Thesiss

The Partition of the Indian subcontinent – into India and Pakistan in 1947 – was one of the crucial moments marking the break between the colonial and postcolonial era. My project is invested in exploring the Partition not merely in terms of the events of August 1947, but as an …

This dissertation ascribes an extended methodology of auto-ethnography to the problem of apprehending the cultural and affective crossways symbiotic with post 911, late capitalism, in the United States and on the Transnational Stage. It introduces a performative approach derived…

From the end of World War II up through the end of French colonial rule in North Africa a sizeable expatriate community existed in Tangier, among whose members were the writers Paul Bowles, William Burroughs, and Brion Gysin. Each author in his own way bore testament in his writ…

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…

In recent decades, literary studies has experienced a global turn, often understood as a move beyond national paradigms of analysis, which are deemed to be narrow and particularistic. Although wary of the tacit universalizing tendencies of global frames, scholars of race and pos…

This dissertation explores the global protests of 1968 by examining three university cities—Tunis, Paris, and Dakar—that became sites of transnational activism after the collapse of the French empire. Newly independent African states in the post-1945 era invested heavily in educ…

This dissertation questions the assumption that there is an inherent link between music and identity. In Part One, I provide an historical anthropology of the global dissemination of identity discourses on the arts and their development on the island nation of Sri Lanka, to demo…

The dissertation aims to engage a critical analysis of the cultural implications of translation practice in the context of postcolonial African literature and film in Setswana language. It argues for the integration of decolonial and culturally relevant translations in post-colo…

This dissertation is an interdisciplinary study into unheard narratives of the 1947 Partition of India as they inform legacies of trauma, violence, and displacement for South Asian diasporic communities. In exploring the limitations of official state accounts of Partition, I tur…

This dissertation investigates the relationship between American mass-media soundscapes and everyday experiences of scientific meaning and truth-value during the Space Race. Agitated by seismic social and political shifts, the years between 1957 and 1975 provide fertile ground f…

This dissertation reevaluates the literary history of modernism in Urdu poetry through a study of the controversial poet N. M. Rashed (1910-75). Best known as the first poet of free verse in Urdu, Rashed's position in the formal history of Urdu modernism is assured. Yet critics,…

This work addresses the folkloristic topic of identity through a conventional narrative history exploring Egypt's recent identity crisis in its historical development rather than its static mode in a specific time and space. This work, therefore, suggests a fresh look at the fun…

Might cultural imperialism captivate its subjects even as it captures them? Although theorists from Frantz Fanon and Christopher Miller to Homi Bhabha and Priya Joshi have asked this question, dominant understandings of cultural imperialism as a process of imposition--not propos…

While Francophone North-African literature and more specifically the work of Assia Djebar have been studied in depth both internationally and nationally (i.e. France) as falling into the definition of Post-colonial studies, my work will focus on the use of music as a technique o…