colonialism

School segregation in the United States is at a crisis point. The educational landscape in Rochester, NY has become increasingly segregated along the lines of race, class, and geography in recent decades. This thesis investigates the geographies and infrastructures that laid the…

Unsettling the Coloniality of Voice proposes that aligning voice with sound and the human has been a central component of the colonial project of modernity. While sight and seeing have been primary sites of analysis in much critical historical work, my research historicizes how …

To survive. This is the main battleground of peripheric bodies (body-territory), particularly indigenous, black, poor and trans* women. By adopting a transdisciplinary and mixed methodology, this research conducts decolonial excavations, traces genealogies of discourse, and pays…

This study is the first to explore the concept of colonial mentality among Samoans in America. The aim of this research was to identify how colonial mentality may manifest among the Samoan population in America. Colonial mentality stems from a history and legacy of colonialism, …

During the seventeenth century in the Mohawk Valley, European trade goods became commonplace. However, little is known about how colonialism impacted Mohawk agricultural practice and foodways. This thesis presents paleoethnobotanical findings from ten Mohawk archaeological sites…

Viewing the film Mama (2013) through the lens of a certain Gothic text, Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, reveals similar fears of the feminine alongside the focus of the nature of the in-between. These commonalities between the texts reveal an emerging trend in modern monster-horror…

‘Ayahuasca’ is a plant mixture with a variety of recipes and localized names native to South America. Often, the woody ayahuasca vine (Banisteriopsis caapi) is combined with chacruna leaf (Psychotria viridis) in a tea, inducing psychedelic effects among its users. While social u…

This study examines the effects of two concurrent cultural developments on British attitudes towards gender during the long eighteenth century: the introduction and popularization of actresses to the British public stage and the ongoing British colonial project. The goal is to d…

This dissertation investigates the relationship between the emergence of Islamophobia, the contemporaneous rise of ultranationalism, and British colonial policy in 1930s Burma. Though scholars agree that Burmese Islamophobia first appeared in the colonial period, they have not y…

So long has the shadow cast by Junípero Serra been that it has obscured the history of the California mission system as it developed after the founding father’s death in 1784. In both the scholarly and popular imagination, Father Serra has become the lasting symbol of the Califo…

This project examines the role of plantations in modernist fiction. The plantation as a global space and site of exchange represents the need to reconceptualize definitions of modernity by problematizing peripheral spaces rather than viewing them as archaic colonial forms. Rathe…

To understand the agents involved in the production of the Camata-Carijana landscape, from the Inka period (circa 1450 to 1550 A.D.) into the modern era, the configuration of three landscape features (community settlements, road network, and agrarian terracing) are compared to a…

President Lincoln has long been lauded as a key figure in history and in rhetoric. But the “Great Emancipator” before arriving on the Emancipation Proclamation first sought to expel black people from the nation as a way of ending the war. This thesis explores two speeches Lincol…

“Cruel Operators: History, Empire, and Affect in the Global Anglophone Novel,” reanimates and repoliticizes the idea of “cruel aesthetics” within contemporary literature by placing cruelty at the crux of global capitalism’s operational antihumanist logic. Historicizing this logi…

This is a two-pronged study of how the Chinese and Tibetan literary traditions have become intertwined in the modern era. Setting out from the contention that the study of minority literatures in China must be fundamentally multilingual in its approach, this dissertation investi…

This thesis examines indigenous responses to the Spanish colonization of Alta California and the establishment of the mission system by Franciscan friars on Native American lands between 1769 and 1834. In particular, I analyze indigenous persistence through processes of cultural…

This study of alienation is centered on the process of exchange between power and knowledge primarily within the context of South African fiction as represented by Alan Paton, Andre Brink, Nadine Gordimer and Ezekiel Mphahlele. Through a brief discussion of romance, it is establ…

This thesis presents a comparative criminological examination of two South Asian Muslim communities in Britain and Pakistan. The work evaluates existing data regarding South Asian Muslims and crime highlighting the fact that this remains a largely under-researched field in conte…

The thesis examines the cultural and political significance of the formal and stylisticstrategies in the work of Jonathan Swift; particularly the early prose satire A Tale of aTub. Given his Irish origins and the largely colonial basis of England's relationshipwith Ireland, Swif…

The thesis is concerned with assessing the scale and importance of the interaction between Scotland and the West Indies in the later part of the eighteenth century. In analysing the symbiotic relationship between a metropolitan region and a colonial sphere, this study seeks to f…