1,721,012 research outputs found
Generic ideologies: The intersection of empire, the epic and the novel in French West African and Latin literatures.
No full textThis dissertation explores how a combination of the epic and novel genres in primary texts is able to create a formal critique of empire. Through genres' ties to imperial ideologies and an examination of the function of orality in primary texts from Francophone West Africa and 1st and 2nd century Rome, I locate how texts subvert dominant imperial ideologies in order to create alternate interpretive communities that critique empire. In the Francophone African literary tradition, the novel is linked ideologically to colonization, while the epic became designated by the Negritude movement as a means to reach back to pre-colonial, chthonic African traditions. In the Roman context, epic was linked to empire while the novel emerged from the colonies and disrupted the link of politics to literature. The Guinean author Camara Laye's texts form the basis of my second chapter, and demonstrate critique of both colonialist discourse and Sekou Toure's post-independence government through their appeals to the ideological connections of genre to empire. The Malian authors Yambo Ouologuem and Amadou Hampâte Bâ, in my third chapter, destabilize the bases of genre and orality and require an individualized hermeneutic. Ouologuem explodes discourse through his denigration of genre and orality and exposes the construction of the metanarratives of colonization, Negritude and interpretation. Hampâte Bâ shifts the focus of these debates from the national to the familial and similarly requires a personalized hermeneutic. Petronius' Satyricon creates a Bakhtinian carnival, which parodies every aspect of the late Julio-Claudian period. The epic genre, so tied to the Augustan project of the early empire, is parodied and located within novelistic prose, which demonstrates how imperial goals had become denigrated at the end of the 1st century. Finally, Apuleius' Metamorphoses emphasizes storytelling and inverts themes and quotations from major epics. In so doing, Apuleius emphasizes the margins of the empire, with the implication that imperial values perhaps do not extend that far. I finish with an understanding of how texts manipulate interpretive communities. I emphasize alternative interpretive communities that are empowered in response to intersections of ideology created by the combination of genres in these particular primary texts.PhDAfrican literatureClassical literatureComparative literatureLanguage, Literature and LinguisticsUniversity of Michigan, Horace H. Rackham School of Graduate Studieshttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/123848/2/3106068.pd
Exorcising Caribbean ghosts: The family, the hero, and the plantation in Julia Alvarez's Saving the World, In the Name of Salome and Maryse Conde's Tree of Life, I, Tituba, Black Witch of Salem 3276174.
No full textExorcising Caribbean Ghosts: the Family, the Hero, and the Plantation searches for common hierarchical, racial, sexual, familial, and political echoes that the plantation system left in Caribbean texts. It argues that in spite of linguistic, religious, and political differences throughout the archipelago, the Caribbean self continues to act in reaction to the initial trauma of the plantation. The plantation placed Europeans above Africans, creating racism leading to an unequal distribution of social standing. It gave white men sexual control of his wife and slaves, thus, curtailing sexual agency and women's rights. A vague notion of paternity erupted from its sexual economy. Power surrounded mostly one man, the master, leaving the alternative discourses of black women and men, white women, and mixed creoles, outside of its realm. By signaling the continuous use of the plantation as a reference point for the distribution of sexual agency, social status, and political power in Caribbean texts, the thesis undermines the plantation's blinding glare. Focusing on close readings of the novels of Dominican-American Julia Alvarez' In the Name of Salome and Guadeloupean Maryse Conde's Tree of Life, the first two chapters elucidate how white and black racism, the double standards affecting women's education and sexuality, and class conflict fragment and disrupt Caribbean families. Their texts suggest new economies of relating outside of old value systems to achieve more honest interaction among family members. Chapters IV and V analyze Alvarez and Conde's attempt at a redistribution of power achieved by their giving voice to alternative historical discourses. Alvarez' Saving the World and Conde's I, Tituba, Black Witch of Salem critique the lack of accurate historical documentation surrounding prominent women's lives whose historical roles have profoundly affected the Americas. By imagining a buried past, these writers enrich the encyclopedia of the historically impoverished Caribbean woman. Guided by Edouard Glissant and Benitez-Rojo's theoretical frameworks, the conclusion links the previous analyses to the Caribbean plantation origins by searching for repeating racial, sexual, and hierarchical patterns of interaction among characters in all four novels. By dismantling old myths and suggesting new ways for the Caribbean self of relating to its historical legacy, the thesis proves how Alvarez and Conde's narratives blueprint pathways to enhance the future of the region.PhDAmerican literatureCaribbean literatureComparative literatureLanguage, Literature and LinguisticsUniversity of Michigan, Horace H. Rackham School of Graduate Studieshttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/126706/2/3276174.pd
The translation of pain in immigrant texts.
No full textThis cross-cultural dissertation examines how the pain of immigration is conveyed in immigrant literature. It compares immigrant texts from the Maghreb, Haiti and Czechoslovakia, written by authors who emigrated to France and North America. Interdisciplinary in scope, this work raises important questions about immigrant psychology, identity politics, minority representation, globalization and multiculturalism. In the traditional immigrant narrative, suffering is marginalized as part of the immigration process and reflects the immigrant's neutralized position in society. My thesis posits that, in order for their sufferings to be heard and heeded by dominant discourse, immigrant writers must engage in a particular rhetoric in which they both reappropriate and resist generic narrative models. My examination of francophone Maghrebi immigrant texts reveals that many Maghrebi immigrants writers (Charef, Mokeddem, Sebbar, Zouari, Zeituni) signify their social dis-ease by explicitly marking wounds or sickness thematically and stylistically into the corpus of the text. I question the limits of such diseased embodiment by alluding to cases of performance or imposture (Smail/Leger). My analysis of Haitian texts considers how different Haitian immigrant authors (Ollivier, Etienne, Pean, Danticat) intimate migrant pain with vodou myths and symbols. Pointing to certain socio-political misappropriations, I investigate the limits of translating immigrant alienation through foreign cultural signifiers. My study of Czech exile literature shows that, in these texts, immigrant pain is suppressed for a number of literary, socio-historical and psychological reasons. I contend that this seeming absence of pain had important consequences in the negative reception of returning emigrants after 1989 in post-communism. I explore how, with the use of allusion, allegory and other indirect means, returning Czech emigrant writers (Kundera, Pekarkova, Formanek, Martinek) tacitly translate their return in their fiction. In all, this work explores how the subject in pain or victimization may gain representation, voice and agency in social discourse. It examines the role of the body, language, culture, gender and race, as well as emotions and empathy. It concludes that a particularly performative rhetoric of pain is necessary to grant the e/immigrant minority subject representation in the public forum.PhDCanadian literatureComparative literatureLanguage, Literature and LinguisticsSlavic literatureUniversity of Michigan, Horace H. Rackham School of Graduate Studieshttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/124429/2/3138174.pd
Inventing Malayanness: Race, education and Englishness in colonial Malaya.
No full textDrawing together various rubrics from Postcolonial Studies and Asian Studies, this dissertation examines the colonial travel narratives of three British writers who shaped the ideological construct of Malaya for the British reading public from the late nineteenth century onwards: Joseph Conrad, Somerset Maugham and Anthony Burgess. It argues that a close engagement with the work of these three novelists---supplemented by readings of other primary texts and by historical archival records on colonial education---indicate that three key concepts were central to creating and ordering a sense of Malaya within the colonial imagination: race, language and education. Key to the ideological fiction of Malaya was the concept of a plural society---one which was divided along racial lines, and between the native races and the alien races. This plural society was further kept within their separate racial containers through language and education policies---a procedure that was common throughout the British Empire. ''British Malaya during the colonial era was structured very similarly to other colonies; yet, this dissertation proposes that British Malaya---now contemporary Singapore and Malaysia---may present a case of the postcolonial nation which could subvert existing theoretical paradigms within both Colonial Studies and Asian Studies. Unlike the typical paradigm of the economically dependent and politically chaotic postcolonial nation, Malaysia and Singapore have both achieved impressive economic growth post-independence, Singapore in particular reaching first world status in a matter of decades. This dissertation thus seeks to investigate---through an examination of how Malaysia and Singapore were ideologically shaped during the colonial era---possible reasons for this exceptionalism, and how this uniqueness then translates into paradigms of dependency within colonial studies.PhDAsian historyAsian literatureComparative literatureEnglish literatureEthnic studiesLanguage, Literature and LinguisticsSocial SciencesUniversity of Michigan, Horace H. Rackham School of Graduate Studieshttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/127018/2/3305011.pd
The Negro myth: Ideology of race, sexuality and immobility in Dany Laferriere.
No full textThis dissertation examines the issue of race through a paradigm based on the question of myth and mythology. I argue that the Haitian born novelist, Dany Laferriere, revolutionizes traditional literatures on race and racism by shifting the analytical focus from a pure question of 'race' to a question of 'myth.' In so doing, instead of objectifying the Black figure as did ethnological works on race (Tempels, Gobineau), or presenting the Black as a fixed signified as post-colonial literatures of resistance (Cesaire, Fanon, Senghor, Diop) tended to do, Laferriere opts for a representation of the Black as a floating signifier. The Black is a myth that, just as other myths, can be placed with dreams and simulacra. Ultimately, the dissertation shows that Laferriere finds ideological solace in the opportunity to beat the racist Black myth at its own game by representing the Black as no more than a myth.PhDBlack studiesCaribbean literatureLanguage, Literature and LinguisticsSocial SciencesUniversity of Michigan, Horace H. Rackham School of Graduate Studieshttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/126414/2/3253263.pd
Une poétique de la mémoire : lire Matière grise, le film du réalisateur rwandais Kivu Ruhorahoza (2011)
No full textThe film Grey Matter [Matière grise] (2011) directed by a Rwandan filmmaker Kivu Ruhorahoza, is an attempt to offer psychoanalytic approaches to understanding a 1994 Rwandan genocide within the psychic and the social. This director is interested in representing the impossible, instead, he offers a poetic representation of trauma. It may be just like a dream in his psychic, wondering whether this event really happened and how to make sense of as time settles ? This noiseless film is the first feature length narrative film directed by a Rwandan who gives the world the visual interpretation of the impact of the aftermath of the 1994 genocide in his country. Grey Matter deals with three stories, which are separated and yet quite connected by trauma
Which way to the modern art museum? Cultural discourse on art and modernity in post -colonial Morocco.
No full textIn asking the question, Which way to the modern art museum? this dissertation explores how the Moroccan cultural elite of the 1960s and 70s engaged with global discourses on art, modernity and the cultural infrastructures that support them. After Moroccan independence from France in 1956, Moroccan artists and intellectuals committed to the liberatory tenets of Western modernity argued for a freedom of expression in their art, mass education of the Moroccan public and the democratization of culture through modern institutions. Intellectuals contested state cultural policies that favored using former colonial infrastructures of culture, such as the museum, and Moroccan contemporary painting merely as a symbols of modernity and development for the West. By exploring the dynamics of the colonial museum in Morocco and its subsequent nationalization, this dissertation addresses how post-colonial nations adopt and manipulate grammars of modernity for global prestige politics. In their aesthetic choices, Moroccan painters sought engagement in global trends and modern aesthetic preoccupations and struggled with the question of authenticity in their art. However, the discursive authority of this cultural elite was threatened unremittingly by both the policies of the Moroccan state and the dominant discourses with which it engaged: Islam, nationalism, and Western discourses of universalism and aesthetic modernity. This dissertation examines the discursive strategies and the populist actions employed by the cultural elite in order to articulate legitimacy and authenticity, and explores struggles over taste and cultural capital in post-colonial Moroccan society as they occurred in cultural journals such as Souffles, Lamalif and Integral. Public reaction to projects of modernity are also discussed through the analysis of a public transcript in press coverage of time and through Abdelfattah Kilito's story Cine-days. In exploring two present-day cultural institutions in Morocco, the Wafabank Space and the Belghazi museum, this work questions how cultural politics from the 1960s and 70s have carried over to contemporary Morocco. The entry of corporate and private spaces onto the cultural landscape problematizes not only the future of art and patrimony in Morocco, but also the teleology of modernity espoused by the cultural elite of the period following independence.PhDArt historyCommunication and the ArtsComparative literatureLanguage, Literature and LinguisticsMiddle Eastern historySocial SciencesUniversity of Michigan, Horace H. Rackham School of Graduate Studieshttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/128466/2/3029416.pd
The representation of Seville's female cigar -maker in Andalusian regionalism and in nineteenth-century French and Spanish literature.
No full textIn its first phase the Andalusian regionalist movement for autonomy used the figure of Seville's female cigar-maker as an emblem of Andalusian culture in the regionalist journal Betica (1913--1917) and in the celebration of Cigarreras in the Royal Tobacco Factory of Seville (1915), the painting of a well-known Andalusian artist at the time, Gonzalo Bilbao. In so doing, the male intellectuals who led this movement, opposed Spain's centralized rule, and campaigned for regional reform in fact elevated the figure of the female cigar-maker to the status of cultural icon. They used her easily recognizable image to promote Andalusia's autonomy, to exalt the political status of the region, and to inspire social and economic reform. In producing and upholding this representation of cultural purity and integrity, however, Andalusian regionalists were forced to contend with the cigar-maker's representational baggage. A close reading of the journal Betica reveals the figure of Seville's cigar-maker to be Janus-faced: she simultaneously contains identifications of the virginal, sacred Madonna and the insolent, shameful whore. This dissertation examines the dynamics of ambivalence through which figures of women in general and of Seville's female cigar-maker in particular are used to represent the specificity and difference of a group of people and their culture. Through close readings of the Andalusian regionalist journal Betica, social-scientific and feminists narratives regarding women and exchange, and a selection of French and Spanish novels written in the nineteenth century, this dissertation follows the meanderings of the cigar-maker and her double, the prostitute, across texts and time as they come to reach the status, as one, of Andalusian cultural icon. By examining historical and literary relations between France and Spain and between Spain and Andalusia during the nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries, this study finds that as a representation of cultural specificity and autonomy Seville's female cigar-maker is paradoxically a composite product of exchange across texts, cultures, and art forms. The dissertation further finds that this process of exchange functioned in the production of works of so-called national literature in France and Spain.PhDComparative literatureLanguage, Literature and LinguisticsRomance literatureSocial SciencesWomen's studiesUniversity of Michigan, Horace H. Rackham School of Graduate Studieshttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/123282/2/3068966.pd
Finding Wholeness: An Eco-criticism. Microcosms as seen through Literary Expression and Educational Models
No full textHonors (Bachelor's)Comparative LiteratureUniversity of Michiganhttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/98933/1/ninalev.pd
Calixte Beyala ou la réécriture de la littérature coloniale française
No full textThis article shows how Calixthe Beyala, in Le petit prince de Belleville (1992) and Maman a un amant (1993), presents the character of the child as producer of sociopolitical and historical discourse. By using the child as narrator, Beyala rewrites the colonial literature of the interwar period extending from Francis Carco to Mac Orlan from a less noble perspective. As producer of certain racist discourses, the child is singled out as the one who represents life and assures the future of the community
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