Doctor of Philosophy (PhD), Ohio University, 2022, English (Arts and Sciences)

“‘An Odd Monster': Essays on 20th Century Literature” focuses on intersections of history, place, gender, race, and imperialism in twentieth-century modernist literature. Within these discussions I assert that western conceptualizations of history or the past work to erase the non-white bodies and cultures pivotal to imperial success, to subsume women into patriarchal subordination, and to present a historical progression antithetical to the experience of those relegated to subalternity. In discussions of Jean Rhys, Tayeb Salih, William Faulkner, and Virginia Woolf, I argue that defiance to authoritarian containment—whether from within or without—often takes unlikely forms with seemingly feeble results. In analyses of characters who write back, talk back, rebel, do nothing, and/or commit small acts of violence, I contend throughout that insubordination to systemic oppressions for the purposes of prioritizing individual agency over moral triumph do not have to be “successful,” to be revolutionary. Utilizing foundational voices such as Sara Ahmed, Edward Said, Homi Bhabha, Michel Foucault, among others, I argue that these acts are transcendent despite little to no substantial change emerging because the characters and writers themselves make and claim their own autonomy and belonging. This work participates in and urges for a continuation of the work of “New Modernist Studies,” which seeks a more expansive understanding of modernism through collapsing the rigid (often exclusionary) spatial and temporal boundaries.

Committee: Ghirmai Negash (Advisor) Subjects: African Literature; American Literature; British and Irish Literature; Caribbean Literature; Literature; Modern Literature

Doctor of Philosophy, The Ohio State University, 2006, English

Challenging the English-only bias in postcolonial theory and literary criticism, this dissertation investigates the role of the twentieth-century Tamil historical romance in the formation of Indian and Tamil identity in the colonial period. I argue that Tamil Indian writer-nationalist Kalki Ra. Krsnamurti's (1899-1954) 1944 Civakamiyin Capatam (Civakami's Vow)—chronicling the ill-fated wartime romance of Pallava king Narasimhavarman (630-668 CE) and fictional court dancer Civakami against the backdrop of the seventh-century Pallava-Chalukya wars—exemplifies a distinct genre of interventionist literature in the Indian subcontinent. In Kalki's hands, the vernacular novel became a means by which to infiltrate the colonial imaginary and, at the same time, to envision a Tamil India untainted by colonial presence. Charting the generic transformation of the historical romance in the Tamil instance, my study provides 1) a refutation of the inflationary and overweening claims made in postcolonial studies about South Asian nationalism, 2) a questioning of naive binaries such as local and global, cosmopolitan and vernacular, universal and particular, traditional and modern, in examining the colonial/postcolonial transaction, and 3) a case for a less grandiose and more carefully historicized account of bourgeois nationalism than has previously been provided by postcolonial critics, accounting for its complicities with and resistances to discourses of nation, region, caste, and gender in the late colonial context. Looking out from a specific historical, political, linguistic, and cultural location, I hope to generate ethical, context-sensitive analyses of South Asian nationalisms (in this study's case, Tamil) as persisting and protean global formations sensitive to local and global networks of influence.

Committee: Chadwick Allen (Advisor); Debra Moddelmog (Other) Subjects:

Master of Arts, Miami University, 2024, English

The question of language in the British and French colonial contexts has been deliberated and examined extensively by postcolonial scholars and critical theorists over the course of the twentieth century with the rise of anticolonial and independence movements throughout the Global South. This thesis examines the status of the French language and its evolving legacy in the postcolonial Algerian context from both sides of the Mediterranean through the auto-fictional and autobiographical narratives of Assia Djebar and Leila Sebbar. Their writings are situated within a larger Algerian literary tradition of linguistic intervention and textual strategies that simultaneously displace and repurpose French as a colonial language in an increasingly multilingual and multicultural environment. At the intersection of postcolonial and Francophone studies, this thesis demonstrates how postcolonial articulations of selfhood and linguistic belonging in Algerian women's writing ultimately reject territorial claims over language, challenge the gendering of French and Arabic as maternal/paternal languages, and privilege subaltern memory and oral testimonies to resist historical and colonial erasure through counter-historiographies. This thesis considers the implications of the Francophone perspective on postcolonial engagement with language and identity formation within the context of global literatures in translation.

Committee: Anita Mannur (Committee Chair); Theresa Kulbaga (Committee Member); Mark McKinney (Committee Member) Subjects: Comparative Literature; Gender; Language; Literature; North African Studies

Doctor of Philosophy, The Ohio State University, 2022, English

This dissertation examines the literary and cultural production of the national Emergency declared by Indian prime minister Indira Gandhi on June 25, 1975. I define “Postcolonial Exceptions” as the situation of recurring crises, dictatorships, and civil wars that plagued countries in the Global South during the decolonization era. I study multiple sites of discursive production: Indian fiction in English and translation, journalism, documentary films, and visual ephemera in the post-independence period to challenge readings of the Emergency as an isolated event, instead theorizing it as a crisis of liberalism and a formative moment in the rise of Hindu nationalism in India. Scholarly investigation of the relationship between state and literature/culture has often relied on a rigid dichotomy between the implicit autonomy of artistic production and the demands of conformity from the monolithic state. Since the 1970s, human rights discourses have reproduced this dichotomy in considering postcolonial states and their relationship with dissident artists and authors. As opposed to this view, my dissertation puts forward a postcolonial framework that emphasizes the constitutive role of literary and cultural writing in producing the idea of the state and its ‘proper' subject. I argue that a reading of postcolonial literatures as the literature of exception makes space for the reconceptualization of cultural production as both sites of resistance and collusion with repressive states. Simultaneously, my project explores how ideas of ‘freedom' and ‘authoritarianism' reflected in the literature/culture of the Emergency speak to the Cold War intellectual politics of the 1970s and the decades that preceded it. Finally, “Postcolonial Exceptions” traces the Emergency's circulation as a political and narrative trope in contemporary India, demonstrating how various actors in India and abroad have narrativized the crisis in the interests of competing versions of the historica (open full item for complete abstract)

Committee: Pranav Jani (Advisor); Jared Gardner (Committee Member); Wendy Hesford (Committee Member); Mytheli Sreenivas (Committee Member) Subjects: Comparative Literature; Film Studies; Literature; South Asian Studies

Doctor of Philosophy (PhD), Ohio University, 2020, Interdisciplinary Arts (Fine Arts)

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-colonial African-language cultural productions. The dissertation shows that, through the application of decolonized methodological practices to translation, cultural meaning can be retained, and therefore, empower the relevance and global visibility of marginalized literatures. The study is cognizant of the fact that cultural translations constitute an essential aspect of growth and expansion of postcolonial literatures and films from Africa, especially for minority literary communities across the continent. Furthermore, the dissertation makes an innovative contribution to the ongoing debates on postcolonial literatures and films produced in Africa, and more importantly, to decolonizing the study of translation as culture in Setswana literature and film. The period of colonization in Africa was characterized not only with the impositions of the European literary cultures and canons on their colonies, but also with varied assumptive views on literary translation practice. For example, most literary translations only focused on the written word represented using the Latin alphabet, but overlooked the possibilities of other translation practices implemented and widely used by the culturally displaced literary cultures. Some of these translation practices entailed the translation of oral tradition and its integration into both the written forms of literature and cinematic adaptations. Furthermore, the exercise of translation also involved the translation of the postcolonial canons, and its defining aesthetic features that account for a distinct style of the cultural productions considered in this study. The study makes a critical observation that the colonial translation practice of Setswana language (open full item for complete abstract)

Committee: Andrea Frohne Dr. (Committee Chair); Erin Schlumpf Dr. (Committee Member); Ghirmai Negash Prof. (Committee Member); Vladmir Marchenkov Prof (Committee Member) Subjects: African Literature; African Studies; Comparative Literature; Sub Saharan Africa Studies

PHD, Kent State University, 2016, College of Arts and Sciences / Department of English

This dissertation focuses on Richard Wright's later non-fiction works Black Power, The Color Curtain and Pagan Spain. It investigates the effects of Wright's travel writings on his worldview and his attitude towards people from different national, racial and cultural backgrounds. It deals with transnational connectedness and the novel subjectivities it engenders. It also attempts to comprehend how the circumstances of interconnectedness, versatility and mobility engendered by globalization influence people's worldviews and their belonging to a community, concentrating on the transnational aspect as its case. While analyzing these issues, this study attempts to further our understanding of transnationalism and transnational phenomena in Wright's trilogy which fundamentally inverts the emphasis of most essentialists critics by crossing racial and national boundaries. Moreover, this dissertation examines cross-currents of influence on Wright's worldview. Wright's works serve as a heritage for critics and thinkers in the United States and elsewhere in the World. Wright calls for a renewed focus on intercultural and transnational dialogue in modernist studies. In addition, this study explores how Third World subjects map and narrate their multiple and hybrid identities among and between various discrepant cultural spaces, borders, communities, places and identity narratives. Rather than promoting the claims of sameness, identity politics and the primacy of a single cultural space, Wright's non-fiction works suggest these subjects' tactical articulation of their identities between, across, and through a transnational matrix of permeable borders and provisional places in their search for an ethical language of coalition politics and transformation.

Committee: Yoshinobu Hakutani (Committee Co-Chair); Babacar M'Baye (Committee Co-Chair); Robert Trogdon (Committee Member); Timothy Scarnecchia (Committee Member); Elizabeth Smith (Committee Member) Subjects: African Americans; American Literature; Literature

Doctor of Philosophy, The Ohio State University, 2016, English

Broadcasting Friendship: Decolonization, Literature, and the BBC analyzes the politics and form of literary radio broadcasts produced in London and broadcast to the West Indies, South Asia, and Africa during the decolonization era. This dissertation focus on the relationship between individual agency and institutional power in the BBC's Overseas Service and the U.S. grant funded Transcription Centre. I argue that writers working within metropolitan broadcasting institutions found friendship to be a productive political and aesthetic concept even as liberal models of friendship were being used as tools of British soft power. By showing how literary radio broadcasts were used for both cultural imperialism and anti-colonialism, we can better understand the interrelated developments of late modernism and postcolonial literature across multiple media. While my dissertation joins recent debates on mid-century literature and radio and transnational modernism, it is the first comparative study of the intersections of radio, literature, and cultural politics in the decolonization era. Each chapter focuses on a different concept of friendship and brings together a range of media with original archival research conducted at the BBC Written Archives Center, the Harry Ransom Center at the University of Texas, and other collections. In Una Marson's Jamaican literary magazine, The Cosmopolitan, and “Calling the West Indies” programs for the BBC, for example, we find the idea of cosmopolitanism being nurtured through poetry, while the Indian novelist Mulk Raj Anand portrays interpersonal friendship between English citizens and Indian subjects as an incentive to political action in his novel, Across the Black Waters and his World War II BBC propaganda talks. In the BBC's Caribbean Voices and the Transcription Centre's Africa Abroad radio programs, we see writers like George Lamming and Lewis Nkosi examining the development of international communities of writers of African descen (open full item for complete abstract)

Committee: Pranav Jani Dr. (Advisor); Thomas Davis Dr. (Advisor); Adeleke Adeeko Dr. (Committee Member); Peter Kalliney Dr. (Committee Member) Subjects: African Literature; Asian Literature; British and Irish Literature; Caribbean Literature; Mass Media

Doctor of Philosophy, Miami University, 2023, English

A comparative and interdisciplinary study, this dissertation examines corporeal forms of nostalgic recollection in twentieth- and twenty-first-century global South Asian literature and performance. Studying a range of cultural material, I illustrate how writers and performing artists negotiate ideological constructions of the past through nostalgic narratives articulated in corporeal terms and through embodied acts. To this end, I first call for a theoretical reconfiguration of nostalgic recollection as a performative act that can “break and remake” narrations of the past, in keeping with Homi K. Bhabha's definition of performance as “kinesis.” Such a reconfiguration also accounts for nostalgia's cross-temporality, since the process of recollecting the past hinges on a disruption of the present and the ideation of the future. Secondly, building on the work of performance theorists like Diana Taylor and Rebecca Schneider, I study how memory is anchored to the body, where the body becomes both the means of recollection and the site for the projection of the past. The dissertation unsettles dominant historiography by calling attention to forms of nostalgia that posit the corporeal as its theoretical, epistemological, ontological nucleus. Thinking through Anuk Arudpragasam's novel The Story of a Brief Marriage (2016), the first chapter theorizes the performativity of nostalgic recollections in the face of nationalist, imperialist, and heteropatriarchal narratives of history. In Chapter 2, I explore how Jhumpa Lahiri's novel The Namesake (2003), Asif Mandvi's play Sakina's Restaurant (1988), and Shyam Selvadurai's novel The Hungry Ghosts (2013) deploy corporeal nostalgic recollection to underscore the unfulfilled neoliberal promises of the first world where the bodies of diasporic women, queer, and working-class individuals are often gendered and sexualized. The third chapter focuses on the performativity of the war-torn body in Sri Lankan performance art by Janani Coora (open full item for complete abstract)

Committee: Nalin Jayasena (Committee Co-Chair); Katie Johnson (Committee Co-Chair) Subjects: Gender Studies; Literature; Performing Arts; South Asian Studies; Theater Studies

Master of Arts, Miami University, 2023, French, Italian, and Classical Studies

This paper written in French examines the works of two female comic artists, Zeina Abirached and Brigitte Findakly, who grew up in the Middle East during periods of political instability and social tension. Abirached's book Le Piano Oriental combines her own life with that of her great-grandfather, while Findakly blends her childhood and adult experiences with a broader portrait of her country and society in Coquelicots d'Irak. Both artists incorporate their personal stories into the historical context of their native and adopted countries. Through their use of autofiction, autobiography and captivating visual storytelling, these two graphic novels demonstrate the transformative power of Art in bringing together and unifying fragmented identities, facilitating healing and reconciliation, and commemorating destroyed and/or forgotten pasts. Art is showcased as a means of expression for bicultural identities and as a vital need. By exploring personal experiences, Abirached and Findakly use original narrative techniques and exploit the rich linguistic and visual elements of their medium to express the transformative power of art in unique ways, offering powerful critiques of war, sexism, prejudice, and inequality.

Committee: Mark McKinney (Committee Chair); Audrey Wasser (Committee Member); Elisabeth Hodges (Committee Member) Subjects: Foreign Language; Literature; Romance Literature

Doctor of Philosophy, Miami University, 2019, English

Taking an interdisciplinary approach that attends to the tryst between British postcolonialism and US neoliberalism in South Asia in the post-World War II era, this dissertation examines how the US state became a disciplinary biopolitical model for the postcolonial South Asian security state on the one hand, and a premise to forge new forms of identities, memories, belonging, and rights for South Asian subjects on the other hand. Through an examination of a broad archive, I make three major claims. First, I argue that while hegemonic memory discourses look for verifiable truths and empirical evidence, writers and artists from postcolonial South Asia propose alternative mnemonic accounts to decenter such hegemonic official and national archives. Second, I analyze how writers and artists delineate ways for South Asian subjects to articulate rights through mnemonic forms of citizenship, thus unsettling the mainstream discourse of human rights that places emphasis on subjects' material claims (or a lack of them) to space. In particular, memory is channeled to reterritorialize notions of “home”—a focal point of Western human rights—thereby allowing the homeless and stateless to claim historical and political subjectivities in postcolonial terrains that have officially disowned them. Third, I examine how the postwar USA has provided tools for the postcolonial South Asian state to galvanize securitization as a governing rationality as well as tools for oppressed subjects to resist from below. Through a reading of Salman Rushdie's 'Shalimar the Clown' (2005) and 'The Golden House' (2017), the first chapter probes how Rushdie's media-saturated literary memory protests neoliberal metamorphoses that take effect through militarization, hyper-securitization, surveillance, and displacement. The second chapter uses Rohinton Mistry's 'A Fine Balance' (1995) and Shyam Selvadurai's 'The Hungry Ghosts' (2013) as touchstones to illustrate queer memory assemblages that contest collu (open full item for complete abstract)

Committee: Nalin Jayasena (Committee Chair); Anita Mannur (Committee Member); Yu-Fang Cho (Committee Member); Cathy J. Schlund-Vials (Committee Member); Jana Braziel (Other) Subjects: Asian American Studies; Asian Literature; Comparative Literature; Literature

Doctor of Philosophy, The Ohio State University, 2018, East Asian Languages and Literatures

This study focuses on Japan's Korean minority, known variously as “Zainichi” or “resident” Koreans, and examines their literary and political activity from 1945-1950, immediately after Korea's liberation from Japanese colonial rule. With the end of World War II, Kim Tal-su (1920-1997) and a number of other Korean intellectuals educated in imperial Japan, formed a literary coterie affiliated with the “League of Koreans in Japan,” a new political support organization advancing Koreans' repatriation and the improvement of their living conditions. Kim's coterie created a Korean-centered news magazine-cum-literary journal written entirely in Japanese: Minshu Chosen (“Democratic Korea”), which ran monthly until the outbreak of the Korean War. The fiction, poetry, drama, editorials, histories, and interviews found in the magazine reveal major currents in the political thought of this postcolonial community and also comprise a rebuttal to the dominant Japanese discourse surrounding Korea and its people. In the first half of my study I explore the figures behind Minshu Chosen and the appearance of their Marxist politics in the magazine's depictions of colonial history and contemporary developments in Asia. Next my focus shifts to a broad overview of the coterie's literary activity, situating the postwar development of Zainichi Korean literature within the context of its imperial era forerunners, as well as the subsequent emergence of this genre within the mainstream of Japanese literature. The latter half of the study focuses on differing modes of resistance, in particular violence versus non-violence, as they appear in works by two coterie members whose politics would diverge drastically after this period. Finally, my conclusion takes up the Occupation government's suppression of the League as a terrorist organization, and the rebuttal offered by one of Minshu Chosen's main editors.

Committee: Richard Torrance PhD (Advisor); Pil Ho Kim PhD (Committee Member); Naomi Fukumori PhD (Committee Member) Subjects: Literature; Minority and Ethnic Groups; Modern History; Modern Literature; World History

Bachelor of Arts, University of Toledo, 2018, English

Tayeb Salih's novel Season of Migration to the North, published shortly after Sudanese independence from colonial rule, is in itself a practice in resistance. Salih subverts the European narrative, and instead replaces it with the experience of his protagonist MustafaSa'eed. Through this novel, Salih combats the British literary and social tradition of the"germ" of infection that is transmitted to the British body politic through the brown body of the formerly colonized subject. ! propose that Salih's novel demonstrates that for all of England's germaphobic and paranoid ideas directed toward the brown body, England's conquest of Sudan is the true source of evil and infection in the novel. Rather than perpetuating the myth of the colonizing mission as the benevolent enterprise that the British often uphold, Salih underscores that colonialism and the conquest of Sudan is the origin of the plague that both the postcolonial body and postcolonial society must struggle to come to terms with, even "post-independence." The motif of the "germ" is constantly repeated by the British in the text. However, Mustafa, appropriates this terminology, and in doing so, points to a source-hood for his actions as the first Sudanese to ever set foot in England-- that source-hood being the British empire and the colonial mission. This infection manifests itself on both the mental plane, through education and the monopolizing of culture, as well as the physical plane, through ideas of sexuality and miscegenation. Other postcolonial scholars tend to read Salih's novel as a letter to the empire, focusing entirely on Mustafa's actions in the post-colonial context. I, however, intend to look at the ways in which the disease of colonialism was intended to erase any possibility of the post-colonial, and the ways in which the novel itself grapples with the notion of anything surviving post contamination

Committee: Melissa Gregory (Committee Chair); Parama Sarkar (Advisor) Subjects: African Literature; Language Arts; Literature; Middle Eastern Literature

Master of Arts (MA), Bowling Green State University, 2017, Popular Culture

Kenya boasts of its high production of popular culture materials. Music, TV shows, movies, popular fiction and now, in this social media age, memes, GIFs and short video clips. All these are tailored to respond to the prevailing social, economic and political conditions in the country. While they are mostly humorous and entertaining, the primary goal of many of these popular culture artefacts is to critique contemporary Kenya. Despite its consumption though, popular culture has remained highly undervalued and unappreciated as a tool for cultural, social and political transformation. Many Kenyans consume popular culture texts solely for entertainment purposes. Popular fiction, since it is studied and examined in Kenya's exam-oriented schools, is arguably the only form of popular culture that is seen as a means to an end – passing one's exams. This end however, is hardly what authors usually have in mind when they produce the texts, considering their contents. This thesis examines Kidagaa Kimemwozea, a Swahili novel by Ken Walibora, as a representation and critique of postcolonial Kenya's social, cultural and political situation. Exploring the political leadership of postcolonial Kenya, class dynamics and relations as well as gender issues, I argue that Walibora's novel does not only expose the Kenyan bourgeoisie's cunningness in their oppression of the proletarians and the male ruse to dominate their female counterparts, but it also proposes excellent paths of emancipation for the proletarians and women, and should thus be given scholarly attention.

Committee: Jeremy Wallach Dr. (Advisor); Esther Clinton Dr. (Committee Member); Kristen Rudisill Dr. (Committee Member) Subjects: African Literature; Literature

PHD, Kent State University, 2016, College of Arts and Sciences / Department of English

Beginning in 1169 with the Anglo-Norman Invasion, the colonization of the Irish resulted in centuries of violence, the confiscation of lands, resources, and sovereignty, and the near total destruction of Ireland's native culture and language. While many Irish continually fought against this occupation, most rebellions ended in nothing more than failure and stricter colonial rule until the early twentieth century when an organized and determined national effort for independence took hold. During this time Irish authors sought to give Ireland a literary culture that would serve as counterpart to its political, economic, and military campaigns for freedom from English rule. This dissertation examines the ways in which W.B. Yeats and James Joyce consciously participated in creating a national identity to inspire decolonization by engaging in revisionist myth-making in order to create new Irish culture heroes. In Yeats's five Cuchulain plays and Joyce's Ulysses each author manipulated mythic heroes from Irish and Greek tradition in an attempt to define Irish identity during the nation's struggle against colonial rule. Yeats and Joyce shaped their individual culture heroes with the deliberate goal of representing the Irish experience from the Irish perspective with the hope of inspiring and uniting the Irish to reclaim their right to rule their own nation. The Cuchulain plays and Ulysses challenged the colonial narrative that the Irish had no culture to speak of, while also confronting and correcting colonial stereotypes perpetuated and spread by the English. Although Yeats and Joyce are often considered incompatible in terms of their involvement with Ireland's anti-colonial movement, their shared use of revisionist myth and culture heroes suggests something different. This dissertation shows that, despite their opposing beliefs, both authors worked on the same cultural project to promote Irish nationalism in the service of Ireland's fight for independence.

Committee: Claire Culleton (Advisor); Kevin Floyd (Committee Member); Tammy Clewell (Committee Member); Patrick Coy (Committee Member) Subjects: Literature

Master of Arts, University of Toledo, 2016, History

My thesis explores the works of European and North American khipu scholars (mainly anthropologists) from 1912 until 2010. I analyze how they incorporated aspects of their own culture and values into their interpretations of Inca khipus' structure and functions. As Incas did not leave behind a written language or even clear non-written descriptions of their khipus, khipu scholars interpreted khipus' purposes with a limited base of Inca perspectives. Thus, every work of khipu literature that I study reflects both elements of Inca culture and the author's own cultural perspectives as a twentieth or twenty-first century academic. I show how each work is indicative of modern cultural views on writing, as well as academic movements and broader social trends that were prominent during the author's time.

Committee: Charles Beatty-Medina (Committee Chair); Padilla Roberto (Committee Member); Kim Nielsen (Committee Member) Subjects: Ancient Civilizations; Ancient History; Cultural Anthropology; History; Language; Latin American History; Modern History

Doctor of Philosophy, The Ohio State University, 2013, English

This dissertation argues that 9/11 Pakistani novels and films privilege cosmopolitan encounters by Muslim, and occasionally non-Muslim, characters that are in conflict with power and simultaneously reject those interactions that are complicit with it. I define cosmopolitan actions as those that do not merely celebrate but critically engage with foreign cultures and peoples at home and abroad. For the purpose of this project, I confine my analysis of power to the influence wielded by religious fundamentalists and political empires. To make my argument, I examine six Pakistani texts in which 9/11 is not merely a temporal marker but central to their ideological contexts and narrative strategies. These include Nadeem Aslam' s novel The Wasted Vigil (2008), Shoaib Mansoor' s film Khuda Kay Liye (2007), Kamila Shamsie' s novel Burnt Shadows (2009), Mohsin Hamid' s novel The Reluctant Fundamentalist (2007), H. M. Naqvi' s novel Home Boy (2009), and Joseph Castelo' s film (co-authored by Ayad Akhtar and Tom Glynn) The War Within (2005). Pakistani novelists and filmmakers have acquired global visibility in the last decade, but their contribution to our understanding of 9/11 has not been sufficiently acknowledged. This project particularizes the recent turn in cosmopolitan theory to accord greater significance to religion in understanding global and local networks. I demonstrate how Pakistani writers and filmmakers represent a gamut of Muslim encounters with foreignness and thereby contest the dominant post-9/11 narrative that Muslims are inherently parochial. The turn towards religion in theories of cosmopolitanism is consistent with a new direction in which postcolonial studies is headed. In his 2012 article "Postcolonial Remains," published in New Literary History, Robert Young notes that postcolonial studies has not paid adequate attention to resistance couched in a religious idiom. In this project, I take Young' s suggestion forward by examining the multiple (open full item for complete abstract)

Committee: Pranav Jani Dr. (Advisor) Subjects: Literature

PhD, University of Cincinnati, 2012, Arts and Sciences: Romance Languages and Literatures

Abstract This work is a comparative analysis of four postcolonial novels by Caribbean writers that resist Western power domination and dictatorships: Texaco (1992) by Patrick Chamoiseau, Le cri des oiseaux fous (2000) by Dany Laferri¿¿¿¿re, El hombre, la hembra y el hambre (1998) by Da¿¿¿¿na Chaviano, and Nuestra se¿¿¿¿ora de la noche (2006) by Mayra Santos-Febres. My study incorporates authors from both the Francophone and Hispanic Caribbean, signaling a shared intense critique in literature that links these authors directly to their nations' political control. My principal task in this dissertation is the examination of characters' creation of non-violent strategies of resistance. I argue that, even though their maneuvers do not alter the course of history in each society, they question, destabilize, and undermine the autocratic governments in which they evolve. My theoretical framework draws from a wide, trans-regional variety of critics in Spanish, French, and English. Using in particular the critical thinking developed by Michel De Certeau and ¿¿¿¿¿douard Glissant, the study explores how characters are subjects always “in motion”—in both the literal and figurative sense—who simply do not accept the physical and mental limitations imposed by the autocratic regimes, and take rebellious detours that allow them to produce their own rules that seem troublesome for some, but inspiring for others, who decide to imitate them. As a result, characters become the opposite of what their dominants had in mind: they become dynamic, flexible, and complex subjects. Even though the literary works were written at the end of the twentieth century and beginning of the twenty-first century, the past moment of narrativization allows me to demonstrate how political oppression is represented through situational constraints, such as racial discrimination, class distinction, and gender inequality in four distinct historical eras: The French departmentalization of Martinique in 1946, th (open full item for complete abstract)

Committee: Patricia Valladares-Ruiz PhD (Committee Chair); Therese Migraine-George PhD (Committee Member); Michele Vialet PhD (Committee Member) Subjects: Caribbean Literature

Doctor of Philosophy, The Ohio State University, 2005, French and Italian

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 nation building, francophone writers from Africa have been catalysts for both social and political change through their contributions to this body of literature. The first half of its history, including the decade immediately following independence, through 1970, is a period described by scholars as both nationalist, and celebratory. Nationalist, because primarily influenced by a desire for independence from colonial rule; and celebratory, because of the concerted effort among writers and other intellectuals to ignite a sense of pride in all things African: culture, history and race. With the fall of European colonial empires and the creation of new, independent states in the 1950s and 1960s, this body of literature underwent a major period of transformation consisting in a dramatic change not only in the tone, focus, and themes chosen by its authors, but also in their social and political preoccupations. Scholars acknowledge this shift by characterizing the post-independence literary production in francophone Africa as belonging to the post-nationalist, critical phase. The focus of my dissertation concerns the ways in which writers of the second-generation use a new ecriture to contest anti-colonial nationalism as it is embodied in the writings of the previous generation. Second generation writers have been particularly critical of the first generation's celebration of tradition as pure, harmonious and infallible, and recognize the power of some traditions to repress certain members of society: members of particular castes and women for example. Issues concerning politics, gender roles in society, the reality of racial and cultural hybridity and class locations were now too obvious to ignore. Soc (open full item for complete abstract)

Committee: John Conteh-Morgan (Advisor) Subjects: Literature, African

Master of Arts, Miami University, 2010, Literature

This thesis explores food as a negative trope in colonial and (post)colonial British literature of the twentieth century. Food, as a carrier of culture, serves as a useful tool for deconstructing hegemonic power relationships between the (post)colonized and (post)colonizing peoples. Chapter One explores the abjection of a culture via the belittling of their food in Redmond O'Hanlon's Into the Heart of Borneo. Jennifer Brennan's Curries and Bugles is the focus of Chapter Two, which examines how ‘ethnic cookbooks' can function to simplify cultures in an attempt to justify colonialism. Finally, Chapter Three analyzes how E. M. Forster, in A Passage to India, uses tea as a metaphor for the inequality of the colonial enterprise, which allows for an examination of the injustices of today's globalization. This chapter argues for a redefinition of patriotism in the light of globalization and is ultimately an argument in support of Fair Trade.

Committee: Dr. Susan Morgan PhD (Committee Chair); Dr. Yu-Fang Cho PhD (Committee Member); Dr. Nalin Jayasena PhD (Committee Member) Subjects: British and Irish Literature; Literature

Master of Arts, Miami University, 2005, Theatre

This critical analysis asserts that the play Anowa is a critique of the ideologies imposed upon the African postcolonial subject. Chapter one is a dramaturgical exploration of the position of oral literature in the perpetuation of the Akan cultural myth through exposure of specific gender discrepancies inherent within its form, and examination of its influence in the creation of modern Ghana whose social and political environment is the inspiration for Aidoo's work. Chapter two, a literary analysis, positions Aidoo's construction of Anowa as a performative critique that dismantles the myth of the Akan gendered identity supported through indigenous oral literature, and perpetuated in West African written works, which, in cooperation with colonial indoctrination, entraps the African subject (Anowa). Chapter Three offers a critical analysis of the themes, symbolism, and performative results manifested through the direction and design of the Miami University production of Anowa, which served as the writer's directing thesis.

Committee: Paul Jackson (Advisor) Subjects: