Professor and Playwright Dr. Tess Onwueme is a powerful literary voice focusing on the issues affecting women and families in Africa and its diaspora. With the publication of her first play, A Hen Too Soon (1983), a fresh voice was added to challenge traditional beliefs that end…
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This dissertation is based on one year of anthropological field research in Paris and Tehran. It proposes an account of fashion production, commercialization, and consumption in the two cities. Starting from theories of subjectivation, this research analyzes the place of fashion…
By the end of the nineteenth century an apparatus of disciplining modernity had cleansed and regulated the performance of music in Western India. In a new cultural public sphere, an emerging bourgeoisie was presented Sanskritized entertainment in the form of Marathi music drama.…
This dissertation constitutes a case study of societal change in a developing country as seen through the eyes of a participant/observer who both lived through it and was involved, in part, in that process of change. This historical narrative is based on the lived experience of …
Since the introduction of modernity to the Arab World in 1798, the Arab World has experienced three attempts of modernization called (Arab Nahdha projects). These projects served as the theoretical and practical agenda for social change, designed for achieving liberty, progress …
This study examines the Biafran secession of 1967-1970 and how the secessionist government constructed a Biafran identity in its campaign to gain international support for Biafra's permanent separation from Nigeria. The introductory chapter outlines the role of identity in Niger…
As one of the most visible signs of the modern world, the myriad of shopping places and types can be considered as a valuable lens through which to examine the contemporary city. In Alexandria, Egypt, the situation was particularly interesting because retail space was moving in …
In contemporary Damascus, the modern oboe and an instrument known as its predecessor, the zurna, are heard on a daily basis as they continue to be employed in Syrian popular and folk music practices. After observing the pervasiveness of the sounds of these instruments in Syria, …
This dissertation studies the promise of inclusion in the global information society for marginalized groups in India, a nation that represents a modular case for technology and modernization initiatives in the global South. There has been significant research on the problematic…
Over three and a half decades after his death, Ali Shariati (1933–1977) continues to occupy a major place in the ongoing academic and public debates about the relationship between Islam and modernity. Seldom, however, have commentators attended to the ways in which Shariati's in…
This dissertation explores representations of the Jewish female body in Hebrew literature at the turn of the 20th century. It serves as an intervention in the dominant discourse on the male Jewish body in recent scholarship, and its occlusion of discussions of femininity and fem…
After the Islamic Revolution of 1979 in Iran, surprisingly, the presence of Iranian women in public spaces dramatically increased. Despite this recent change in women's presence in public spaces, Iranian women, like in many other Muslim-majority societies in the Middle East, are…
In a country that lacks a history of exhibiting hostility to most religions, Islam and its stigmatization have become the topic du jour in the United States. Many of the stereotypes of Islam and Muslims that emerge in and through U.S. mainstream media are neither apolitical nor …
This thesis explores questions surrounding the necessity of travel in pursuit of knowledge, cultural negotiation as a continuous and interactive process, as well as the strong bond with one's own culture that is indispensible to a successful negotiation. I analyze the 1834 trave…
Contemporary urban form in the Middle Eastern countries have increasingly gained the attention of urban planners and scholars in the recent decades. Nonetheless, the dualities and disparities embedded in their rapid, uneven, and unplanned process of urbanization, the conflict be…
In this current era of postmodernity, globalization, and new technological and social conditions, new approaches to literacy teaching are being introduced and examined. Studies that explore complexities of language teaching and learning in discourses of postmodernity as they rel…
In this dissertation I examine policies in Indonesia, under Suharto's New Order regime, which aimed at modernizing the nation. Many scholars have analyzed such policies at the macro-level of national politics. I seek to complement this work with a micro-level study. I present th…
This thesis examines how media technologies are crucial to the experience of modernity for northern Nigerian Hausa. I examine the social life of media; the ways in which technologies enter particular social, religious and political fields and the uncertain, often unexpected resu…
This dissertation is based on the idea that reproduction is a central locus of contest in the Galilee. "Modernization"--in the interrelated forms of nationalism, economic transformations, medical regulation, new forms of social stratification, and changing gender relations--have…