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Dissertations / Theses on the topic 'Diaspora and modernity'
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Mirmotahari, Emad. "Islam and the Eastern African novel revisiting nation, diaspora, modernity /." Diss., Restricted to subscribing institutions, 2008. http://proquest.umi.com/pqdweb?did=1666396541&sid=12&Fmt=2&clientId=1564&RQT=309&VName=PQD.
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St, Louis Brett Andrew Lucas. "C.L.R. James's social theory : a critique of race and modernity." Thesis, University of Southampton, 1999. http://ethos.bl.uk/OrderDetails.do?uin=uk.bl.ethos.297631.
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Hesse, Barnor. "Signs of blackness : racialized governmentality and the politics of black diaspora." Thesis, University of Essex, 1998. http://ethos.bl.uk/OrderDetails.do?uin=uk.bl.ethos.243354.
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Spencer, Patricia Annamaria. "Malaya's Indian Tamil Labor Diaspora: Colonial Subversion of Their Quest for Agency and Modernity." DigitalCommons@USU, 2013. https://digitalcommons.usu.edu/etd/1463.
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The Indian labor diaspora that settled in Malaya, now known as Malaysia, was a diaspora that was used to further colonial ambitions. Large scale agricultural projects required a workforce that Malaya did not have. South Indian peasants from the untouchable Madrasi caste were taken to Malaya, initially, as indentured servants. When indenture was abolished, they were engaged as contract workers. Inferiority and backwardness were common colonial perceptions that were held against them. These laborers were exploited by the British as they had no bargaining power or the ability to demand more than a meager wage.
World War II redefined the way these laborers started to view the British. Having suffered defeat in the hands of the Japanese, the colonial power retreated meekly. This was a significant development as it removed the veil of British dominance in the eyes of a formerly docile people. When the British returned to Malaya after the war, it was a more defiant Indian labor community who greeted them. These wanted more concessions. They wanted citizenship, better wages and living conditions. They wanted a future that did not retain them on the rubber estates but one where they could finally shed their subaltern roots and achieve upward mobility.
This new defiance was met with antagonism by the colonial power whose main concern was to get the lucrative but stalled rubber industry up and running again. The destitution and impoverishment suffered by the Indians during the war was ignored as they were rounded up like cattle to be put to work again on the estates.
When their demands were not met, Indian laborers joined forces with the heavily Communist influenced Chinese migrant community to go on strikes, the strongest weapon they had at their disposal. The creation of the All Malayan Rubber Workers' Council, a predominantly Indian trade union, is essential in showing how Indian labor became a threat to the British that they eventually had to retaliate with draconian military suppression through the imposition of the Emergency in 1948.
Archival material from the Malaysian National Archives, The National Archives of the United Kingdom, the Labor History and Archive Study Center at the People's History Museum in the United Kingdom, and the Hull History Center in the United Kingdom, were analyzed to present an alternate narrative as opposed to the colonial narrative, in recognizing and attributing a modern spirit and agency amongst this formerly docile labor diaspora. This work presents the events of 1945-1948 as a time when Indians rejected the colonial perception of them as an inferior people, and challenged the colonial power. However, their efforts were subverted by the British and by doing so, the British ensured the maintenance of a labor diaspora that would continue to be exploited by those who ruled over them.
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Pello-Esso, Kibandu. "Design And Race: "African Design" In The Shadow Of Modernity." Thesis, Konstfack, Inredningsarkitektur & Möbeldesign, 2021. http://urn.kb.se/resolve?urn=urn:nbn:se:konstfack:diva-7822.
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To explore the question of how race and design are related, I have developed a set of analysis strategies, involving props that are investigating objecthood and subjectivity. I use prototyping techniques and sketching in full scale. The design process contains three main investigation packages that ran parallel and was intertwined with each other, and resulted in a staged planetarian habitability (Mbembe, 2020) that communicates how to decolonize the African objects. The objective of this project was to investigate how to make stories about African design as well as identify how an African spatial design practice could unfold. The myth building around race is a successful practice even today. Therefore, it is necessary for each generation to undo these myths. The project resulted in objects and a spatial installation that render tangible, new ideals about modernity and design in relation to race.
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Karim, Haryati Abdul. "Globalisation, 'in-between' identities and shifting values : young multiethnic Malaysians and media consumption." Thesis, Loughborough University, 2010. https://dspace.lboro.ac.uk/2134/8841.
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The aim of this research is to examine the identities of youth from different cultural background in Malaysia that has been formed through consumption of media. The forces of globalisation reportedly have de-centred the self from the core, leading to multiple, fluid and contradictory identities. Individuals have been displaced from their backgrounds, and have emerged as individuals, in contrast to past collective identities. People are self-reflexive in constructing their sense of self, with the media playing a role in nurturing one s quest for self-identity (Thompson, 1995). This issue is of particular relevance to young Malaysians. Within this locality, young people s lives are deeply embedded in the collectivities of ethnicity, religion and national identity. At the same time, Malaysia has adopted an open economic market. The de-regulation of Malaysia s broadcasting services enables a mass penetration of the global media to influence young Malaysians. This study is interested in examining how these conditions have affected young Malaysians identities through media consumption. While other studies have explored identity through the consumption of the global media by local audiences, such studies have focused on hybridised cultural practices. This study takes into account de-centred identities by examining shifts in values among different ethnicities, as reflected in consumption of global and local television programmes, differentiating this from previous research works. This study draws on Giddens (1990) concept of reflexivity in examining this issue. This study found that the global media plays a significant role in young Malaysians questioning tradition against modernity. They admire life outside Malaysia, and view it as more modern and liberating, compared to the perceived closed life of Malaysian culture. Yet, this does not conclusively show that young Malaysians have completely abandoned local cultures and values. Rather, it shows they can fully adopt values they admire into their lives while continuing to live within the bounds of their parents and community. Young Malaysians have appropriated the various forms of global cultures derived from media consumption as a means of forging their sense of self, which articulates a need to project an individual self rather than emerging from their collectivity. Although religion and ethnicity remain important in their lives, these young people do not see themselves solely restricted by these identity markers alone. Their cultural identity contains characteristics of other global cultures as well. It is an intersection of various forms of identities, negotiated between religion and ethnicity within global youth cultures, diaspora, gender, lifestyles and taste. Young Malaysians can best be described as having in-between identities - global - local subjects borne out of the hybridisation of values from both sources. Ethnic minority Malaysians display two identities, due to their consumption of international programmes. First, overseas Chinese and Tamil television programmes enable youth to hybridise their youth identity into Western-Asian popular youth cultures instead of drawing solely from one or the other. Second, this type of exposure leads young Malaysian-Chinese to have feelings of cultural superiority over the local Malay films and drama.
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Santos, Eduardo Antonio Estevam. "Luiz Gama, um intelectual diaspórico: intelectualidade, relações étnico-raciais e produção cultural na modernidade paulistana (1830-1882)." Pontifícia Universidade Católica de São Paulo, 2014. https://tede2.pucsp.br/handle/handle/12825.
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This academic paper interprets and analyzes the trajectory and cultural production of the poet, journalist, mason, abolitionist, lawyer ("rábula") and political leader Luiz Gama. The city of São Paulo was the space for his accomplishments, quintessential place for the emergence of his political and diasporic identity, to his legal struggles on behalf of enslaved and the stage for the emergence of liberal-republican positions wich, to Gama, Gama, were inseparable from slave liberation. We prioritize, in the analysis of their narratives, how Luiz Gama used race, identity, modernity and memory of slavery to mediate the social reality of São Paulo and ethno-racial relations. Under the analytical perspective of cultural studies and postcolonial criticism, we seek to find Luiz Gama in frames of an intellectuality formed beyond the national space
Este trabalho acadêmico interpreta e analisa a trajetória e produção cultural do poeta, jornalista, maçom, abolicionista, advogado (rábula) e líder político Luiz Gama. A cidade de São Paulo foi o espaço de suas realizações, lugar por excelência para o surgimento de sua identidade política diaspórica, para os seus embates jurídicos em favor do escravizado e palco para o surgimento de posições liberal-republicanas que, para Gama, eram indissociáveis da libertação escrava. Priorizamos, nas análises de suas narrativas, o modo como Luiz Gama usava a raça, a identidade, a modernidade e a memória da escravidão para mediar a realidade social paulistana e as relações étnicoraciais. Sob a perspectiva analítica dos estudos culturais e da crítica póscolonial, procuramos localizar Luiz Gama nos quadros de uma intelectualidade formada além do espaço nacional
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An, Ji-yoon. "Family pictures : representations of the family in contemporary Korean cinema." Thesis, University of Cambridge, 2017. https://www.repository.cam.ac.uk/handle/1810/268018.
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The family has always been a central narrative theme in cinema. Korean cinema has been no exception, where the family has proved to be a popular subject since its earliest days. Yet Western scholarship on Korean cinema has given little attention to this dominant theme, preferring to concentrate on the film industry's recent revival and its blockbusters. Scholarship in Korea and in the Korean language, on the hand, has continuously discussed some of the major cinematic works on the family. However, such literature has tended to be in the form of articles discussing one or two particular works. A comprehensive study of the family in contemporary Korean cinema therefore remains absent both in Korean and in English. This thesis is an attempt to provide such a work, bringing together films on the family and writings on them in both Western and Korean scholarships, as well as filling the gaps where certain trends and patterns have gone undetected. How are the changes in the understanding of the family or in the roles of individual family members reworked, imagined, or desired in films? Taking this question as the starting point of the research, each chapter explores a separate theme: transformations in the structure of the family; faltering patriarchy and fatherhood; motherhood and the extremity of maternal love; and certain children's experiences of the family. The first chapter detects a general move away from the traditional patriarchal nuclear family and an interest in depicting alternative families, exploring shifting family forms in contemporary society and the public discourses surrounding them. The second chapter highlights the contradictory ways that the father has been illustrated in films during and after the IMF crisis. The third chapter explores a branch of recent thrillers that depicts mothers as dark and dangerous characters, offering an interesting cultural framing to the multiple perceptions of the mother figure in contemporary society. Finally, the last chapter aims to extend representations of the 'Korean family' to include films by/about those currently living outside of Korea, namely Korean emigrants and adoptees.
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Smith, Alé Elizabeth. "Re-imagining the past, negotiating the present: the lived diasporic experience in S.J. Naudé and Jaco van Schalkwyk's fiction." Master's thesis, University of Cape Town, 2018. http://hdl.handle.net/11427/28117.
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S.J. Naudé's collection of short stories, The Alphabet of Birds, foregrounds the diasporic experiences of its marginalised, transnational subjects. The stories unearth profound grief and a deep sense of loss and displacement. The title of the collection suggests that the content grapples with issues that are central to the discourse of diaspora: movement, freedom, borders, home, dwelling, meaning, and identity. Jaco van Schalkwyk's debut novel, The Alibi Club, is structured around the story of a young man's efforts to build a new life in an unfamiliar country. Although very different in style, tone, and form, Naudé and Van Schalkwyk both ask questions about the nature of belonging, pain and loss associated with the diasporic experience: How does one come to terms with one's past?; How does one navigate oneself in an increasingly estranging global world?; Is it possible to re-imagine the past, to rewrite the stories one tells about oneself? Naudé and Van Schalkwyk are not the first South Africans to give thought to these questions; in fact, our country has a rich history of pre- and post-apartheid diasporic writings. What I find compelling, however, is how a new generation of authors - a group of writers that faces unique challenges - draws on the literary form to engage with and relate to the past and present, their country of birth, and their language. I consider in what ways the literary form allows these two authors to articulate and re-imagine the lived diasporic experiences of their Afrikaans-speaking, contemporary transnational subjects who inhabit multiple identities.
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Stubbs, Tara M. C. "'Irish by descent' : Marianne Moore, Irish writers and the American-Irish Inheritance." Thesis, University of Oxford, 2008. http://ora.ox.ac.uk/objects/uuid:bf87b5ea-4baa-4a46-9509-2c59e738e2a1.
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Despite having a rather weak family connection to Ireland, the American modernist poet Marianne Moore (1887-1972) described herself in a letter to Ezra Pound in 1919 as ‘Irish by descent’. This thesis relates Moore’s claim of Irish descent to her career as a publisher, poet and playwright, and argues that her decision to shape an Irish inheritance for herself was linked with her self-identification as an American poet. Chapter 1 discusses Moore’s self-confessed susceptibility to ‘Irish magic’ in relation to the increase in contributions from Irish writers during her editorship of The Dial magazine from 1925 to 1929. Moore’s 1915 poems to the Irish writers George Moore, W. B. Yeats and George Bernard Shaw, which reveal a paradoxical desire for affiliation to, and disassociation from, Irish literary traditions, are scrutinized in Chapter 2. Chapters 3a and b discuss Moore’s ‘Irish’ poems ‘Sojourn in the Whale’ (1917) and ‘Spenser’s Ireland’ (1941). In both poems political events in Ireland – the ‘Easter Rising’ of 1916 and Ireland’s policy of neutrality during World War II – become a backdrop for Moore’s personal anxieties as an American poet of ‘Irish’ descent coming to terms with her political and cultural inheritance. Expanding upon previous chapters’ discussion of the interrelation of poetics and politics, Chapter 4 shows how Moore’s use of Irish sources in ‘Spenser’s Ireland’ and other poems including ‘Silence’ and the ‘Student’ reflects her quixotic attitude to Irish culture as alternately an inspiration and a tool for manipulation. The final chapter discusses Moore’s adaptation of the Anglo-Irish novelist Maria Edgeworth’s 1812 novel The Absentee as a play in 1954. Through this last piece of ‘Irish’ writing, Moore adopts a sentimentality that befits the later stages of her career and illustrates how Irish literature, rather than Irish politics, has emerged as her ultimate source of inspiration.
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Raab, Angela R. "Mangled Bodies, Mangled Selves: Hurston, A. Walker and Morrison." Thesis, Connect to resource online, 2008. http://hdl.handle.net/1805/1628.
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Thesis (M.A.)--Indiana University, 2008.Title from screen (viewed on July 1, 2008). Department of English, Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis (IUPUI). Advisor(s): Missy Dehn Kubitschek, Jennifer Thorington Springer, Tom Marvin. Includes vitae. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 109-114).
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Rana, Junaid Akram 1973. "Traffic in the diaspora : Pakistan, modernity and labor migration." 2003. http://hdl.handle.net/2152/12586.
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Rana, Junaid Akram Visweswaran Kamala. "Traffic in the diaspora Pakistan, modernity and labor migration /." 2003. http://wwwlib.umi.com/cr/utexas/fullcit?p3119723.
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Simmons, Marlon. "Politics of Diaspora." Thesis, 2012. http://hdl.handle.net/1807/34923.
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The intention of the study is to come into a better understanding of the way in which the Diasporic body comes to know and understand its subjectivity within the governing contemporary public sphere. I suggest that this knowledge is diverse and that it can assist us to re-conceptualize learning in the context of schooling and education. I am interested in this seemingly mundane thing of ‘blackness’ and the way in which the signifying power of ‘blackness’ has come to constitute the conditions of possibility for the formation of a certain humanism. I trace somewhat abstract historical trajectories in order to better understand how contemporary everyday Diasporic life comes to be classified, organized, self-regulated and inscribed through particular intersections of race by way of gender, ableism, class, and sexuality. I seek to ascertain ways in which race is interpreted as the ‘Truth’ in order to impute the ethic of colonialism onto the Diasporic body.
With this study my interest concerns understanding my lived experiences within the context of Diaspora and about how I come to make sense of race/racism/blackness through the cultural location of the colonial West. I am seeking to understand how, at certain moments, abject bodies of the Diaspora become predisposed to socialize in specific ways through these protean subjectivities. My interest involves coming to know critical pedagogies immanent to African Diasporic spaces that are germane for re-imagining schooling and education. I am interested in the school as a Diasporic space, the pedagogical and instructional implications for the teacher/educator, and about the ways in which meaning is made of Diaspora. I am suggesting writing Diaspora for schooling and education presents alternative ways of making sense of one’s subjectivity, citizenry, identity, about coming to know and understand how belonging, power and privilege come to be inscribed within the governing nation-state.
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Ko, Chia Cian, and 高嘉謙. "Transcendence and Modernity of Han Poetry: a Poetics of Diaspora (1895-1945)." Thesis, 2008. http://ndltd.ncl.edu.tw/handle/59906444238690152373.
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博士國立政治大學
中國文學研究所
96
The present study investigates Chinese diaspora in terms of a particular group of loyalist poets scattering in South China, Taiwan, and Nanyang in late Qing, including Qiu Fengjia, Wang Song, Hong Qisheng, Kang Youwei, Qiu Shuyuan, Xu Nanying and Yu Dafu and discusses transcendence and modernity of their Han poetry. This study deals with the time span from territorial cession of Taiwan in 1895 to Japanese surrender /the end of war in 1945. The discussion starts with the emergence of the first group of loyalists in late Qing in 1895 and closes with Yu Dafu’s missing in Sumatra in 1945. During this period of time, social upheaval due to the transition to a new era and the impact from colonization in Taiwan and westernization in China forced common people as well as intellectuals massively migrated and emigrated. For example, Qiu Fengjia exiled from Taiwan to China during the Japanese colonization and later went to Nanyang. Kang Youwei, Qiu Shuyuan, Xu Nangying and Yu Dafu exiled or moved to Nanyang and the later two even died there. Poets in Taiwan, like Wang Song and Hong Qisheng, considered themselves as emigrants from China. Being deserted and colonized, these poets threw themselves into loyalist writing, intending to construct identity in terms of space and time. Drawing upon such loyalists’ works of Han poetry, this study attempts to sketch out those poets’ mental state as political/ cultural loyalists and the way their Han poetry displayed transcendence and modernity. Having an established tradition as the genre to represent the spirits, morals and emotions of intellectuals, Han poetry was naturally chosen by intellectuals to use when they endeavored to depict historical changes and the collapse of a dynasty. Han poetry thus in turn manifested itself as an epitome of diaspora and the loyalists’ state of mind during that period of time. In addition, after Yiwei and Xinhai political upheavals, the emigration formed intriguing paths of disseminating culture and literature. In this context, Han poetry turned out to serve as an important literary form and space, by which we are able to interpret and discuss modernity.
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Osinubi, Taiwo Adetunji. "Argonauts of the black Atlantic : representing slavery, modernity, and the colonising moment." Thesis, 2005. http://hdl.handle.net/2429/18222.
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This dissertation is a comparative analysis of the uses of tropes of marginality in
American, Caribbean, British, and African fiction that engages with the aftermaths of the
trans-Atlantic slave trade and slavery. This study begins by exploring the utility of the
frame of Paul Gilroy's concept of the "black Atlantic" as a heuristic model for
understanding encounters with slavery and the slave trade as phases of an emerging
capitalist modernity. I suggest that, within this heuristic framework, marginality is
always variable, contingent and changing. Several positions of marginality might even
emerge in conflict with each other, since the ideological deployments of slavery in the
U.S., the Caribbean, and in African countries are not always in concert. In fact, it is
through the study of conflicts and tensions between such seemingly unified marginalities
that their differences become discernible. As a result, the common theme in the texts I
examine is the need to create communities of listeners who can discern the
transformations of the colonising moment in the disparate sites of the diaspora. The
practice of listening is a step in apprehending the forms of marginalisation and occlusions
of the violence of colonisation that continue at different sites.
In the five chapters of this dissertation, I read stories by Edgar Allan Poe and
Herman Melville, and novels by Richard Wright, Toni Morrison, Caryl Phillips, Maryse
Conde, Joseph Conrad, Ayi Kwei Armah, Amos Tutuola, Yaw Boateng, and Syl Cheney-
Coker. I focus, particularly, on the use of animals, spatial boundaries, literacy, orality,
and tropes of listening in the selected texts. I show that these authors use the opposition
of visual and aural metaphors to draw attention to the limits of their characters'
knowledge in order to highlight the situatedness of each character in processes of
marginalisation that continue to unfold. Further, as much as these narratives excavate the
afterlives of slavery, they are also engaged in the task of differentiating them in order to
identify the necessary site-specific tasks of reparation or repair.Arts, Faculty of
English, Department of
Graduate
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Castro, Silvia Regina Lorenso. "De ruas, bodegas e bares: um contínuum Africano em poéticas transaltânticas periféricas - San Juan, Nova York e São Paulo." Thesis, 2013. http://hdl.handle.net/2152/29153.
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This dissertation establishes a transatlantic connection between Brazil, the United States and the Caribbean through the discussion of two contemporary literary movements: Sarau da Cooperifa, in São Paulo, and Nuyorican poetry, from the Puerto Rican poets living in New York City. Although these places share significant differences in terms of colonial and postcolonial history, they share similar experiences in terms of race and class representations. From similar oppressive realities, I argue that they also build similar strategies of resistance and urban discourse. By carrying a secondary citizenship status, Nuyorican poets and poets from the Brazilian periphery find in creative writing ways to reinvent themselves as subjects of their own history, a story written and reinvented in the streets, in the street corners, in barber shops, in the back yard, in bars and pubs. They take the street as epistemological locus in order to expand the concept of political intervention, be it while celebrating life or ritualizing death. In this sense, the street is the site for unrestricted access to poetry, and poetry is the element that fits these subjects in the history of the city. The work of Sergio Vaz, Ferrez, Allan da Rosa, Elizandra Souza, Willie Perdomo, Victor Hernandez Cruz, Miguel Algarín, Miguel Piñero and Sandra Maria Esteves is read through the lenses of African Diaspora theories and its relation to literary criticism, anthropology, history, discourse analysis, Black feminist theory and Latino studies. I share Edouard Glissant’s understanding that the Africans, who were forced to come to the Americas and the Caribbean upon slavery, did not bring only their body. They also brought with their body a worldview, a way of dealing with adversity, an epistemological understanding that has allowed them to outlive the physical death by overcoming the imputation of social death. Thus, this dissertation argues that cultural production is a political production, and that it has been used by racialized and impoverished minority individuals and groups across the globe as strategic tool in the struggle against oppression.text
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chen, hsiu-yuan, and 陳秀媛. "Boundary-Spacing of Diaspoea in the City of Modernity." Thesis, 2003. http://ndltd.ncl.edu.tw/handle/58864294182612468951.
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碩士國立清華大學
外國語文學系
91
This thesis explores the diasporic issues that embody a broadly conceived theme─the relation between diaspora, space, city,and modernity─in In the Skin of a Lion. My research builds on the radical possibility of opening the bounded spaces socially and spatially. From this perspective, I focus on the spatial practices of the displaced immigrants in which the processes of reproducing social identity and the bounded spaces are analyzed. This thesis inquires into the many divergent perceptions of the diaspora with its relevant representations of the spatial embodiment, the reproduction of social spaces, and the dynamic expression of modernity. My study places a high premium on the ideas of the hybrid geography and the alternative urban reality crystallized through the process of negotiating cultural differences of the diasporas. In the light of the diaspora theories on space and identity, I analyze In the Skin of a Lion as a cardinal representation of the hybrid urban reality and the creativity of the diaspora spaces with the photographic approach. By reading the diasporic histories as the experiences of modernity, this research underlines the representations of a multiple viewpoints rendered by the movements of the diasporas and the practices of spatial interpenetrations. Based on the relation between the diasporic issues and the spatial expression, I conclude that this novel excavates the alternative reality of the displaced immigrants and the city enlightened by a revisionary knowledge of Others.
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Nagayama, Chikako. "Fantasy of Empire: Ri Kōran, Subject Positioning and the Cinematic Contruction of Space." Thesis, 2009. http://hdl.handle.net/1807/19156.
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This thesis emerged from my emotional, tactile, and intellectual access to the actress, Yamaguchi Yoshiko (a.k.a. Ri Kōran or Li Xianglan), who embodied the cultural hybridity of Manchuria and represented a ‘modern girl’ on screen. I analyze four wartime melodrama-adventure films, in which she co-starred with Japanese actors: Song of the White Orchid (Byakuran no uta, 1939), China Nights (Shina no Yoru, 1940), Vow in the Desert (Nessa no chikai, 1940), and Suzhou Nights (Soshū no yoru, 1941).
The formation of domesticity played an integral part in the making of modern nation-states. Intertexualizing with the discursive formation of the ie (house/family) between the mid 19th and mid 20th centuries, I first demonstrate that Japanese film subjects are made to embody the imagined Imperial nation through gendered performances in Song of the White Orchid. The interior and exterior are constructed to mirror the notion of imperial nation and the Asian ‘other’.
Next, I extend the analytical framework to the three films, China Nights, Vow in the Desert, and Suzhou Nights, which employ films’ specific locations for different operations of gendered and ethnicized positioning. I also pay attention to some of the climaxes, which unconventionally present psychological dramas outdoors and action scenes indoors. Especially, my interest in this part of analysis is in interrelating metaphors of bodily boundary and national border. As delineating the signification of body and nation, I situate the relay of the gaze in the simultaneous blurring of bodily boundary and national communities that coincides with melodramatic highlights located outdoors.
In order to shape a Japanese imperial subject, the films symbolically negotiate with three levels of power dynamics: the establishment of a national identity, the mimicry of the West, and the significance of China in Japanese imperial modernity. The delineation of cinematic space and subject positioning in Ri Kōran’s films reveals that Chinese, Japanese and the West are constituted as shifting positions that respectively represent past/obstructions, present/a mobile agency, and future/the envisioned goal. Ri Kōran attracts spectators’ gaze and mediates multiple locations to identify with, while Japanese male protagonists embody the gaze by making his corporeality absent.
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(8850251), Ghaleb Alomaish. "“DOUBLE REFRACTION”: IMAGE PROJECTION AND PERCEPTION IN SAUDI-AMERICAN CONTEXTS: A COMPARATIVE STUDY." Thesis, 2020.
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This dissertation aims to create a scholarly space where a seventy-five-year-old “special relationship” (1945-2020) between the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia and the United States is examined from an interdisciplinary comparativist perspective. I posit that a comparative study of Saudi and American fiction goes beyond the limitedness of global geopolitics and proves to uncover some new literary, sociocultural, and historical dimensions of this long history, while shedding some light on others. Saudi writers creatively challenge the inherently static and monolithic image of Saudi Arabia, its culture and people in the West. They also simultaneously unsettle the notion of homogeneity and enable us to gain new insight into self-perception within the local Saudi context by offering a wide scope of genuine engagements with distinctive themes ranging from spatiality, identity, ethnicity, and gender to slavery, religiosity and (post)modernity. On the other side, American authors still show some signs of ambivalence towards the depiction of the Saudi (Muslim/Arab) Other, but they nonetheless also demonstrate serious effort to emancipate their representations from the confining legacy of (neo)Orientalist discourse and oil politics by tackling the concepts of race, alterity, hegemony, radicalism, nomadism and (un)belonging.