Author(s): Zablotsky, Veronika | Advisor(s): Dent, Gina | Abstract: This dissertation reconsiders the history of Armenian displacement from the standpoint of feminist and postcolonial theory. It investigates how colonial imaginaries of the Armenian nation were produced by trans-imperial entanglements between the Indian Ocean, the Mediterranean, and the North Atlantic since the early modern period in order to develop a postcolonial critique of neoliberal development in post-Soviet Armenia. Building on Edward Said’s framework of Orientalism, it argues that constructions of Armenians as representatives of the “West” in the “East” not only disarticulated Armenian claims to indigeneity in West Asia but also facilitated the global expansion of colonial logics of race and empire. The four chapters of this thesis deploy a mixed methodology that combines empirical and archival research with analyses of textual and visual materials to rethink the concept of emancipation in West Asia. They draw on a range of sources from novels and memoirs, including "The Life and Adventures of Joseph Emin" (1792), to diplomatic reports, newspaper articles, and naturalization cases that determined whether Armenians were to be categorized as “free white persons” in the United States. Furthermore, they discuss the silent film "Auction of Souls" (1919) alongside images and photographs of Armenian orphans by Near East Relief, the writings of Fridtjof Nansen and Karen Jeppe, among others, as well as images and illustrations in an Armenian-language Soviet women’s journal. Based on open-ended interviews and participant observation among diasporic reformers in post-Soviet Armenia’s non-governmental development sector, this thesis demonstrates that neoliberal development in post-Soviet Armenia actualizes colonial logics that preceded and exceded Soviet statecraft. By contrasting the early Soviet project of women’s emancipation with the inter-war mandate system in the Middle East, and colonial subjection by the English joint-stock corporation in South Asia, it develops an alternative account of globalization that offers a postcolonial approach to postsocialism and diaspora in West Asia. Drawing on critical race and political theory, it concludes that moving toward collective futures beyond the colonial gaze will require emancipation from the logic of development, or “developmentality,” as a rationality of government.

/pdf/governing-armenia-the-politics-of-development-and-the-making-54lni3ahsd.pdf

Governing Armenia: The Politics of Development and the Making of Global Diaspora

This thesis explores the role of exile in the work of the Spanish Republican Arturo Barea (1897-1957). It suggests that, linked to the movements that exile generates (physical, social and intellectual), the concept of ‘transnational’ can be used as an analytical tool with which to interrogate Barea’s work and its interpretations. It was during his exile in Britain that Barea became a professional writer, a literary critic and a broadcaster for the BBC. He published his autobiographical trilogy The Forging of a Rebel, edited by T.S. Eliot, in London between 1941 and 1946. This work was immediately translated into several languages, but was only printed in Spanish in its Argentinian edition of 1951, and was not published in Spain until 1977. Through a combined reading of the trilogy alongside a larger body of fictional and non-fictional work the thesis offers a detailed historical analysis of the first context of production and reception of Barea’s writing in Britain, focusing on the period of 1938-1945. It highlights the challenges and opportunities of exile as a transnational and cosmopolitan experience, and demonstrates the different ways in which the homeland and the host state intersect in Barea’s work. Barea’s writings are read here as exercises of cross-cultural translation in which Spain, its people and the Spanish Civil War were construed for a British – and later international – public, while Britain, its people and their role in the Second World War were also interpreted for a Latin American audience. This thesis emphasizes the historical importance of the informal intellectual networks, the publishing landscape, and the ‘corporate cosmopolitanism’ of the BBC as the institutional sites in which Barea developed his work. A transnational and cosmopolitan approach can offer an avenue to analyse Spanish Republican exile cultural products in a wider historical setting.

A Spaniard in Hertfordshire : the intellectual exile of Arturo Barea

A high annual GDP growth rate of over 8 per cent is now being achieved on a consistent basis. The rapid economic growth has, however, brought only a marginal decline in rural and urban poverty as nearly 250 million people, constituting about 25 per cent of the country's total population, still remain below the poverty line. The data relating to the dimensions of poverty is startling - a whopping 350 million people are illiterate, 150 million have no access to safe drinking water, 750 million lack clean sanitation facilities and are prone to diseases resulting therefrom, and 50 per cent of the children eat below acceptable nutritional levels. Average life expectancy at birth has no doubt risen to 63 years, but infant mortality rate (IMR) and maternal mortality rate (MMR) are still at unacceptably high levels - 57 per 1000, and 3 per 1000 live births respectively. In terms of Human Development Index (HDI), India is ranked 126th among the 177 listed countries. Even the mentioned statistics do not fully capture the sheer destitution and misery our marginalized sections of population are subjected to. The poverty that they endure robs them of their human dignity and makes a mockery of our claims to social justice and equity. Growth, when unevenly spread, dwarfs overall prosperity. Hence, bridging the income divide is the biggest challenge for India. The Government on its part has launched several poverty alleviation programmes but they have not brought the desired result. The Approach Paper to the Eleventh Five-Year Plan has laid emphasis on strategies that accelerate growth and make it broadbased. The present anthology is comprised of well-researched articles by erudite scholars who have deeply analysed the problem of persisting poverty in India. Various factors responsible for such a situation have been studied and ways and means suggested to considerably reduce if not eradicate poverty. The book will serve as a valuable reference source for students and teachers of Economics and researchers on this subject. It will also be useful for the policymakers, planners, parliamentarians, government agencies and NGOs. Common readers concerned with the overall development of the nation will find it highly informative.

Poverty in India

...........................................................................................ii Preface.............................................................................................iii Table of

Accordion homes : lesbian, gay, bisexual and trans (LGBT) refugees' experiences of home and belonging in Canada

The dissertation Dissociating Society: Knowledge, Affect and Performativity in immigrant integration monitoring analyses a work of dissociation by investigating the performative practices and effects of immigrant integration monitoring. It shows how statistical knowledge production of those classified in one way or another as ‘immigrants’ and their so-called integration enacts a racialized imaginary of society. Through two focal points, narrating and affect, the dissertation demonstrates what is produced ‘between the walls’ of social scientific knowledge production that is intricately tied to population management by the state. It does so through a multi-sited ethnography of monitoring practices at various institutions and academic networks in four West European countries. 
The chapters of the dissertation show and claim the making of difference-as-racialized distance in images of immigrant integration, the narration of perpetual arrival of ‘immigrant’ characters compared to those already in society, an imagination of ‘there’ on the basis of constantly questioning ‘where are you from?’, and the active presence of a societal gaze through which seeing is distributed in the professional field of monitoring immigrant integration. Two forms of affect, discomfort and anxiety, are analysed as performative in practices of immigrant integration monitoring, sustaining and reproducing a racialized imaginary of society. This is traced in difficulties in speaking that emerged from the inevitable paradoxes that make up the logics of monitoring immigrant integration. The community of practice does a lot of work to avert a reversal of figure and ground, specifically, by pushing the reference category representing society out of sight and placing ‘immigrants’ in the spotlight. This results in paradoxes analysed through the observations of speaking with a double voice, moments of stammering and slips of the tongue. Subsequently, the dissertation states that monitoring immigrant integration is a work of dissociation in which ‘society’ is moved away and purified from ‘others’ who are not good enough yet, not fitting in, on a distance, that is, those who are perpetually arriving.

Dissociating Society : Knowledge, affect and performativity in immigrant integration monitoring

Migration, de-territorialization, transnationalism, dispersal, assimilation, multiculturalism, exile, hybridity, nostalgia, homeland and other such signposts evoke the realities of the present glob

A companion to diaspora and transnationalism

Social and political movements do not originate in vacuum but are rather the residual effects of a deep-seated structural crisis and frustration rooted in the objective conditions of existing social, economic and political order, its institutions and practices and notions of development, participation and governance that people challenge and seek to change. The state becomes central to this exploitative enterprise as it carries the legitimate monopoly on the means of violence, functions as an arbiter for the allocation of socially valued goods and is an upholder of existing institutions and practices that shapes relationships between citizens, organized interests, institutions and political system. It makes binding decisions, claiming to represent and aggregate various social interests and enforces adherence to them (Jerkins and Klandermans 1995). Naxalite movement or ’naxalism’ or Naxalbari as it is popularly known is one such example of a political movement in post-independent India that lays bare the dialectics and inherent contradictions in society, politics and economy. Naxalism and Maoism is cradled amidst a world of plentitude and paucity and is located between constant rhythms of acute poverty, uneven development, political insularity, caste atrocity and forcible dispossession from one’s land followed by incumbent social polarization as has been the case in South-Eastern Uttar Pradesh. Naxalbari or ultra-Left extremism i.e. the phenomenon of waging an armed struggle against the ’enemies of the state’ (our emphasis) originated in 1967 in a village named Naxalbari in Darjeeling District of West Bengal and from where the movement draws its name. The movement was shaped by the socio-political ferment going on ∗We are thankful to several people from Chandauli, Mirzapur, Sonbhadra, and Varanasi for their valuable help during the fieldwork which was supervised by Prof. Anand Kumar and carried out by Subir Rana and Ashish Kumar Das. 1In an interesting rendition of the etymology of the term ’naxalite’, Bela Bhati on interviewing few naxalites in Central Bihar was told that naxalite is made of two words naksha that is map and the English ’lite’ which means ’prakash’ or light and therefore put together it means making a new map for Bharat (India) with our lights. For more details see, Bela Bhatia (2005). The Naxalite Movement in Central Bihar, EPW, April 9, 2005. 2These will be used inter-changeably throughout the text since they are almost similar in content and their stated objectives. 3Some like Shivaji Mukherjee would argue and say that the Maoist insurgency in India had colonial origins. Adding further, he says that what we see today is basically a fallout of the colonial policy of ruling the land by adopting two forms of ’indirect rule’ i.e. the zamindari land tenure and princely states. According to Shivaji , ”while the zamindari landlord tenure system created conditions of lower bureaucratic penetration as also land/caste inequality, the princely states tended to have lower levels of government institutions and also often had tribals who were ignored and neglectedand untouched by modern bureaucratic institutions.” This set up the structural conditions to restlessness and insurgency in India in the future. (p.5)

/pdf/a-marxian-moment-in-the-theatre-of-the-oppressed-4uvhtomev4.pdf

Subir Rana

Papers

A companion to diaspora and transnationalism

‘A Marxian ‘Moment’ in the ‘Theatre of the Oppressed’: Infrapolitics and Making of the 'Naxal Narrative’ in South-Eastern Uttar Pradesh,’

Book Review: Comparative Study of Child Soldiering on Myanmar-China Border: Evolutions, Challenges and Countermeasures

Comparative Study of Child Soldiering on Myanmar-China Border: Evolutions, Challenges and Countermeasures. By Kai Chen.