of a “Faustian” Filipino soul formed during the Spanish-colonial period; to a contradictory effect. It allowed him to assert a national identity that challenged the dichotomous ways in which Philippine history was conventionally conceived; but it also reintroduced Eurocentric and homogenizing schemes; reinforcing existing hegemonies in the postcolony.

Autopoetics, Market Competence, And The Transnational Author, Maria Gabriela Martin

English Faculty Publications

Although materialist analyses have critiqued the institutionalization of postcolonial studies and its emergence in global capitalism, only few have addressed the role of creative writing in standardizing migrant novelistic production to what Mark McGurl has designated as ‘program fiction’ whose trademark is the practice of “involuted self-reference”. In filling this gap, this paper looks into Gina Apostol’s writings and their reception by international audiences as exemplary of the cultural capital of program fiction. While Apostol’s autofictions/ficto-criticism points to the influence of creative writing in her novels — she studied under John Barth in the MFA program in Johns Hopkins University, …

Vernacular Virtual: Toward A Philippine New Materialist Poetics Authors, Christian Jil R. Benitez

Filipino Faculty Publications

This essay turns to and through the Philippine vernacular in order to open up the possibility of a new materialist regard of literature, one that specifically stems from the Philippine tropics. It proposes that the opportunity for such a tropical materialism rests on the onomatopoeism observed in the vernacular. Onomatopoeia, as a material linguistic principle, is recognized here to be most instructive in reunderstanding Philippine folk poetry — texts which date back to the precolonial period — in terms beyond mere representation. As a counterpoint to these traditional literary texts, the essay also ruminates on the poetry of Jose Garcia …

Dalit Women, Anti-Caste Aesthetics, And The Politics Of Representation, Ruma Sinha

Dissertations - ALL

This dissertation examines key problems in the representation of caste and argues for its importance as a vector of intersectional analysis of world literature. It uses an anti-caste feminist framework to foreground representations of Dalit women in short stories, graphic narratives, autobiographies, Anglophone Indian and Dalit novels, and explores the politics of their publication and circulation to argue that, in a context in which Dalit voices are deprivileged in and beyond India, a focus on intersectional experiences and "caste consciousness" are vital to reimagining collective solidarity of Dalits with other political movements locally and globally. Recognizing the impossible yet necessary …

Review Of Chath Piersath's On Earth Beneath Sky, Loom Press, 2020, George Chigas

Journal of Southeast Asian American Education and Advancement

A critical analysis and review of Chath pierSath's 2020 collection of poems and sketches entitled On Earth Beneath Sky published by Loom Press

Othering: An Analysis Of Expression In Hip-Hop And South Asian Literature Through Post-9/11 Discourse, Syed Tareq Alam

English Honors Theses

The critical question this thesis seeks to answer is how a relationship between hip-hop and South Asian literature can be developed in such a way that one is able understand and address both the present and future state of America in a post 9/11 context. To answer this question, three hip-hop songs will be analyzed through their lyrics and instrumentation with a specific focus on their expression of the other: “Cops Shot the Kid” by Nas, “Flag Shopping” and “Patriot Act” by Heems. One novel and play will be analyzed in similar form: The Reluctant Fundamentalist by Mohsin Hamid and …

The Orient In The Empire’S Poetry: Scholarship, Translation, And Imaginative Geography (1770-1857), Zeeshan Riyaz Reshamwala

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This dissertation uses the idea of imaginative geography to study literary and scholarly representations of what writers in Europe referred to as the Orient during the long nineteenth century. Imaginative geography refers to a subjective collection of associations that accumulate around a place about which positive knowledge is limited, such that the imaginative associations overpower and structure any empirical knowledge about it, even when further knowledge is acquired. The imaginative geography of the Orient emerged from texts, images, and artifacts that traveled from Asia to Europe through sustained colonial contact. This dissertation studies how writers in India and Britain constituted, …