This dissertation focuses on the burgeoning field of contemporary Arab-American literature as an important site for negotiating the complexities of Arab-American identity. Arguing against the US Census Bureau's current racial categorization of Arab-Americans as white, my current…
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This dissertation addresses the lack of postcolonial criticism concerning the fiction of Anthony Trollope, himself an avid traveler in and writer about the British Empire. Chapter One provides background about the critical reception of Trollope's writings about the Empire and tr…
This research examines the emergence in India of earth remote sensing (ERS), a principal medium for environmental analysis, communication, and policy-making. ERS—the science and “craft” of analyzing images of terrestrial phenomena collected by aircraft or satellite—constitutes a…
This dissertation examines the marginalization and eventual erasure of the literature written in Malay by the Chinese of colonial Indonesia. A substantial textual production between the 1870s and 1940s, Chinese-Malay literature disappeared not only from circulation in Indonesia,…
Since the Roman arch monument came into use some 2,200 years ago, it has been subject to an increasingly narrow range of interpretations. This dissertation aims to reveal the monument's original significance, which has become obscured by a steadfast triumphalist reading. Most an…
Postcolonial literary critics note persistently recurring representations of colonial violence in post-independence Anglophone African novels. I suggest that complex psychological and political processes of colonial trauma compel this narrative repetition. This dissertation juxt…
Though a growing body of scholarship situates contemporary literary authorship within a romantic tradition of writers attempting to distance themselves from the market function of their texts, focusing on postcolonial writers shows that anxiety about commercialization is not the…
This dissertation is a study of the figure of the intruder in postcolonial francophone literature, film and graphic novels published and released in the second half of the 20th and early 21 st century which develop a discourse on the Maghreb or the Maghrebian dispora in France. …
Out of Egypt investigates the privileged place of the biblical trope of Exodus in religious, political, and cultural rhetoric in Ireland, particularly during the anti-colonial struggles of the last century. From the metaphoric identification of the Irish with enslaved Israelites…
In this dissertation I examine contemporary drama from India, Jamaica, and Nigeria in conjunction with feminist movements in these countries. Many of the dramatists discussed in this project were influenced by feminist mobilization and some of them present a progressive politics…
This dissertation focuses on the work of cultural preservation and self-representation by a group of women from the cultural "periphery." As I explore the works of María Cristina Mena, Humishuma (Mourning Dove), Sui Sin Far (Edith Maude Eaton) and The Daughters of Hawai'i, it be…
Based on the reading and analysis of two novels, Valentin Yves Mudimbe's Entre les eaux (1973), and Justine Mintsa's Histoire d'Awu (2000), and a film by Ousmane Sembene, Guelwaar (1993), I analyze various depictions and symbolism pertinent to mourning rituals after a father's d…
The colonizers invaded the peoples and nations not only politically and economically but also culturally and emotionally. The tools of this invasion and the continuing domination over the colonized were not only militaristic and economic; they also included the developing of a s…
In this thesis, I focus on the relationship between gender and nation in post-colonial India, through the lens of Muslim women, who are located on the margins of both religious community and nation. The contradictory embrace of a composite national identity with an ascriptive re…
State of the Family: Domestic Politics in the Arabic Novel has been inspired by social scientist work on the family in the Arab world. This dissertation explores the motif of family in the Arabic novel, specifically as a means of representing larger political relationships. Whil…
This dissertation investigates how 'women' and 'Islam' are constructed in a postcolonial nation, Malaysia. Located in Southeast Asia, Malaysia is a multi-ethnic nation which is Islamic. It was colonized by the Portuguese, the Dutch and finally, the British. In a strategy common …
This study argues that Sarvepalli Radhakrishnan's (1888-1975) interpretations of "experience" and the apologetics they support are not only informed by, but often perpetuate, orientalist images of India constructed during the colonial period. On the theoretical and methodologica…
This dissertation investigates V. S. Naipaul's discursive representation of India and Islam from the perspective of Orientalism. It examines the India trilogy, An Area of Darkness , India : A Wounded Civilization and India : A Million Mutinies Now and his two books on the Islami…
This dissertation is a historical and ethnographic examination of blasphemy laws, accusations and trials in colonial India and post-colonial Pakistan. I track the institution of Pakistan's blasphemy law from the British project of legal codification, and the attempt to seculariz…