28 resultados para Post-colonialism

em Helda - Digital Repository of University of Helsinki


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This Master's thesis examines two opposite nationalistic discourses on the revolution of Zanzibar. Chama cha Mapinduzi (CCM), the party in power since the 1964 revolution defends its revolutionary and "African" heritage in the current multi-party system. New nationalists, including among others the main opposition party Civic United Front (CUF), question both the 1964 revolution and the post-revolution period and blame CCM for empty promises, corruption and ethnic discrimination. This study analyzes the role of a significant historical event in the creation of nationalistic ideology and national identity. The 1964 revolution forms the nucleus of various debates related to the history of Zanzibar: slavery, colonialism, racial discrimination and political violence. Representations of these Social constructivist principles form the basis of this study, and central concepts in the theoretical framework are nationalism, national identity, ethnicity and race. I use critical discourse analysis as my research method, lean on the work by Teun A. van Dijk and Norman Fairclough as the most significant researchers in this field. I examine particularly the ways in which linguistic methods, such as stereotypes and metaphors are used to form in- and out-groups ("us" vs. "others"). My material, both in Swahili and English, was collected mainly in Tanzania in the fall of 2007 and from online sources in the spring of 2009. It includes publications by the Zanzibari government between the years of 1964-2000 (12), official speeches for the Revolution Day or the Union Day (12), articles from Tanzanian newspapers from the 1990s until the year of 2009 (15), memoirs and political pamphlets (10), blog posts and opinion pieces from four different websites (8), and interviews or personal communication in Zanzibar, Dar es Salaam and Uppsala (8). Nationalistic rhetoric often creates enemy images by using binary good-bad oppositions. Both discourses in this study build identities on the basis of "otherness" and exclusion, with the intent of emphasizing the particularity of the own group and excluding "evilness" outside the own reference group. These opposite views on the 1964 revolution as the main axis of the history of Zanzibar build different portraits of the nation and Zanzibari-ness (Uzanzibari). CCM still relies on the pre-revolutionary enemy images of Arabs as selfish rulers and cruel slave traders. For CCM, Zanzibar is primarily an "African" nation and a part of Tanzania which is threatened by "Arabs", the outsiders. In contrast, the new nationalists stress the long history of Zanzibar as multi-racial, cosmopolitan and formerly independent country which has its own, separate culture and identity from mainland Tanzanians. Heshima, honour/respect, one of the basic values of Swahili culture, occupies a central role in both discourses: the main party emphasizes that the revolution returned "heshima" to the Zanzibari Africans after centuries of humiliation, whereas the new nationalists claim that ever since the revolution all "non-Africans" have been humiliated and lost their "heshima". According to the new nationalists, true Zanzibari values which include tolerance and harmony between different "races" were lost when the "foreign" revolutionaries arrived from the mainland. Consequently, they see the 1964 revolution as Tanganyikan colonialism which began with the help of Western countries, and maintain that this "colonialism" still continues in the violent multi-party elections.

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Empire is central to U.S. history. When we see the U.S. projecting its influence on a global scale in today s world it is important to understand that U.S. empire has a long history. This dissertation offers a case study of colonialism and U.S. empire by discussing the social worlds, labor regimes, and culture of the U.S. Army during the conquest of southern Arizona and New Mexico (1866-1886). It highlights some of the defining principles, mentalities, and characteristics of U.S. imperialism and shows how U.S. forces have in years past constructed their power and represented themselves, their missions, and the places and peoples that faced U.S. imperialism/colonialism. Using insights from postcolonial studies and whiteness studies, this work balances its attention between discursive representations (army stories) and social experience (army actions), pays attention to silences in the process of historical production, and focuses on collective group mentalities and identities. In the end the army experience reveals an empire in denial constructed on the rule of difference and marked by frustration. White officers, their wives, and the white enlisted men not only wanted the monopoly of violence for the U.S. regime but also colonial (mental/cultural) authority and power, and constructed their identity, authority, and power in discourse and in the social contexts of the everyday through difference. Engaged in warfare against the Apaches, they did not recognize their actions as harmful or acknowledge the U.S. invasion as the bloody colonial conquest it was. White army personnel painted themselves and the army as liberators, represented colonial peoples as racial inferiors, approached colonial terrain in terms of struggle, and claimed that the region was a terrible periphery with little value before the arrival of white civilization. Officers and wives also wanted to place themselves at the top of colonial hierarchies as the refined and respectable class who led the regeneration of the colony by example: they tried to turn army villages into islands of civilization and made journeys, leisure, and domestic life to showcase their class sensibilities and level of sophistication. Often, however, their efforts failed, resulting in frustration and bitterness. Many blamed the colony and its peoples for their failures. The army itself was divided by race and class. All soldiers were treated as laborers unfit for self-government. White enlisted men, frustrated by their failures in colonial warfare and by constant manual labor, constructed worlds of resistance, whereas indigenous soldiers sought to negotiate the effects of colonialism by working in the army. As colonized labor their position was defined by tension between integration and exclusion and between freedom and colonial control.

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Marguerite Duras (1914−1996) was one of the most original French writers and film directors, whose cycles are renowned for a transgeneric repetition variation of human suffering in the modern condition. Her fictionalisation of Asian colonialism, the India Cycle (1964−1976), consists of three novels, Le ravissement de Lol V. Stein (1964), Le Vice-consul (1966) and L'amour (1971), a theatre play, India Song (1973), and three films, La Femme du Gange (1973), India Song (1974) and Son nom de Venise dans Calcutta desért (1976). Duras’s cultural position as a colon in inter-war ‘Indochina’ was the backdrop for this “théâtre-text-film”, while its creation was provoked by the atrocities of World War II and post-war decolonisation. Fictionalising Trauma analyses the aesthetics of the India Cycle as Duras’s critical working-through of historical trauma. From an emotion-focused cognitive viewpoint, the study sheds light on trauma’s narrativisation using the renewed concept of traumatic memory developed by current social neuroscience. Duras is shown to integrate embodied memory and narrative memory into an emotionally progressing fiction. Thus the rhetoric of the India Cycle epitomises a creative symbolisation of the unsayable, which revises the concept of trauma from a semiotic failure into an imaginative metaphorical process. The India Cycle portrays the stagnated situation of a white society in Europe and British India during the thirties. The narratives of three European protagonists and one fictional Cambodian mendicant are organised as analogues mirroring the effects of rejection and loss on both sides of the colonial system. Using trauma as a conceptual prism, the study rearticulates this composition as three roles: those of witnessing writers, rejected survivors and colonial perpetrators. Three problems are analysed in turn by reading the non-verbal markers of the text: the white man as a witness, the subversive trope of the madwoman and the deadlock of the colonists’ destructive passion. The study reveals emotion and fantasy to be crucial elements in critical trauma fiction. Two devices intertwine throughout the cycle: affective images of trauma expressing the horror of life and death, and self-reflexive metafiction distancing the face-value of the melodramatic stories. This strategy dismantles racist and sexist discourses underpinning European life, thus demanding a renewal of cultural memory by an empathic listening to the ‘other’. And as solipsism and madness lead the lives of the white protagonists to tragic ends, the ‘real’ beggar in Calcutta lives in ecological harmony with Nature. This emphasises the failure of colonialism, as the Durasian phantasm ambiguously strives for a deconstruction of the exotic mythical fiction of French ‘Indochina’.

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Infection by Epstein-Barr virus (EBV) occurs in approximately 95% of the world s population. EBV was the first human virus implicated in oncogenesis. Characteristic for EBV primary infection are detectable IgM and IgG antibodies against viral capsid antigen (VCA). During convalescence the VCA IgM disappears while the VCA IgG persists for life. Reactivations of EBV occur both among immunocompromised and immunocompetent individuals. In serological diagnosis, measurement of avidity of VCA IgG separates primary from secondary infections. However, in serodiagnosis of mononucleosis it is quite common to encounter, paradoxically, VCA IgM together with high-avidity VCA IgG, indicating past immunity. We determined the etiology of this phenomenon and found that, among patients with cytomegalovirus (CMV) primary infection a large proportion (23%) showed antibody profiles of EBV reactivation. In contrast, EBV primary infection did not appear to induce immunoreactivation of CMV. EBV-associated post-transplant lymphoproliferative disease (PTLD) is a life threatening complication of allogeneic stem cell or solid organ transplantation. PTLD may present with a diverse spectrum of clinical symptoms and signs. Due to rapidity of PTLD progression especially after stem cell transplantation, the diagnosis must be obtained quickly. Pending timely detection, the evolution of the fatal disease may be halted by reduction of immunosuppression. A promising new PTLD treatment (also in Finland) is based on anti-CD-20 monoclonal antibodies. Diagnosis of PTLD has been demanding because of immunosuppression, blood transfusions and the latent nature of the virus. We set up in 1999 to our knowledge first in Finland for any microbial pathogen a real-time quantitative PCR (qPCR) for detection of EBV DNA in blood serum/plasma. In addition, we set up an in situ hybridisation assay for EBV RNA in tissue sections. In collaboration with a group of haematologists at Helsinki University Central Hospital we retrospectively determined the incidence of PTLD among 257 allogenic stem cell transplantations (SCT) performed during 1994-1999. Post-mortem analysis revealed 18 cases of PTLD. From a subset of PTLD cases (12/18) and a series of corresponding controls (36), consecutive samples of serum were studied by the new EBV-qPCR. All the PTLD patients were positive for EBV-DNA with progressively rising copy numbers. In most PTLD patients EBV DNA became detectable within 70 days of SCT. Of note, the appearance of EBV DNA preceded the PTLD symptoms (fever, lymphadenopathy, atypical lymphocytes). Among the SCT controls, EBV DNA occurred only sporadically, and the EBV-DNA levels remained relatively low. We concluded that EBV qPCR is a highly sensitive (100%) and specific (96%) new diagnostic approach. We also looked for and found risk factors for the development of PTLD. Together with a liver transplantation group at the Transplantation and Liver Surgery Clinic we wanted to clarify how often and how severely do EBV infections occur after liver transplantation. We studied by the EBV qPCR 1284 plasma samples obtained from 105 adult liver transplant recipients. EBV DNA was detected in 14 patients (13%) during the first 12 months. The peak viral loads of 13 asymptomatic patients were relatively low (<6600/ml), and EBV DNA subsided quickly from circulation. Fatal PTLD was diagnosed in one patient. Finally, we wanted to determine the number and clinical significance of EBV infections of various types occurring among a large, retrospective, nonselected cohort of allogenic SCT recipients. We analysed by EBV qPCR 5479 serum samples of 406 SCT recipients obtained during 1988-1999. EBV DNA was seen in 57 (14%) patients, of whom 22 (5%) showed progressively rising and ultimately high levels of EBV DNA (median 54 million /ml). Among the SCT survivors, EBV DNA was transiently detectable in 19 (5%) asymptomatic patients. Thereby, low-level EBV-DNA positivity in serum occurs relatively often after SCT and may subside without specific treatment. However, high molecular copy numbers (>50 000) are diagnostic for life-threatening EBV infection. We furthermore developed a mathematical algorithm for the prediction of development of life-threatening EBV infection.

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Austria and Finland are persistently referred to as the “success stories” of post-1945 European history. Notwithstanding their different points of departure, in the course of the Cold War both countries portrayed themselves as small and neutral border-states in the world dictated by superpower politics. By the 1970s, both countries frequently ranked at the top end in various international classifications regarding economic development and well-being in society. This trend continues today. The study takes under scrutiny the concept of consensus which figures centrally in the two national narratives of post-1945 success. Given that the two domestic contexts as such only share few direct links with one another and are more obviously different than similar in terms of their geographical location, historical experiences and politico-cultural traditions, the analogies and variations in the anatomies of the post-1945 “cultures of consensus” provide an interesting topic for a historical comparative and cross-national examination. The main research question concerns the identification and analysis of the conceptual and procedural convergence points of the concepts of the state and consensus. The thesis is divided into six main chapters. After the introduction, the second chapter presents the theoretical framework in more detail by focusing on the key concepts of the study – the state and consensus. Chapter two also introduces the comparative historical and cross-national research angles. Chapter three grounds the key concepts of the state and consensus in the historical contexts of Austria and Finland by discussing the state, the nation and democracy in a longer term comparative perspective. The fourth and fifth chapter present case studies on the two policy fields, the “pillars”, upon which the post-1945 Austrian and Finnish cultures of consensus are argued to have rested. Chapter four deals with neo-corporatist features in the economic policy making and chapter five discusses the building up of domestic consensus regarding the key concepts of neutrality policies in the 1950s and 1960s. The study concludes that it was not consensus as such but the strikingly intense preoccupation with the theme of domestic consensus that cross-cut, in a curiously analogous manner, the policy-making processes studied. The main challenge for the post-1945 architects of Austrian and Finnish cultures of consensus was to find strategies and concepts for consensus-building which would be compatible with the principles of democracy. Discussed at the level of procedures, the most important finding of the study concerns the triangular mechanism of coordination, consultation and cooperation that set into motion and facilitated a new type of search for consensus in both post-war societies. In this triangle, the agency of the state was central, though in varying ways. The new conceptions concerning a small state’s position in the Cold War world also prompted cross-nationally perceivable willingness to reconsider inherited concepts and procedures of the state and the nation. At the same time, the ways of understanding the role of the state and its relation to society remained profoundly different in Austria and Finland and this basic difference was in many ways reflected in the concepts and procedures deployed in the search for consensus and management of domestic conflicts. For more detailed information, please consult the author.

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This work is concerned with presenting a modified theoretical approach to the study of centre-periphery relations in the Russian Federation. In the widely accepted scientific discourse, the Russian federal system under the Yeltsin Administration (1991-2000) was asymmetrical; largely owing to the varying amount of structural autonomy distributed among the federation s 89 constituent units. While providing an improved understanding as to which political and socio-economic structures contributed to federal asymmetry, it is felt that associated large N-studies have underemphasised the role played by actor agency in re-shaping Russian federal institutions. It is the main task of this thesis to reintroduce /re-emphasise the importance of actor agency as a major contributing element of institutional change in the Russian federal system. By focusing on the strategic agency of regional elites simultaneously within regional and federal contexts, the thesis adopts the position that political, ethnic and socio-economic structural factors alone cannot fully determine the extent to which regional leaders were successful in their pursuit of economic and political pay-offs from the institutionally weakened federal centre. Furthermore, this work hypothesises that under conditions of federal institutional uncertainty, it is the ability of regional leaders to simultaneously interpret various mutable structural conditions then translate them into plausible strategies which accounts for the regions ability to extract variable amounts of economic and political pay-offs from the Russian federal system. The thesis finds that while the hypothesis is accurate in its theoretical assumptions, several key conclusions provide paths for further inquiry posed by the initial research question. First, without reliable information or stable institutions to guide their actions, both regional and federal elites were forced into ad-hoc decision-making in order to maintain their core strategic focus: political survival. Second, instead of attributing asymmetry to either actor agency or structural factors exclusively, the empirical data shows that both agency and structures interact symbiotically in the strategic formulation process, thus accounting for the sub-optimal nature of several of the actions taken in the adopted cases. Third, as actor agency and structural factors mutate over time, so, too do the perceived payoffs from elite competition. In the case of the Russian federal system, the stronger the federal centre became, the less likely it was that regional leaders could extract the high degree of economic and political pay-offs that they clamoured for earlier in the Yeltsin period. Finally, traditional approaches to the study of federal systems which focus on institutions as measures of federalism are not fully applicable in the Russian case precisely because the institutions themselves were a secondary point of contention between competing elites. Institutional equilibriums between the regions and Moscow were struck only when highly personalised elite preferences were satisfied. Therefore the Russian federal system is the product of short-term, institutional solutions suited to elite survival strategies developed under conditions of economic, political and social uncertainty.

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It has been only recently realized that sexual selection does not end at copulation but that post-copulatory processes are often important in determining the fitness of individuals. In this thesis, I experimentally studied both pre- and post-copulatory sexual selection in the least killifish, Heterandria formosa. I found that this species suffers from severe inbreeding depression in male reproductive behaviour, offspring viability and offspring maturation times. Neither sex showed pre-copulatory inbreeding avoidance but when females mated with their brothers, less sperm were retrieved from their reproductive system compared to the situation when females mated with unrelated males. Whether the difference in sperm numbers is due to female or male effect could not be resolved. Based on theory, females should be more eager to avoid inbreeding than males in this species, because females invest more in their offspring than males do. Inbreeding seems to be an important part of this species biology and the severe inbreeding depression has most likely selected for the evolution of the post-copulatory inbreeding avoidance mechanism that I found. In addition, I studied the effects of polyandry on female reproductive success. When females mated with more than one male, they were more likely to get pregnant. However, I also found a cost of polyandry. The offspring of females mated to four males took longer to reach sexual maturity compared to the offspring of monandrous females. This cost may be explained by parent-offspring conflict over maternal resource allocation. In another experiment, in which within-brood relatedness was manipulated, offspring sizes decreased over time when within-brood relatedness was low. This result is partly in accordance with the kinship theory of genomic imprinting. When relatedness decreases, offspring are expected to be less co-operative and demand fewer resources from their mother, which leads to impaired development. In the last chapter of my thesis, I show that H. formosa males do not prefer large females as in other Poeciliidae species. I suggest that males view smaller females as more profitable mates because those are more likely virgin. In conclusion, I found both pre- and post-copulatory sexual selection to be important factors in determining reproductive success in H. formosa.

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In view of the current fragmentation in management and organisation studies, we argue that there is a need to elaborate techniques that help reconcile contradictory and superficially incommensurable standpoints. For this purpose, we draw on ‘pre-modern’ Aristotelian epistemological and methodological sources, particularly the idea of ‘saving the appearances’ (SA), not previously introduced into organisation studies. Using SA as our starting point, we outline a methodology that helps to develop reasonable and acceptable intermediary positions in contemporary debates between ‘modernism’ and ‘post-modernism’. We illustrate the functioning of SA in the case of three issues in the philosophy of science where ‘modernist’ and ‘post-modernist’ scholars seem to have incommensurable standpoints: the nature of scientific knowledge; the conception of causality; and the epistemology of practice. We show in particular how to use the logics of ‘qualification’, ‘new conception’, and ‘complementary combination’ to form the basis for mediating positions which could then be accepted by less extreme proponents of both ‘modernism’ and ‘postmodernism’.

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This article concentrates on the discursive constmction of success and failure in narratives of post-merger integration. Drawing on extensive interview material from eight Finnish-Swedish mergers and acquisitions, the empirical analysis leads to distinguishing four types of discourse — 'rationalistic', 'cultural', 'role-bound' and 'individualistic' — that narrators employ in recounting their experiences. In particular, the empirical material illustrates how the discursive frameworks enable specific (di.scursive) strategies and moves for (re)framing the success/failure, justification/legitimization of one's own actions, and (re)constniction of responsibility when dealing with socio-psychological pressures associated with success/failtire. The analysis also suggests that, as a result of making use of these discursive strategies and moves, success stories are likely to lead to overly optimistic or, in the case of failure stories, overly pessimistic views on the management's ability to control these change processes. Tliese findings imply that we should take the discursive elements that both constrain our descriptions and explanations seriously, and provide opportunities for more or less intentional (re)interpretations of postmerger integration or other organizational change processes.