Browsing by Subject "Orientalism"

Now showing 1 - 5 of 5
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    Imagining the Poor: The Discourse that Directs Western Intervention in Africa and its Impact on the Condition of American Poverty
    (2016-04-29) Ellison, Clarence Bradford
    This thesis unveils how dominant Western imaginings of Africa detrimentally impact poverty in the United States. The limitations of notable texts are presented, arguing they fail to recognize structured pressures that constrain those interpellated within Orientalist apparatuses, and states the suggestively depoliticized presence of Christian missionaries parallels secular Western governmental interventions, implicitly delegitimizing the African State. By considering the influence of representations of Africa by dominant media, university, and state ideological apparatuses the thesis illustrates how the repetition and replication of imagined narratives about the continent create an American culture of differential empathy, framing all Africans as inherently destitute and needy, and poor Americans as lazy. Although a grim examination of the current state of affairs directing Western intervention in Africa and its impact on the condition of American poverty, the thesis ultimately offers a humanistic lens as an avenue towards the creation of more equitable social science and policy.
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    Latinx Internationalism and the French Atlantic: Sandra María Esteves in Art contre/against apartheid and Miguel Algarín in “Tangiers”
    (The Cambridge Journal of Postcolonial Literary Inquiry, 2022-09) Quesada, SM
    AbstractThis article interrogates the South-South internationalism of two renowned US Latinx poets: Miguel Algarín’s abjection in Morocco in his poem “Tangiers” and Sandra María Esteves’s anti-apartheid poetry for the French Art contre/against apartheid project, which included the controversial participation of Jacques Derrida. Although these poems focus on different contexts of African liberation, both react to French coloniality. For Algarín, his Orientalist evocations of underage child prostitution operate under a French hegemony, coming into crisis when a third world alliance fails. In Esteves’s work, her poetic solidarity draws on Frantz Fanon’s experience of French colonization in Algeria but also comes into crisis when Derrida’s foreword for Art contre/against apartheid is challenged as Eurocentric. Although both engagements with African self-determination exhibit residues of a French hegemony undergirding and undercutting what I term is a poetic Latin-African solidarity, their South-South approach enriches postcolonial studies, in which Latin American, and by extension, Latinx identities have been sidelined.
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    Queer Muslim Environmental Futurisms: Taqwa (Introspection) and Barzakh (Liminality and Paradox)
    (2023-04-20) Ghanem, Maya
    Through Orientalism, EuroAmerican hegemony constructs nature and sexuality to control ideas and resources around Muslims and nonhumans. EuroAmerican colonizers introduced to Islamic theology the very association of sexuality with “natural/unnatural.” As a result, claims by numerous Islamic scholars that homosexuality is forbidden in Islam because it is “unnatural” echo Orientalist constructions of nature and sexuality. This thesis draws from intersectional queer Muslim perspectives to question Orientalist constructions of nature. I examine academic literature, artistic mediums, and political realities to theorize Queer Muslim Environmental Futurisms (QMEF). Reckoning with the “paradox” of their identities, queer Muslims offer non-linear temporalities that reject Orientalist binaries between humans and nature, queerness and Muslimness. Dismantling Orientalist binaries, I argue that Queer Muslim Environmental Futurisms (QMEF) instead embrace the barzakh (liminality and paradox) of queer/Muslim and human/nature relationships. I first outline a QMEF to facilitate dialogue between queer and Muslim environmental literature over different points of time. I then analyze Saba Taj’s there are gardens at the margins, a mixed-media visual arts exhibition highlighting queer Muslim relationships, to demonstrate how barzakh can negotiate new temporalities and relationships for queer Muslims and nonhumans. I also examine moments of QMEF during the Gezi Park Protests in Turkey, which show queer-Muslim coalition and blips of breakage in linear time. In these examples, I unpack how queer Muslims embrace contradictions, bringing opposites together as a whole. This thesis thus demonstrates how QMEF heals separations between queerness and Muslimness, human and nonhuman creation
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    Swaying between Grace and Pomposity: The Imagined Modernity of Soong Mayling
    (2021-04) Liu, Qianyu Thea
    This paper is centrally concerned with the inconsistencies between the practices of the Orientalized modernity and the Chinese indigenous sociocultural situation in the Republic of China. I focus on Soong Mayling, the first lady of Generalissimo and President Chiang Kai-shek, by tracing her early education in the US, marriage life, as well as her political involvement after returning to China. I examine Orientalized figures’ attempts and possibilities to reconcile the discrepancies that existed between western countries and China. I argue that Soong and her husband endeavored to take outer forms of the West to construct their imagined naive modernity. Their ignorance of Chinese culture and a complete adaptation of linear (evolutionary) ideology cut their reforms off from Chinese people’s sentiments. Their reforms were inconsistent with China’s socio-cultural situation and found no echo in people’s hearts. Failure was inevitable. For sources, the core of the paper is mainly drawn from the speeches, written works, and diaries of Soong Mayling and Chiang Kai-shek, while a major portion of this paper includes news from both China domestic and worldwide newspapers and magazines. I have also supplemented this information with the works and diaries of several intellectuals such as Hu Shih, Sun Yat-sen, and Lin Yutang to enrich my portrait of Soong Mayling.
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