colonialism

An historical account of Welsh, Basque, Algerian, and Quebec nationalist movements suggests a comparative framework through which the recent "reawakening" of Estonian nationalism may be best analyzed. The relationship between the social construction of nationalism and the mainte…

This ethno-historical analysis of everyday life in contemporary Aleppo, Syria predicates its interpretational method of urban meaning on the contention that antagonistic practices over local space reflect and render significant conflicts in Syrian society as a whole. Because loc…

This dissertation examines the process of decolonization in the Anglo-Egyptian Sudan from the perspective of the most important colonial official in the condominium government, the Civil Secretary. Challenging conventional interpretations which focus on the primary role of indig…

My dissertation examines the settlement of Arabs in Java after the imposition of Dutch rule in 1800 until their politico-religious awakening between 1890 and 1924. I show that "Arabs," initially part of an ethnolinguistically fluid trading world, became a community awkwardly bou…

This dissertation is an examination of the ways in which colonial ontologies continue to structure forms of self-understanding in the postcolonial world, with specific reference to contemporary Fijian military service in the British Army. Based on seventeen months of ethnographi…

This dissertation examines the history of hunting in India under British colonialism, but with some background on earlier periods and a brief discussion on Nepal and successor states of India, Pakistan, Bangladesh. The study relies on Indian and British sources including private…

This thesis addresses the question of the ethnic cleansing of Palestine by examining Zionism as a settler-colonial national movement, and it demonstrates that the realization of Zionism in both its Labor and Revisionist interpretations has inevitably led to continuous policies o…

In recent decades, French historical scholarship has begun to re-examine the Second Empire, revising a period once interpreted in terms of failure and national tragedy to reveal a moment in which the roots of France’s “modern” republican polity emerged. Yet in spite of this re-e…

In this dissertation, I tell three stories about cultural institutions, colonialism and memory. I tell these stories through the exploration of a well-known cultural institution in Paris, Institut du Monde Arabe (IMA). This dissertation is interested in how IMA talks about Franc…

Joyce’s A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man functions as an axis around which writers from former British colonies—Salman Rushdie (India), Tayeb Salih (Sudan), and Tsitsi Dangarembga (Zimbabwe)—construct their own Bildungsromane. This nodal point is possible because Joyce’s …

This study examines the Igbo women of Southeastern Nigeria from the eve of colonial intrusion to the imposition of colonialism, the Women's War of 1929, and its aftermath. By placing the Women's War into the context of the stripping away of inherent rights guaranteed them by mat…

European colonial interest in the Arab lands is generally assumed to have begun with Napoleon Bonaparte's invasion of Egypt in 1798. Bonaparte's expedition marked the beginning of the progressive subjection by the major European colonial powers of the time, France and Britain, o…

This is an ethnopolitical study of the majority non-Han, Muslim province of Xinjiang in China’s far northwest during the transition from empire to nationalizing state. After achieving provincial status in 1884, the final decades of Qing rule witnessed fatally weakened attempts b…

During the first four decades of the twentieth century, Muslim North Africans were French colonial subjects and started to become a sizable minority in France. A few thousand in the first decade, France brought over 300,000 of them to Europe as soldiers and workers during World …

This dissertation examines the early fourteenth-century architecture, art, and urbanism of Lucera in Apulia, a city that for most of the thirteenth century served as the only Muslim settlement on the Italian peninsula until its violent purge and destruction by the king of Naples…

For centuries the West has seen the Muslim woman as an entire group of people in need of saving. Lacking a thorough understanding of Islam and an incredibly diverse Middle Eastern society, Western powers endeavored to shape women of the Middle East into secular, modern examples …

In Places of Complicity, I consider how narratives of the past of two African places obscure, and sometimes explore, complicity. For primarily activist-intellectual publics, Thiaroye and District Six have been icons of “memory” of racist violence and resistant community. I argue…

In my dissertation, I connect the role of literature and its interpretations with France's current occultation of its colonial and imperial past and present. The dissertation puts forth a re-consideration of an excluded work and of some hexagonal classics across time-periods. Th…

This study examines three poems composed by a West African Muslim scholar known by the name Alh[dotbelow]ajj 'Umar b. Abi Bakr b. ''Uthman Krachi (1858-1934). He was born in the Northern Nigerian city of Kano where he completed his education. He then settled in the mid-Volta reg…

This dissertation explores a robust history of verbal, visual, and material images of tigers that has circulated in literary and popular culture from the pre-colonial through the postcolonial periods, particularly in texts from or about the South Asian subcontinent. I read repre…