Dissertations / Theses on the topic 'North-American discourse'

It is widely acknowledged that mass media play a central role in circulating and disseminating ideas. Particularly in this globalised era, it is becoming increasingly difficult to ignore the role and impact of news media in shaping public opinion worldwide. During the attacks on New York in September 2001, for instance, CNN - the American cable news network - broadcast across the world twenty-four hours, and most of its reports were translated, or interpreted, into other languages, to be aired in other countries in real time. Most people are thus exposed to extensive reporting every day, but they are not necessarily aware that each news institution promotes, or, at least tries to construct, a particular media discourse according to its political or social orientation. Because of the complexity of mass media discourses, however, it is difficult to demonstrate how the language used participates in constructing and disseminating certain ideologies, or to challenge stereotypes and power relationships. This explains why media, news, political and institutional texts are preferred genres for critical discourse analysts. The extensive body of literature on news media discourses and their impact which draws on critical discourse analysis includes Van Dijk (1988), Fairclough (1995b), Al-Hejin (2007), Kim S (2008), among many others. Translation is a major variable that influences the circulation of ideas and ideologies, and translational choices can participate in provoking (or diffusing) political conflict. At the same time, translation may also challenge dominant discourses. Baker (1996: 14) acknowledges the power of translation, arguing that translation and the study of translation have been used as a "weapon in fighting colonialism, sexism, racism, and so on". And yet, most research on news discourse has so far tended to examine monolingual texts, rather than multilingual texts, including translations, despite the fact that numerous news reports are translated from one language into another on a regular basis. Critical approaches to language study have occasionally been used to investigate translation, in order "to reveal how translation is shaped by ideologies and in this way contributes to the perpetuation or subversion of particular discourses" (Olk 2002: 101), but such studies have remained restricted in scope. Drawing on corpus-based methodology and critical discourse analysis, this study examines US and South Korean news stories published in mainstream media with a view to identifying specific discursive practices relating to North Korea and how they are mediated in translation. The study attempts to analyse the relationship between textual features and practices specific to each news outlet. The corpus for this study consists of two separate sub-corpora, designed and compiled according to the same criteria and specifications: one made up of news texts originally written in English, and the other consisting of translated texts which include English source texts and the target texts translated from English into Korean. The texts are drawn from Newsweek/Newsweek Hangukpan and CNN/CNN Hanguel News. It is hoped that this study will enhance our understanding of some of the ways in which particular media discourses are constructed, disseminated and mediated via translation.

La tesis doctoral que aquí se presenta se podría enmarcar dentro de tres campos lingüísticos: el análisis de género, la retórica contrastiva y el análisis de corpus.<br/>El análisis de género (Swales 1981, 1990; Dudley-Evans & Henderson 1990a, 1990b; Henderson & Hewings 1990; Bathia 1993, 2002; Skulstad 1996, 2002; Flowerdew 1994, 2002) es un parte dentro del amplio campo de análisis del discurso (Barber 1962; Halliday, Strevens & McIntosh 1964). En este estudio nos centramos en el estudio de la clase magistral dentro de los denominados géneros académicos en el aula (Fortanet 2004b). La clase magistral es un género hablado y como tal posee ciertas peculiaridades de los géneros hablados en contraposición a los géneros académicos escritos.<br/>Nuestro estudio se centra en la comparación y contraste de dos lenguas, el español peninsular y el inglés americano, ya que como corpus se utilizan clases magistrales españolas y norte-americanas y en consecuencia se toman como referencia estudios de retórica contrastiva. En este estudio nos centramos en un aspecto concreto del lenguaje, los marcadores discursivos. Con el análisis de los marcadores discursivos en el lenguaje académico hablado en español e inglés norte-americano pretendemos ver como se usan los marcadores discursivos para favorecer a hablantes nativos y no nativos de español e inglés en el espacio de educación superior.

For the past 30 years, a feminist spirituality movement has been developing in North America. Variously called Goddess Worship, Goddess spirituality, or Women's spirituality, it derives in part from Neo-paganism and Contemporary Witchcraft, on the one side, and feminist liberation theology on the other. Continuing the questioning begun by Simone de Beauvoir on female self and other, on gender and its construction, and on the merits of a morality of indeterminacy, this ethnography of a community of like minded women who participate together in devotional circles to the Goddess in and around Ottawa, Ontario, Canada focuses on the ritual, textual and iconological means by which these women come to an embodied relationship with the divine apprehended as female. By deconstructing the actions, the words, and the images of the human body, as the locus of contact with the divine, and the divine body as the central cosmological metaphor of this spirituality produced and used by these women, the ritual and ethical discourses on identity, power and agency built around them are made evident. Compared and contrasted, they then are studied as charters for the construction of the self and community.

This thesis investigates the two major conflicting modes of interpretation applied to Mo Yan’s literary texts diachronically and synchronically in order to reveal both the aesthetic imperative and the liberating force of the British and North American literary centers in receiving literature from the periphery. After an introduction to the centers’ disparate responses to the paradigmatic shift of the local Chinese literary trend in the 1980s, the thesis continues with a theoretical discussion on reader-response theory and the uneven power relations between the literary center and the periphery. Jauss’s concept of horizon of expectation and Fish’s interpretive community are adopted to stress openness in interpretation while Casanova’s conceptualization of the world republic of letters provides the framework to study the competition among interpretive communities for the legitimacy of their respective interpretation. The study of the press reception of Mo Yan focuses on the ongoing shift of horizon of expectation from the dominating political and representational mode of interpretation to one that stresses the literary and fictional nature of literature. The study shows that the imperative in the reception of Mo Yan is the extension of the Western cultural hegemony sustained by an Orientalist dichotomy. The academic promotion in the public sphere, however, shows critics’ effort to subvert such domination by suggesting an alternative mode that brings the Chinese literary context to bear on the interpretation. In addition to this, Mo Yan’s strategic negotiation with the dominating mode of reception is analysed in my close reading of POW!. At the end of the thesis, I call for general readers to raise the awareness of the hegemonic tendency of any prevailing mode of interpretation. By asserting a certain distance, readers enable the openness in interpretation and hence possible communication among different communities.

This thesis examines the use of interior narrative techniques such as free indirect discourse and internal monologue in two of James McBride’s neo-slave narratives, Song Yet Sung (2008) and The Good Lord Bird (2013). Very limited critical attention has been given to these neo-slave narratives that illustrate McBrides attention to characterization and focalized narration. In these narratives McBride builds upon the revelations he explores in his bestselling memoir, The Color of Water (1996, 2006), where he learns to disassociate race and character. What he discovers about not only his mother, but also himself, inspires his re-imagination of the people who lived during the antebellum period. His use of interior narrative techniques deviates from his peers’ conventional approach to the neo-slave narrative. His exploration of the psyche demonstrates a focalized attention to the individual, rather than a characterization of the community, which is typically portrayed in neo-slave narratives. In conclusion, this thesis argues that James McBride’s neo-slave narratives reveal his interest in deconstructing the hierarchal positioning of whites and blacks during the antebellum period in order to communicate that although African Americans were the intended victims, slave masters and mistresses were oppressed by the ideologies of slavery as well.

Orientador: Tullo Vigevani<br>Banca: Nizar Mesari<br>Banca: Mamede Mustafa Jarouche<br>O Programa de Pós-Graduação em Relações Internacionais é instituído em parceria com a Unesp/Unicamp/PUC-SP, em projeto subsidiado pela CAPES, intitulado "Programa San Tiago Dantas".<br>Resumo: O discurso norte-americano (governo Bush) a respeito da reforma democrática nos territórios palestinos autônomos - Faixa de Gaza e Cisjordânia - identifica a ausência da democracia como uma das causas centrais no impedimento à paz entre palestinos e israelenses. Nesta perspectiva, os Estados Unidos colocam como condição primária ao seu auxílio na constituição do Estado Palestino, a realização de reformas democráticas. Esta pesquisa problematiza os fundamentos deste discurso a partir de uma análise das origens do conflito palestino-israelense e de suas principais implicações para a comunidade palestina. A partir daí, fazemos um contraste entre os "diagnósticos" acerca do conflito apresentados pelos Estado Unidos e as reais condições sócio-econômicas e políticas dos territórios palestinos, evidenciando os principais impedimentos à constituição do Estado Palestino e ao equacionamento do conflito.<br>Abstract: The north-american discourse (Bush government) related to democratic reform in the Palestinian Territories - Gaza Strip and West Bank - identifies the lack of democracy as one of the main causes that obstructs peace between Palestinians and Israelis. In this way, United States, establish as the basic condition in their support in the construction of the Palestinian State, the implementation of democratic reforms. This research analyses the foundations of this discourse by an analysis of the roots of the israeli-palestinian conflict and their main implications to Palestinian community. From that, we do a contrast between the north-american diagnostic about the conflict and the real social-economic and politics conditions of the Palestinian Territories, emphasizing the principal obstacles to the construction of the Palestinian State and to the conflict resolution.<br>Mestre

Made available in DSpace on 2014-06-11T19:29:14Z (GMT). No. of bitstreams: 0 Previous issue date: 2006-06Bitstream added on 2014-06-13T19:07:18Z : No. of bitstreams: 1 silva_apm_me_mar.pdf: 1002714 bytes, checksum: 30b20f4c9ac2422cdf0ecbd31456274e (MD5)<br>O discurso norte-americano (governo Bush) a respeito da reforma democrática nos territórios palestinos autônomos - Faixa de Gaza e Cisjordânia - identifica a ausência da democracia como uma das causas centrais no impedimento à paz entre palestinos e israelenses. Nesta perspectiva, os Estados Unidos colocam como condição primária ao seu auxílio na constituição do Estado Palestino, a realização de reformas democráticas. Esta pesquisa problematiza os fundamentos deste discurso a partir de uma análise das origens do conflito palestino-israelense e de suas principais implicações para a comunidade palestina. A partir daí, fazemos um contraste entre os diagnósticos acerca do conflito apresentados pelos Estado Unidos e as reais condições sócio-econômicas e políticas dos territórios palestinos, evidenciando os principais impedimentos à constituição do Estado Palestino e ao equacionamento do conflito.<br>The north-american discourse (Bush government) related to democratic reform in the Palestinian Territories - Gaza Strip and West Bank - identifies the lack of democracy as one of the main causes that obstructs peace between Palestinians and Israelis. In this way, United States, establish as the basic condition in their support in the construction of the Palestinian State, the implementation of democratic reforms. This research analyses the foundations of this discourse by an analysis of the roots of the israeli-palestinian conflict and their main implications to Palestinian community. From that, we do a contrast between the north-american diagnostic about the conflict and the real social-economic and politics conditions of the Palestinian Territories, emphasizing the principal obstacles to the construction of the Palestinian State and to the conflict resolution.

A culinária é um traço cultural muito forte e distintivo dos hábitos e feições de um povo, de uma sociedade ou mesmo de uma nação e estudos recentes sugeriram que essa atividade implica grandes desafios para os tradutores. Sabe-se que a tradução não é uma atividade neutra, uma vez que, além de preferências individuais, o tradutor transfere escolhas ideológicas para os textos que produzem. O objetivo desta pesquisa é analisar como o tema culinária brasileira tem sido abordado na sociedade norte-americana, comparando frequências e padrões colocacionais dos itens lexicais mais recorrentes em livros escritos por brasileiros àqueles escritos por norte-americanos. Para tanto, foi compilado um corpus de estudo comparável a partir de oito livros de receitas brasileiras publicados em língua inglesa e quatro livros de culinária brasileira publicados em português. Esse corpus foi dividido em dois subcorpora: um subcorpus receitas e um subcorpus textos informativos. O subcorpus receitas fornece subsídios para identificar os ingredientes e pratos relacionados como tipicamente brasileiros pelos norteamericanos, sendo possível, após essa identificação, compará-los ao que é publicado no Brasil. O subcorpus textos informativos é base para a análise do discurso do norte-americano em relação ao Brasil e ao povo brasileiro. A análise do corpus foi feita de maneira semi-automática, com ajuda da ferramenta computacional WordSmith Tools 5.0. A análise quantitativa dos dados precedeu a análise qualitativa, manual, do corpus de estudo. Diferenças significativas foram observadas nos dois idiomas. Os autores norte-americanos tendem a associar a culinária brasileira à culinária nordestina, principalmente à baiana. Também foi possível observar que dão preferência a receitas familiares e cujos ingredientes são mais facilmente encontrados nos Estados Unidos. Pela análise dos livros de receitas, ainda foi possível delinear certa imagem construída do brasileiro. Estereotipada, essa imagem pautou-se por características como: festeiro, místico, exótico e adepto de hábitos alimentares pouco saudáveis. Além disso, a culinária brasileira é vista como essencialmente caseira, restrita às residências, e os autores norte-americanos não costumam distinguir termos e aspectos próprios da cultura brasileira dos de outros países da América Latina. A metodologia baseada em corpus mostrou-se adequada e eficiente na identificação de padrões lexicais recorrentes, de uma forma mais prática e confiável do que seria possível a partir de uma leitura sequencial de textos individuais.<br>Culinary is a very strong cultural feature of a people, a society and even a nation, and recent studies have shown that it poses major challenges to translators. Taking into consideration that translation is not a neutral activity, since translators tend to transfer their ideological choices to the texts they produce, this research aims to investigate how Brazilian cuisine has been portrayed in North-American society. Our primary purpose is to compare the frequencies and collocational patterns of the most frequent lexical items in American and Brazilian cookbooks. In order to be able to do this, a comparable study corpus was compiled from eight Brazilian cookbooks published in English and four Brazilian cookbooks published in Portuguese. This corpus consists of two subcorpora: one made up of recipes and the other of informational texts. The recipes\' subcorpus has been compiled to enable the retrieval of ingredients and dishes which Americans would regard as typical Brazilian cooking and compare them to what is published in Brazil. The subcorpus \'informational texts\' serves as an input for the analysis of the discourse of Americans in relation to Brazil and Brazilian people. The analysis was carried out semi-automatically, by means of the software package WordSmith Tools 5.0, focusing on the quantitative as well as qualitative aspects of the data. Relevant differences were found between the books in the two languages. Firstly, North-American authors tend to associate Brazilian cuisine to dishes from the northeast of Brazil, mainly from Bahia. It was also found that North-Americans prefer recipes which are familiar to them and whose ingredients are more easily found in the United States. The analysis of the North-American discourse pointed to a stereotypical image of Brazilians, who are seen as revelers, mystic and, with unhealthy eating habits. In addition, Brazilian cuisine is mostly viewed as homemade and North-Americans do not seem to distinguish terms which are specific of the Brazilian culture from those of other Latin American countries. All in all, the corpus based methodology proposed here has proved to be adequate and reliable for identifying recurring textual patterns in a way that would not have been possible by sequential reading of individual texts.

The term “feminist” is a widely used label that is often embraced by women who do not advocate feminism. The wide use of the feminist label in contrast to the declining presence of feminist activism indicates a problem with the development of a third wave of feminism in the United States. In this study, I evaluated trends in feminism in the United States through an analysis of public political discourse. A semantic discourse analysis of political discourse from 1870 to 2011 evaluated a shift in the use of inclusive and exclusive pronoun usage by female political speakers. Speeches compiled for this study were obtained from internet sources such as NPR, C-Span and CNN, and evaluated the oratory of Victoria Woodhull, Geraldine Ferraro, Hillary Clinton, Sarah Palin and Michelle Bachmann. The results of this study indicated that there was not a strong shift in the use of inclusive and exclusive pronouns overtime, but there was a large growth in both population and diversity of the targeted audience, and this growth was often not accommodated for in the discourse of contemporary female political candidates. The slow shift in inclusive discourse indicated a post-feminist line of thought that questioned the validity of an argument for a third wave of feminist activism in the United States. Political discourse cannot define a cause for post-feminism, but can indicate a downward trend in the influence of feminism as a contemporary cultural movement.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Oregon, 2004.<br>Typescript. Includes vita and abstract. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 362-381). Also available for download via the World Wide Web; free to University of Oregon users.

This paper uses Paul Ricoeur's distinction between language and discourse to help define a North American research agenda in knowledge organization. Ricoeur's concept of discourse as a set of utterances, defined within multiple disciplines and domains, and reducible, not to the word but to the sentence, provides three useful tools for defining our research. First, it enables us to recognize the important contribution of numerous studies that focus on acts of organization, rather than on standards or tools of organization. Second, it gives us a harmonious paradigm that helps us reconcile the competing demands of interoperability, based on widely-used tools and techniques of library science, and domain integrity, based on user warrant and an understanding of local context. Finally, it resonates with the current economic, political and social climate in which our information systems work, particularly the competing calls for protectionism and globalization.

The Discourse of Embodiment in the Nineteenth-Century British and North American Sign Language Debates examines the transatlantic cultural reception of deafness and signed languages to determine why a largely successful nineteenth-century movement known as Oralism advocated the eradication of signed languages. The dissertation answers this question through exploring a range of texts including fiction by Charles Dickens and Wilkie Collins, Oralist texts by Alexander Graham Bell and Thomas Arnold, and deaf resistance texts including poetry and proposals to establish Deaf settlements. I argue that Oralists – and a wider Victorian culture – believed that signed languages were inferior to spoken and written languages because they believed that signed languages were more embodied than these other modes of language. This charge of embodiedness produced negative constructions of signed languages as more concrete, iconic, and primitive than speech and writing. In chapter one, I examine poetry written by deaf people in order to uncover the phonocentrism that underscored both Oralism and the dominant nineteenth-century construction of the importance of aural and oral sound to poetry. In chapter two, I consider the relationship between the sign language debates and the debates around evolution in order to argue that both sides of the evolutionary debate were invested in making deaf people speak. In chapter three, I consider Wilkie Collins’s depiction of a deaf heroine in his novel Hide and Seek. I argue that Collins’s desire to make his heroine speak through her body rather than sign points to the difficulties of representing a signing deaf person within the conventions of the Victorian novel. Finally, chapter four focuses on the rhetoric around deaf intermarriage and community as it arose in the eugenicist turn taken by Oralism. Using a variety of theoretical approaches including Deaf and Disability Studies, post-structuralist understandings of language, and animal studies, I examine how cultural constructions of deafness and signed languages reveal nineteenth-century anxieties about the nature of language, the meaning of bodily difference, and the definition of the human in the post-Darwinian era.<br>Thesis (Ph.D, English) -- Queen's University, 2008-09-23 17:20:59.793

There is an ongoing crisis between Ugandan and North American United Methodists related to global missional partnerships and the financial ethics of international donor funds. For nearly a decade, these two parties worked together around the themes of global partnerships in mission and ministry. Today, these relationships are broken and communication has been severely impacted due to allegations of mismanaged funds on the episcopal level in East Africa. After reviewing existing literature focused on communication, moral decision-making, conflict resolution, and cultural and intercultural competency from both western and African perspectives, I invited two theological resources into a conversation. As parties involved in conflict address problems of communication and moral decision-making, the deeper issues of cultural and intercultural awareness can be examined. This research intentionally took a small step toward the larger goal of conflict forming a new theological resource for shared coherent moral discourse.

<p>This dissertation examines Charles Darwin’s major texts together with literary works by turn-of the-century American women writers—Nella Larsen, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, and Kate Chopin—in order to trace how evolutionary theory shaped transatlantic cultural ideas of race, particularly black identity, and gender. I focus on the concept of “descent” as the overarching theme organizing categories of the human in evolutionary terms. My perspective and methods—examining race and gender from a black feminist perspective that draws on biopolitics theory, as well as using close reading, affect theory, and attention to narrative in my textual analysis—comprise my argument’s framework. By bringing these perspectives and methods together in my attention to the interplay between Darwinian discourse and American literature, I shed new light on the turn-of-the-century transatlantic exchange between science and culture. Throughout this dissertation, I argue that descent constitutes a central concept and point of tension in evolutionary theory’s inscription of life’s development. I also show how themes of human-animal kinship, the Western binary of rationality and materiality, and reproduction and maternity circulated within this discourse. I contribute to scholarly work relating evolutionist discourse to literature by focusing on American literature: in the context of turn-of-the-century American anxieties about racial and gender hierarchies, the evolutionist paradigm’s configurations of human difference were especially consequential. Moreover, Larsen, Gilman, and Chopin offer responses that reveal this hierarchy’s varied effects on racialized and gendered bodies. I thus demonstrate the significance of examining Darwinian discourse alongside American literature by women writers, an association in need of deeper scholarly attention, especially from a feminist, theoretical perspective. </p><p>This dissertation begins with my application of literary analysis and close reading to Darwin’s major texts in order to uncover how they formed a suggestive foundation for late nineteenth- to early twentieth-century ideologies of race and gender. I use this analysis as the background for my investigation of Larsen’s, Gilman’s, and Chopin’s literary texts. In Chapter 1, I conduct a close reading of Darwin’s articulation of natural selection in <i>The Origin of Species</i>and focus on how Darwin’s syntactical and narrative structure imply evolution as an agential force aimed at linear progress. In Chapter 2, I analyze Darwin’s articulation of the development of race and gender differences in <i>The Descent of Man</i>, as well as Thomas Henry Huxley’s <i>Evidence as to Man’s Place in Nature</i>, and argue that Darwin’s and Huxley’s accounts suggest how anxiety over animal-human kinship was alleviated through structuring nonwhite races and women as less developed and hence inferior. In Chapter 3, I argue that Larsen’s novel <i>Quicksand </i>interrogates and complicates aesthetic primitivism and biopolitical racism and sexism, both rooted in evolutionist discourses. Finally, in Chapter 4, I focus on Gilman’s utopian novel <i>Herland</i>and select short stories by Chopin. While Gilman unambiguously advocates for a desexualized white matriarchy, Chopin’s stories waver between support for, and critique of, racial hierarchy. Reading these authors together against the backdrop of white masculine evolutionist theory reveals how this theory roots women as materially bound reproducers of racial hierarchy.</p>

This dissertation research examines expressions and articulations of counter-hegemonic discourses on the part of Muslim, Arab, South Asian, and Middle-Eastern women in the U.S. and Canada, with a particular attention to race and gender. As they are predominantly constructed as passive and imperilled in mainstream media, this doctoral work looks at how some of these women take voice and ‘talk back’ by creating their own media texts. The methodology involves a selection of the following case studies: (1) the poetry and performances of Suheir Hammad; (2) the cinematic interventions of Annemarie Jacir (Salt of This Sea); (3) the cinematic interventions of Shirin Neshat (Women Without Men); and (4) the films and the television comedy (Little Mosque on the Prairie) created by Zarqa Nawaz. These case studies were selected because they constitute long-term interventions to alter the dominant media sphere and on the basis of their popularity – they benefit from a wide reach within particular ‘interpretive communities.’ This dissertation includes a textual analysis focusing on the use of language and imagery deployed by these artists in their various productions. The analysis is supplemented with individual interviews with the artists involved. Additionally, the research includes a performance analysis since some of the case examples involve an embodied performance of an alternative discourse. The selected artists are here defined as “identity workers,” rather than the more common phrase “cultural workers,” for the purpose of signalling that the circulated works not only relate to culture, but also endeavour to provide alternative portrayals of identity. My central argument is that these works are constitutive of a discourse of resistance. This thesis posits resistance as being counter-hegemonic. It demonstrates how these representations signify a re-articulation of identity and a call for a redistribution of symbolic power. It also situates these acts of talking back as constructed ‘mad’ speech based on the argument that hegemonic culture often attempts to construct a particular type of speech as mad in order to contain it while this type of talk is not always literally insane. Further, the works analyzed in this thesis can be understood as making ‘noise.’ I conceptualize noise as a counter-hegemonic language that disturbs the tranquility of the status quo and that celebrates difference. In making noise, the selected identity workers described in my case studies deploy a variety of discursive tactics as interventions. Most notably, they engage in discursive practices of re-writing historical narratives, revalorizing native languages, activating collective heritages, and deploying resignification and reversal. These interventions additionally archive erased stories. Moreover, these texts significantly re-center gender – by referencing the workings of patriarchy, positing women heroines at the center of their narratives, or portraying lead female and feminist characters. The results of this analysis reveal that these works are subjected to attempts of containment and appropriation. In effect, the very popularity of these works endows each artist with increased latitude to stage interventions but also dilutes their intended oppositional messages through circulation and cooptation within traditional and new media. This study also demonstrates that the selected artists have been surprisingly burdened with representation.

<p>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.</p>