This dissertation examines the complex process of identity formation in the town of Kétu located in southeastern Bénin Republic. Regional social and political instability during the nineteenth century pulled Kétu into a variety of regional identities defined by new ethnic, relig…
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This dissertation focuses on forms of migration and the ways in which the movement of people drove social and cultural changes at the village level in the French colonial district of Buguni (southern Mali). It covers different mobile social groups--including migrant workers, fre…
This thesis examines a selection of prose fiction written in Arabic and French by contemporary Lebanese women writers. It focuses on the challenges they pose to Lebanese/Arab society regarding traditional concepts of gender and gender roles, sexuality and sexual practices. I ide…
The representation of the Other in Western media has taken on various meanings throughout history. In 17th- and 18th-century French theatre, the image of the Ottoman and Islamic Other poses many questions for the Western viewer and reader. How can we interpret the staged "Turk" …
This study examines the relationship between ideas about decadence and the discourse of Orientalism in French and Arabic literature and society since the nineteenth century. By tracing the genealogy of French Orientalism in the Arab world, this dissertation shows how colonial mo…
Although second language writing research has considerably flourished during the last 4 decades; there are still many "unanswered questions" (Johns, 2004) and many underexamined areas. Besides, second language writing research is still dominated by ESL studies. For instance, man…
Islam is often said to be incompatible with French secularism. Yet the French state never created the conditions for Muslim immigrants to become secular republicans. For Muslim immigrants, who were simultaneously promised equality as individuals and segregated on religious groun…
This dissertation examines Muslim cultural adaptation to French culture. Specifically, this project asserts the Muslim symbol hijab, or headscarf, is a religious and cultural symbol of Islam that is in direct clash with the French concept of secularism. In 2004 the French govern…
Amidst the large body of contemporary studies on cross-cultural encounters, those between the French and Chinese (or Europeans and Chinese) during the late 17th and 18th centuries (precisely when China is considered a greater civilization) are notably absent. Only critics of Chi…
This study analyzes an important and neglected factor in the French decolonization of North Africa, namely Islam and its institutions. After more than a century of French imperialism, Islam remained, for the majority of Algerians, the principal means of self-identification, the …
An Empire of Facts integrates the history of North Africa with the intellectual, cultural, and political history of the French Third Republic. In metropole and colony alike, the cultural politics of late nineteenth and early twentieth century France revolved around attempts to c…
Moroccan Colonial Troops: History, Memory, and the Culture of French Colonialism deals with the history of Moroccan colonial troops between 1912 and 1945. By concentrating on the Moroccan soldiers who were recruited under the French, this dissertation relates the history of colo…
My initial translation of the novel, La Baroudeuse , into English raised several questions for which this project seeks to provide answers through an analytical case study. Chapter One describes the translation experience. It includes an analysis of the effects of the novel's po…
My dissertation explores the transnational dimension of Syrian and Lebanese nationalist movements during the first years of French Mandate in Syria and Lebanon. It analyzes the role and transformations of transnational political networks in the particular case of Syrian and Leba…
This dissertation analyzes the eighteenth-century French Enlightenment's championing of rational philosophy and scientific methodology, rather than any form of traditional theology, as a way to comprehend truth. The French philosophes struggled to proffer their shocking ideas on…
Focusing on a corpus of mid- and late-19th century travel accounts by Moroccan, French and British travelers, this dissertation reassesses two critical assumptions that formulations of modernity often accept as unquestionable and established truths: (1) that modernity was consti…
In this dissertation, I undertake a comparison of physical and narrative indeterminacy in medieval and modern French narrative. This comparison is based on a common narrative deferral of authoritative meaning and on the prevalence of hybrid characters in texts from both periods.…
This ethnographically-oriented linguistic research examines the impact of space on language use in Fes (Morocco). A post-colonial city, Fes is split into two well-marked districts: The Ville Nouvelle or "New City," built by the French; and the Medina, which is the old town, with…