This study examines the historiography of International Refugee Law; specifically, the defining moment, 1951, when the Refugee Convention was drafted. The field of Refugee Studies, much like International Relations and International Law has been dominated by the 'classic' Westph…
(At) Play in the Postcolony confronts Senegal's current labor crisis through a sustained historical and ethnographic study of a government who claims the recent success of the national soccer team as evidence of its own efficacy (despite being famously unsuccessful at resolving …
From its beginnings in the 1920s, literature in French from Africa has been set against a backdrop of struggle and indelibly marked by conflict. Indeed, over the course of these last 80 years, whether striving for the creation of new independent nations or participating in natio…
In the United States, the past twenty years has witnessed a growing academic interest in understanding 'globalization,' i.e., a series of interconnected social, cultural, and political processes occurring under integrated economies. Management scholars have tried to understand g…
In "The Heteroglossic Narratives of National History: Mythified Histories and the Postcolonial Condition," I examine the function of myth in the making of a nation and in the writing of national history. I use the term "myth" in two ways. First, I use it to refer to the fantasti…
This dissertation examined the use of anti-realist aesthetics in the representation of history in postcolonial fiction produced in Latin America, the Caribbean, South India and Africa. More specifically, it focused on how postcolonial writers engage the issue of history, outside…
The thesis defended in this dissertation is that postcolonial biblical interpretation is a viable interpretive strategy for the reading of the Hebrew Bible by black African women in post-apartheid South Africa. Drawing its methodological cues from Musa W. Dube's postcolonial fem…
Developments in world politics and culture in the inter war and post war years, especially the rise of the anti-colonial nationalist movements in Africa, provide an important background to the rise of African cultural modernity and the emergence of modern African literature. Mod…
The purpose of the study is to investigate the historical and cultural constraints and current policies that have shaped the growth of western-style education for women in Cameroon and, in particular, the South West Province (SWP). This study focuses on women's education in the …
In the field of literary production, women's autobiographical writing has been one of the most powerful means of artistic expression. Life-writing is a genre of ambiguity and paradox intertwined with some of the most fundamental questions of literary studies. Within the domain o…
Throughout the history of Lukan studies, the imperial positivism of the historical-critical method has served to privilege and strengthen the now widespread conception of the Lukan writings as supportive of or, at least, uncritical toward Rome in particular and imperialism in ge…
This dissertation investigates the creation of identity in Caribbean literature as that creation is shaped by property law principles. The strict legal construction of property is that it is "a bundle of rights" (right to use, possess, dispose, alienate, etc) and I examine how i…
This study is concerned with the process of the making of a postcolonial poet persona where the poet is addressing multiple audiences and is trying to speak for, and speak to, multiple constituencies through poetry. The poets examined here, Rabindranath Tagore, Derek Walcott, an…
This dissertation develops a theoretical framework for the study of a resurgent realism in the context of contemporary global anglophone literature. By demonstrating the continuing relevance of Mikhail Bakhtin and Georg Lukács, and by expanding their theories of realism and the …
This dissertation explores the many allusions to and retellings of the Oedipus myth in twentieth-century writing and examines their relationship to what many have seen as the crisis in humanism as it has unfolded in the past hundred years. For modernists and many of their succes…
This study of Paul Bowles's North African writings, especially those concerned with Morocco, investigates the possibilities and limitations that accrued from his carefully maintained reputation as both a traveler (a translator of the "exotic") and as exile. In other words, my ai…
This dissertation argues that a broad commonality of thematic, aesthetic and structural concerns exists in the literature of minority authors writing within contemporary contexts of migration. The texts addressed in this study, recent works in German juxtaposed to examples from …
Josè Rizal, a nineteenth century Philippine propagandist, lived as he died: dedicated to creating a national identity through anti friar propaganda, he would be executed by a firing squad at the age of 29 for sedition against Spain's colonial empire. In his short life, he earned…
The dissertation attempts to answer the following questions: Why has religion been a persistent and significant factor in Third World politics? How did Third World countries address the challenge of religious pluralism? How can development theory be reformulated so that religion…