Browsing by Subject "Postcolonialism"

Now showing 1 - 4 of 4
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    Language Education Policy in the (post/neo)Colonial Pakistan and the Life Trajectories of Low SES Students
    (2016-08) Shier, Sadaf
    Educational policies in Pakistan have been the mandate of colonial masters since British colonialism in the eighteenth century. Today, the monetary and symbolic power of international neocolonial development agencies shape Pakistani educational policies, especially those related to medium of instruction (MOI), and these policies act to strengthen a (neo)colonial hegemony. Although English is the mother tongue of fewer than 1% of Pakistanis, 52% of students were barred from higher education (HE) in Lahore, Pakistan during the last 12 years, because they failed a standardized English language exam. Moreover, most K-10 teachers in Punjab province lack functional English language skills. Nevertheless, Pakistan’s National Education Policy 2009 declared English as the MOI from grade four on-wards in order to comply with a quality education mandate of UNESCO’s Education for All (EFA). This language policy vertical case study constructs a multimodal critical discourse analysis to analyze data (including documents, government websites, Skype and face-to-face interviews, and Facebook discussions) collected in Pakistan from policymakers, administrators, teachers, and HE students, including recent graduates. The study analyzes how global educational Discourses inform, (re/de)shape and are (re/de)shaped by national, provincial and local educational discourses, and how those discourses (re/de)shape the life trajectories of post-colonial Pakistani HE students. The study illustrates how low-SES Pakistani HE students negotiate, appropriate, subordinate, and resist neocolonial oppression by language education policy. This dissertation finds that global discourses on internationalization of HE, competition through HE, and quality education through English MOI carry direct implications for academic and professional trajectories of Pakistanis. Pakistani HE students have become what Ramanathan called “the contact zone of subordination and resistance” to the hegemony of English. This contact zone is frequently skewed towards subordination, risking the academic, linguistic, and national identity of Pakistanis. Selecting English MOI directly affects language and cultural shifts, and the vitality of local languages, cultures, and knowledges. Deeper analysis of the Discourses of (mis)trust, dislocation, need and desire reveals two conflicting possibilities for the educational crisis in Pakistan. The first is a continued journey towards loss of identity and freedom; the second is genuine educational reform BY and FOR the people of Pakistan.
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    Orphans of the Other America: Contesting Community in Twentieth-Century Caribbean Literatures
    (2013-05) Arbino, Daniel
    One of the leading Critical Race theories in the Caribbean, as put forth by Édouard Glissant, Edward Brathwaite, Jean Bernabé and others calls for a collective "we" in Caribbean society characterized by the idea of creolization, or the fusing of heterogeneous characteristics. In other words, people are able to feel a part of society because everyone shares a background of diversity and racial mixing. This utopic concept often attempts to move beyond racial categorization that creates exclusionary practices to privilege cultural fluidity; identity is no longer fixed because all Caribbean people have multiple genealogical backgrounds. This dissertation aims to complicate the concept of creolization as a unifying factor. Indeed, "Orphans of the Other America: Contesting Community in Twentieth Century Caribbean Literatures" explores the different ways that orphan protagonists in Caribbean literature spurn creolization in the region in favor of their own individual, albeit differing, needs. My approach therefore challenges creolization as nothing more than an ideal that has failed to be pragmatic in the Caribbean setting. This is in tune with recent research like Shalini Puri's The Caribbean Postcolonial (2004) which articulates the social inequalities on the islands of Trinidad and Tobago where racial tension continues to exist between the Afro-Caribbean and Indo-Caribbean sectors. My conclusions thus demonstrate insular societies that are racially fragmented and disjointed. I use orphan characters as a way to highlight the unwillingness to accept creolization as a premise. Orphan characters are particularly useful because their loss of parents should represent a sense of freedom from familial ties. Indeed, leading scholarly work on orphans in the Caribbean, such as Valérie Loichot's Orphan Narratives (2007) praises orphan protagonists for their ability to create their own creolized narratives and communities that often challenge the power in place. However, the orphan protagonists in my dissertation often revert back to the colonial models left behind by their parents. Instead of serving as a site of liberty, they come to be a site of recalcitrance. For this reason I use the term counter-community, which I define as elements that thwart social and racial equality and oppose community-building. As a result, colonial violence (rape and incest) as well as racism are acted out by these very orphans. Specifically those descendants of the plantocracy do not break from their parents and create their own narratives; they reassert the narratives of colonialism. Meanwhile, descendants of slaves are too entrenched in their own search for identity and questions revolving around their parents' history, that their parents' absence prevents their initiation into society. Instead of being part of a collective, they survive in solitude.
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    The promise of the modern: state, culture, and Avant-gardism in India (ca. 1930-1960)
    (2011-12) Gupta, Atreyee
    At a time when artistic, intellectual, and critical discourses in the South Asian public sphere stand besieged by aggressive nationalist conservative forces, this dissertation returns to the troubling question of the intersections between art, aesthetics, and politics. Focusing on four discrete but deeply interrelated sites - art exhibitions, the museum, the urban public sphere, and the space of domesticity - "The Promise of the Modern: State, Culture, and Avant-gardism in India (ca. 1930-1960)" suggests that aesthetics as a system of sense perception was, and still is, central in formulating the political field. Mapping the interrelations among vision, aesthetics, and the political in early post-Independence India, I suggest that artistic practices fundamentally altered and reframed the experience of seeing and inhabiting a modern India. Locating modern art and its aesthetic discourses within an expansive visual field constituted through museology, art history, and the popular media, I foreground an Indian avant-gardism that was deeply invested in imagining a different life praxis in/for early post-Independence India. This, I suggest, was the promise of the modern.
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    Recovering Returnee Memories: A Comparative Approach To Representations Of Pieds-Noirs And Retornados Experiences
    (2020-06) Rellier, Sandra
    This dissertation examines the historical and transnational connections of the cultural memory of the Europeans and their descendants who left former French and Portuguese African colonies when the latter became independent. These populations are identified as Portuguese retornados from Angola and Mozambique and pieds-noirs, both of French and Spanish origin from Algeria. By comparing returnee migration experiences, through the interdisciplinary lenses of literature, visual media, and ethnographic interviews the present scholarly study begins to fill the critical void left by postcolonial discourses on these populations. Through the analysis of common themes, it defies the traditional discriminatory understandings of African decolonization in relation to the subsequent mass migrations of Europeans. Focusing on the representation of returnees’ private experiences, one of those themes is liminality before, during and/or after the independence wars. Another theme identified in literature and visual media, is the notion of the “Lost Paradise,” that connects the experiences of the populations in question. Shedding light on these similarities overcomes the boundaries imposed by the exclusive focus on any one national literature. This dissertation’s subjects assert their historical and traumatic experiences against the different national collective amnesias surrounding the liberation wars. Through the comparative analysis of their layered silences, linguistic maneuvers, and oral histories, this study provides a new understanding of the cultural impact of the mass European migrations from post-independence Africa on contemporary generations.