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Social & Political Thought

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  • ItemOpen Access
    Expropriating Ireland: Land Theft, Property Relations, and Ireland's Colonial Regime
    (2023-12-08) Beirne, James Michael; Jenkins, William M.
    Colonialism is perhaps the most significant social force in Irish history, but its long duration and the great scope of its impacts make it difficult to address comprehensively. This dissertation makes a step in this direction through a historical materialist framework, incorporating insights from political Marxism, settler colonial studies, and Gramscian historicism. The introduction situates present-day Ireland in the context of its colonisation and stresses the importance of a historical materialist approach unbounded by disciplinary considerations. Two theoretical chapters then introduce two important concepts which help delineate the essential contours of a colonial social totality over the longue durée. In the first chapter, colonial property relations are developed from the concept of social property relations advanced by scholars such as Robert Brenner, Ellen Meiksins Wood, and George Comninel and by engagement with Maïa Pal’s similar ‘colonial social property relations’. Ultimately, colonial property relations differ from social property relations in that rather than being part of the internal development of a single society, they are imposed by one society upon another. This theme is further developed in the second chapter, which—through a synthetic criticism of settler colonial property drawing on the work of Robert Nichols, Patrick Wolfe, and Brenna Bhandar—introduces the concept of the colonial regime. Drawing on the work of Esteve Morera and Eamonn Slater and Terrence McDonough’s interpretation of Marx’s writings on Ireland, which centres an early formulation of the concept of colonial regime, this is presented as a loose extension of Gramsci’s ‘integral state’ that is suited for historicist analysis of a precapitalist society that is not enveloped by a single state, but by a suprastate social structure. Then follows an extensive historical chapter which, beginning with a discussion of the nature of Gaelic class society before the arrival of the English, traces the development of colonial property relations and the colonial regime over the centuries, primarily through engagement with the historical and geographic literature. Following a preliminary discussion of the breakdown of English domination, the conclusion suggests that Ireland’s political economy is nevertheless still determined by the colonial system and advances a call for further, radical Irish theory and historiography.
  • ItemOpen Access
    Capitalism's Safety Net: News Media and The Far-Right
    (2023-12-08) Milonas, Panagiotis Peter; Agathangelou,Anna M.
    Mass media significantly impacts public opinion and societal norms, but it is important to recognize that news coverage has contributed to the growth of far-right beliefs in various countries. This coverage has made conservative, nationalist, and authoritarian ideas more acceptable to the public and increased support for specific political figures. It is crucial to examine whether the capitalist media encourages the development of far-right beliefs and, if so, how. To investigate the relationship between the dominant ideology and news organizations’ role and influence in society, I use a political economy approach to analyze the power dynamics between politics, media, and economics. My research reveals how news organizations can influence other beliefs, such as anti-socialism, racism, sexism, and political apathy. I explain how liberalism and post-fascism aim to maintain and promote capitalist social structures, often working together to achieve this goal. Through my analytical framework, I show how the capitalist media uses the “safety net” as an ideological tool to support far-right groups and undermine radical left-wing political parties and movements during capitalist crises. This makes the “safety net” an institutional mechanism with significant power and resources to reinforce conservative beliefs. My project goes beyond analyzing commercial media and offers a critique of the capitalist mode of production.
  • ItemOpen Access
    The Dialectic of the Unhappy Consciousness in J.M. Coetzee's Fiction
    (2023-12-08) Shahinfard, Farzad; McNally, David
    This study provides a dialectical alternative to poststructuralist and postmodernist readings of J. M. Coetzee’s fiction, on one hand, and Levinasian interpretations of his works, on the other. Drawing on Hegel and Adorno, I explore the subject position of the Unhappy Consciousness in three of Coetzee’s novels: Foe, Age of Iron, and Elizabeth Costello. Specifically, I argue that the women characters in these novels can be understood through the lens of the Unhappy Consciousness, that is, the “dual” consciousness of mastery and slavery. As such, they are obsessed with questions of freedom (mastery and slavery), forgiveness, love, salvation, and evil, among others. Women who bear the wounds of history, I believe, occupy the ideal subject position as mediators through which we can relate to the suffering of the other, including the animal others, without assimilating the other’s difference. This study attempts to understand the nature of this relation with the other without sacrificing “nonidentity” to the language of mastery. Susan Barton in Foe is a white woman whose voice has been silenced by white men and the literary canon. She locates herself as the master to Friday and the slave to Cruso, who is replaced by Foe later in the novel. Mrs. Curren in Age of Iron, likewise, is an ailing white woman situated in late-apartheid South Africa and as such she occupies the position of mastery with regards to the black population and a position of slavery with regards to men in general. Elizabeth Costello is both animal and human and as such mediates our relation with what she calls our “slave populations,” i.e., animals (104). As I show, all three novels can be read as adhering to but at the same time writing back to and revising the Hegelian Unhappy Consciousness. Drawing on Adorno, I regard the primacy of the bodily and the somatic, i.e. physical suffering, to be central to the dialectic of the Unhappy Consciousness in these novels. Ultimately, animals and nonhuman others appear as figures of “nonidentity” crawling through the surface of Coetzee’s fiction, plaguing the consciousness of his works and their breeding ground, i.e. culture.
  • ItemOpen Access
    "I Ran From It And Still Was In It": Meditations On Melancholy And Race...In The Meantime
    (2023-08-04) Amponsah, Evelyn; Agathangelou, Anna M.
    This project engages with the question of black liberation. My project asks two key questions: in the absence of liberation, what can or does exist? And will liberation ever arrive? I answered these questions by tracing the figured opposition of Afro-pessimism and Black Optimism. I argue that while many see these approaches or experimental analytics in an oppositional way, it is important to focus on the interregnum of these two critical dispositions if we want to understand the possibilities for a world otherwise. Remaining in the interregnum can allow us to trace how and in what ways the presuppositions of Euro-American constructions of modernity implode. In modernity, Blackness has always been a site of untimely meditation manifesting itself in different and inventive ways. I argue that our current frameworks informed and shaped by white supremacy limit our imagining a future without Blackness, without whiteness and without race, because modern ego formation relies on these very enslaving structures. Beyond just imagining, toward making real, my project asks: what do we do in ‘the meantime’ as we invent (a new now/present and therefore future)? What is rendered central in the meantime, this site of transition and suspension, is a not a linear movement. Rather, the meantime as a method and a device allows a reading of these two radical dispositions about Blackness that discloses the indissoluble relationship between the ontological nothing and Blackness as its sociopolitical allotrope in the logics of melancholia as the liminal end of the world. Instead, staying with and in “the meantime”, I show how collapsing this imagined opposition between Afro-pessimism and Black Optimism (as responses to the anti-blackness and violence against the slave) challenges the melancholic structuration of antiblackness and its contingent utilitarian concepts such as the ego that comes in the desire for a mother and homeland, as expressed through the ‘return’ to Africa for Black people, and the need and desire for a Black other, as expressed through the figure of the slave, for white people and white supremacy. I thereby arrive at a conversation that nuances race, melancholy and notions of liberation and conclude with reminders of the importance of love to and for revolution
  • ItemOpen Access
    The Ethics of Interpretation: Interpreting the Paradoxical Singularity of Spinoza's Ontological Argument
    (2023-08-04) Nusbaum, Jordan Robert Johnstone; El Khachab, Walid
    In this dissertation, I interpret Spinoza’s ontological argument to mean that the partiality of a part (mode) cannot be conceived except within the context of a whole (substance) in which it participates. Yet, insofar as a modified part (in-another) has a true idea of its own modified partiality, then that idea, and whatever follows from it, must be as irreducibly whole (in-itself) as the substantial whole in which it participates. This constitutes what I describe as the paradox of singularity in Spinoza’s thought because it establishes an ontology in which singular things are singularized or differentiated through an intersection of causes that must be conceived either in-themselves, in-another, or both at once. Given Spinoza’s (in)famous concept of absolutely infinite substance, the role and function of individuality and individuation in his philosophy has been a popular subject of dispute in the 20th century secondary literature. Some authors have sought to portray Spinoza as a champion of an untethered individualism, whereas others have emphasized the collectivistic bonds that bind individuals together in cooperative endeavors. Most productively, recent scholars have presented Spinoza as a thinker of what they call transindividuality. Spinoza, however, never used the term transindividuality in his writings, but he did employ two interrelated concepts of singularity (res singulares) which I thus argue should be described instead as paradoxical singularity. Many of the proponents of Spinoza’s transindividualism, or what I call paradoxical singularity, have overlooked the way in which his views on individuality and collectivity follows from the paradoxical logic with which Spinoza claims to know of the necessary existence of God. For this reason, few have understood how or why Spinoza’s ontological argument facilitates the non-ancillary adequacy between religion and philosophy as equivalent expressions of this immanent certainty. I therefore demonstrate how Spinoza’s ontological argument offers a paradoxical logic with which to identify, relate, and interpret universality and particularity. I argue that Spinoza’s ontological argument for the necessary existence of God constitutes a theory of action, way of being, or an ethos in which philosophy and religion are functionally identical. Yet, given the paradox of singularity that it involves, participation in this ethos presupposes a power of interpretation from which and for which individuals of a compatible nature strive to persevere in their being together.
  • ItemOpen Access
    Manual Labour and Industrial Schooling for Indigenous Youth in Upper Canada, 1821-1863, and the Democratic Symbolic
    (2023-08-04) Dawson, Dana Gayell; Singer, Brian C. J.
    This dissertation explores why residential schooling went on to become a federal system despite early and acknowledged failures. Efforts to understand the provenance and aftermath of the system must address how the schools were intimately related to Canada’s colonial past and liberal democratic present. In this dissertation, the history of the residential school system for Indigenous children in Canada is situated within the context of pre-confederation democratization. Democratization is understood within the framework outlined by Claude Lefort as a sociocultural phenomenon characterized by a shift in symbolic representations of the locus of power away from an external, identifiable source toward the sovereign power of the individuals constituting a collectivity. I focus on how Crown administrators, missionaries and philanthropists articulated the desirability of manual labour and industrial boarding schools for Indigenous children and how those discourses reflected and propagated an emerging democratic symbolic. To maintain their unity, social systems have historically required symbolic representations of the source of legitimacy of concepts, relations of power, norms and behaviors. If for British colonizers, that source had in previous regimes represented something external to the collective that authorized claims to knowledge and was understood as the basis of law, within the democratic symbolic emergent in nineteenth century Western Europe and North America, that source dissipates in its distribution throughout the collectivity. In letters, reports and policy documents exploring and describing the form and function of manual labour and industrial boarding schools for Indigenous children written between 1821 and 1863, I identify the turn inward in seeking foundational legitimizing precepts in the evangelical ideal of salvation through personal transformation, in conceptualizations of self-perfection via pursuit of one’s individual interests and in ideas of a universalized society constructed around shared natural sympathies or mutual protection of self-interest. The work of manual labour and industrial boarding schools as they were imagined in this period was to generate a subject that would find the principle of order within their own person and cast out, preferably of their own volition, that which signified chaos and disorder.
  • ItemOpen Access
    The Univocity of Attention: ADHD and the Case for a Renewed Self-Advocacy
    (2023-03-28) Brown, Andrew Ivan; Martin, Aryn
    This dissertation uses multi-sited ethnography and socio-philosophical analysis to answer the following questions: What is the current state of ADHD’s onto-epistemological status in contemporary discourse? Is an equivalent to critical autism studies possible for ADHD? Specifically, is it possible to refigure ADHD’s ontology as an affirmative difference rather than a deficit? Drawing from my own experiences living with ADHD, as well as anecdotal and ethnographic accounts from my engagement with ADHD self-advocacy communities, I put various critical social scientific theories “to the test,” including Hacking’s looping effects, structuralist-functionalist’s medicalization and social control, Foucault’s and Rose’s theories of subjectification and governmentality, Deleuze and Guattari’s concept of becoming, the fold and related antipsychiatry approaches (e.g., in mad studies literature), and historical materialist theories of the pathologies of late-stage capitalism. My findings indicate that there is something specific about ADHD’s symptoms that pushes back against the often-totalizing nature of these critical theories. I also draw from science and technology studies to conduct an ethnographic study of an ADHD clinic in Japan, to explore how this specificity of ADHD “travels” in cross-cultural contexts without being reduced to biology or culture. The results of my research indicate that the ontological legitimacy of ADHD (what qualifies it as existing, and what it means for it to exist) in contemporary discourse has little to do with its purported neurobiological or genetic underpinnings. Instead, popular ontological beliefs appear to “swing” between two poles of what I call the “dialectic of medicalization”: in one direction, a belief in the ontological primacy of identity (a disease entity, human kind, brain type, medical label, and so on); in the other direction, a belief in the ontological primacy of individual variation (neurobiological diversity, “human distress,” statistically-associated symptoms, genetic correlates, and so on). I show how this dialectic keeps ADHD in conceptual purgatory, helps to explain the history and current state of ADHD discourse, and contributes to ADHD misrecognition and harm. Borrowing from Deleuze’s Difference & Repetition (1994), I call for a renewed ADHD self-advocacy that breaks free from this dialectic by reformulating ontologies of ADHD in terms of its “difference in itself.” My dissertation arrives at a position compatible with critical disability studies and critical autism studies, though in a way that speaks to the specificity of ADHD’s affirmative differences rather than reducing them to the generality of neurodiversity.
  • ItemOpen Access
    The Esoteric, the Islamicate, and 20th Century World Literature
    (2023-03-28) Amoui Kalareh, Kurosh; Boon, Marcus B.
    By exploring the intersections of the esoteric and the islamicate in a series of 20th century literary works from disparate global locations, this dissertation maps out a constellation of countercultural world literature as a model for further advancing the study of literature and esotericism in a planetary context. Chapters are focused on literary works of Iranian Sādeq Hedāyat (1903-1951), Argentine Jorge Luis Borges (1899-1986), and the cut-up collaborations of American William S. Burroughs (1914-1997) and British-Canadian Brion Gysin (1916-1986). Using the statement 'writing is magic and labour,' I argue that these four authors yearned to attain ‘magic’ in their creative writing, while each had their own distinct definition and understanding of what this ‘magic’ would be. These definitions and understandings have been largely shaped by each author’s particular encounters with esoteric and islamicate discourses; they are also products of their ‘labour’—practices and strategies of writing and research affected by the social and political power dynamics of the fields of global cultural production and circulation. Hedāyat’s conception of magic, formed through encounters with European, Islamic, and Zoroastrian esoteric discourses, chiefly refers to practices and texts associated with the ancient magus (Zoroastrian priestly class) that through centuries of religious conflict have transfigured into something distant and incomprehensible. This magic becomes the subject of extensive folklore research for Hedāyat, and is further used and invoked in his works of fiction. For Borges, magic refers to the unexplainable quality of the aesthetic events that flees rational justification. His explorations in pantheism that expand to a range of esoteric currents such as Kabbalah and Gnosticism, find in the islamicate a culture that has grappled with questions on the nature of divinity and on writing being sacred and magical. In the cut-up collaborations of Burroughs-Gysin, the magic of writing is in the randomness of the process as well as the speech act of language, while its labour is primarily dependent on using scissors instead of conventional instruments of writing. Inspired by the islamicate milieu of post-war Tangier, Burroughs-Gysin opened up new possibilities for writing and for human-machine collaborations that are still influencing the electronic literature of the 21st century.
  • ItemOpen Access
    The Open City: A Grammatology of Migrant-Rights Movements and the Logic of Sovereignty
    (2023-03-28) Correia, Tyler; Hadj-Moussa, Ratiba
    In the following work I apply a grammatological method of analysis to the concomitant objects of a logic of sovereignty and migrant-rights politics. Drawing on the analytical tools of genealogy, etymology and pragmatics outlined by Jacques Derrida, I argue that a portable grammar of emplaced possibility generated by migrant-rights movements situated in cities (sanctuary politics in Toronto, Canada, the sans-papier in Paris, and Sheffield UK’s “Cities of Sanctuary” movement) give rise to novel and significant changes in political discourse, generating articulations of a democracy of strangers, common right, solidarity beyond citizenship, and an unprecedented notion of freedom. Using this unorthodox method, I find that a history of Western logocentrism is constituted by an economy of translations not exclusive to its privileged subject or territorial boundary—especially involving circuits of meaning and tracing encounters with pre-Hellenic and Arabic cultures. In turn, the traditio or ‘official tradition’ of an interiorized ‘West’ passed down from Greece to Rome to the vernacular present is the product of a logic of sovereignty through which the repetition of questions that already imply internally homogeneous community against their ‘exteriors’ also generate assumptions around the author and authority of that community from Plato onward. From this vantage point, an international system of nation-states is understood to compulsively give rise to emergent technologies of border enforcement and extra-territorialization, detention, deportation and encampment. In departure from this logic, and signaling the possibilia of radically new institutional frameworks, attention to migrant-rights movements supports a distinct grammar of cosmopolitan democracy not yet captured by scholars, including a research project uncovering genealogies of cities as already plural and interdependent, etymologies of sanctuary, hospitality and civic refuge, and prefiguring institutions of welcome within a globalized world (in particular, parliaments of unrepresented subjects, universities as everyday critical sites of public engagement, and technological networks of vigilant anticipation of the arrival of newcomers). The amalgam of these theoretical and practical elements I refer to as the open city.
  • ItemOpen Access
    No sovereign remedy: distress, madness, and mental health care in Guyana
    (2022-12-14) Persaud, Savitri; Kempadoo, Kamala
    This dissertation is an ethnographic examination of how mental distress is read and understood in Guyana. Through semi-structured qualitative interviews, site observations, media analysis, and document analysis (primary, secondary, tertiary, and grey literature), this research investigates (i) competing and complementary discourses and etiologies of distress; (ii) diverse care pathways and practices utilized by Guyanese to address and ease distress; (iii) and the histories, legacy of empire, and socio-politico-economic factors that inform and spring from this exploration. This research commenced in response to deaths and incidents of violence against women and girls who were labelled “mad”, “mentally ill”, and “demon possessed” in Guyanese news reports. These cases signalled the polyvalent, intersectional, and fluid ways in which Guyanese make sense of and respond to mental distress; thereby prompting research questions on belief systems, modalities of care, and the social relations that are produced, organized, and practiced as Guyanese attend to mental distress on their own terms. Interviews were conducted in Guyana with 37 helping practitioners, inclusive of medical doctors, nurses, social service agents, civil society/NGO actors, government officials at Guyana’s Ministry of Health, and religious/spiritual practitioners belonging to various faiths. Observations were carried out at the country’s National Psychiatric Hospital – informally known as the “Madhouse”. Participants emphasized how mental distress is colloquially and primarily perceived through the stigmatized and meaning-centred language of “madness”. They reported that the general public seldom uses the clinical terms “mental illness”/“mental disorder”, which reference the dominant, Western biomedical model of psychiatry. Instead, participants revealed how mental distress is expressed through an array of perceived explanatory models: biomedical; socio-economic/structural; (inter)personal; and supernatural. A major point of consensus among all 37 participants is how perceived supernatural causality is viewed as an intelligible landscape for understanding distress among the public; therefore, there is a propensity for religious/spiritual practitioners to act as first responders. Per participant accounts, Guyanese appear to embrace plurality and refuse either/or models of care. Consequently, these findings present crucial implications for theory, research, policy, and practice aimed at addressing and reducing mental distress experienced by Guyanese and fostering safe, comprehensive, responsive, and accountable public health systems.
  • ItemOpen Access
    THE SOCIAL AND CULTURAL POLITICS OF LISTENING TO BLACK CANADA(S)
    (2022-12-14) Mohammed, Ola; Sanders, Leslie; Kempadoo, Kamala
    This dissertation, Social and Cultural Politics of Listening to Black Canada(s) develops the concept, Black Nowheres, and its two registers—now here and know here—to understand how the pervasive conditions of anti-Blackness structure the world and can be registered in everyday sound and sonic practices. I employ a range of unsettled listening practices to sonically think and grapple with the dynamics of Black being and Blackness in Canada—particularly how Black people are treated by the Canadian Nation State—given the Nation’s complex relationship to Blackness and Black people. This dissertation also registers how, in spite of the violence that establishes Black nowheres, Black people assert generative sonic practices that insist on knowing Black life on different terms. This dissertation is thematically organized by key tropes that are persistent in both Black Studies and Sound Studies: Noise, Voice, and Soundscape. While these tropes thematically organize the chapters/tracks of the dissertation, I engage in practices of thinking about—as well as thinking with and through—Black sonic practices to register the nuances of Black sociality in Canada. As such, each chapter registers the nuanced dynamics of what I name Black nowheres to understand how Black life “is constituted through vulnerability to the overwhelming force of anti-blackness and white supremacy, and yet not capitulating to only [sic] be known by these same forces […]” (Campt, 2017, p. 23). In shifting the focus from fixed readings of sounds and sonic practices of Black people and Blackness in Canada to listening to what sounds, and sonic practices of Black people and Blackness in Canada, do, this dissertation shifts our relation from one of total mastery and legibility of Black Canada(s) to insisting we unfold and reveal the intricacies of Black being and Blackness in Canada without limit.
  • ItemOpen Access
    Epistemologies of Imperial Feminism(s): Violence, Colonization, and Sexual (Re)Inscriptions of Empire.
    (2022-12-14) Fraser, Faye Marie; Agathangelou, Anna M.
    This doctoral thesis project brings together Indigenous theory and post-colonial feminism under a decolonial framework to highlight the significance of feminist moral epistemologies in establishing global hierarchical systems. I argue that when situated within the sexual matrices of coloniality, feminist moral regulation knowledge production in Canada institutionalizes hierarchical social ordering through the de-mediation of non-secular agency and sacred Indigenous self-consciousness. This dissertation warns feminist moral regulation scholars of the contamination of feminist knowledge produced about the “sexual Other” that remains colonized within the methodological grids of the epistemic structures of secular-coloniality. It highlights how a focus on epistemology allows us to understand the role of feminism’s contingent investments in imperial knowledge systems and the effects this has for structuring neocolonial governmentality and settler colonial domination, in the service of sexual empire. In it, I employ deconstruction and genealogical analytics to reveal how structures of empire are intertwined with discourses of sex and colonial law to trace how such intertwinements shape the production of subjectivities, liberal state-making projects, and colonial enterprises under the promise of “sexual progress” and political freedom. This framework allows me to explore the co-production of knowledge systems within neocolonial orders by focusing on philosophical debates about human rights, gender and racial (in)security, liberal secularism, transnational imperial feminist power. Central to the argument that I pursue in this dissertation is that in the wake of neo-liberalism and neo-colonialism, feminist knowledge about sex work and morality is not mediated by a singular site of annunciation via moral regulation theory. I argue, instead, that moral regulation feminist theorizations of sexual morality are also conditioned by the epistemic and methodological project of imperial feminist praxis. Therefore, this dissertation investigates the epistemological dimensions of moral regulation feminist knowledge production and excavates the modalities of power that drive this discipline and explores the epistemological regions from which it speaks.  
  • ItemOpen Access
    The Hegelian-Marxian Machinery of History: Cedric J. Robinson, Unilinearity and the Dialectic Project of Liberation
    (2022-08-08) Khan, Salmaan Abdul Hamid; Abdel-Shehid, Gamal
    Through his life’s work Cedric J. Robinson had developed a historiographic and theoretical critique of Marxism that exposed it as reductive, Eurocentric, and built upon idealistic positions that did not reflect the concrete conditions of reality itself. However, his critical intervention has been largely ignored and where it has been addressed, it was dismissed as having engaged in a misreading or reductive engagement with Marxism which is otherwise signified as a much more dynamic and reflexive philosophy. The basic intention of this dissertation then has been to defend one aspect of Robinson’s critique of Marxism – his characterization of it as Eurocentric– through both drawing on Robinson’s work itself and through supporting his conclusions by way of my own intervention into debates concerning Marx’s Eurocentricity and the limitations that thus spring from this characterization. This supportive aspect has been carried out through two sections: 1.) through a contextualization of Marxian philosophy in its appropriation of the Eurocentric Hegelian philosophical and historical system, and 2.) through critical engagements with contemporary literature that seeks to disprove the claim that Marxism is in fact Eurocentric. The combined sections of this dissertation go beyond the intended defense of Robinson’s criticisms of Marxian philosophy and carry implications for past and ongoing debates concerning the efficacy of Marxism as a theory of liberation for those people and populations that fall outside of its otherwise restrictive parameters. This dissertation encourages the reader to conclude with the sense that: ‘Robinson was indeed right. Marxism really is inherently antagonistic to both an anti-racist and anti-colonial politics. And I would like to read more of what he had to say’.
  • ItemOpen Access
    Power on the Plantation Complex: Biopolitics and Thanatopolitics
    (2022-08-08) Michelakos, Jason Michael; Leps, Marie-Christine
    This study examines how planters in Barbados, from the seventeenth to the nineteenth century, exercised three modes of power (sovereignty, discipline, and governmentality) in the management of those enslaved. The first part of this dissertation examines how the capture, incarceration, transportation, and sale of enslaved Africans and those subjugated under regimes of unfree labour, were carried out by Imperial agents, slave-traders, and planters, through the geo-economic/political ordering of sovereign power. In the second part of this study, I demonstrate how practices of surveillance, slave-labour, punishment, and resistance realized a shift in the dominant mode of power being exercised on the plantation from sovereignty to discipline. The third, and final part of this dissertation, reveals how planters initiated pro-natalist policies through the deployment of an incentive structure, and how physicians and slave managers coordinated this governmental strategy. Throughout this work I explore how the slave vessel, colonial marketplace, and institutions of confinement, connect the economic, juridical, and political dimensions of plantation slavery as a dispositif of capitalist exploitation. These zones of exchange exhibit how the organizational synergy of Barbadian plantations shaped them into a complex biopolitical and thanatopolitical regime of racism, punishment, and managerialism.
  • ItemOpen Access
    The Kleinian Subject in the Anthropocene: Posthumanism, Narration of Crisis, and the Ethics of Reparative Care
    (2022-03-03) Ritchie, Nicole Anne; Cavanagh, Sheila L.
    This dissertation utilizes psychoanalytic theory to understand the anxieties that construct narrations of and demand intervention into the Anthropocene, a period marked by crises associated with human impact. I specifically bring Melanie Klein's theory of object relations to this contemporary sociopolitical context by analyzing the role of subjectivity in posthumanist theorizing, focusing on new materialism and object-oriented ontology. In response to feminist, queer, decolonial, and critical race concerns for the intersectional human within the posthumanities, this research questions the sociopolitical impact of human desires, fears, and defences on conceptions of repair in anthropocentric crisis and subsequent calls for care-taking in our more-than-human world. First, I explore how the foundational arguments of the posthumanities resonate with the anxieties of Klein's paranoid-schizoid position and the subsequent defence mechanism of manic reparation. I humanize the drive of posthumanist theorizing through Klein's subject and its constitutive formation around a fear of annihilation, positioning the desire to be posthuman as a collective negotiation of threat and security in the face of crisis. Next, I discuss Klein's conception of non-manic reparation and the sociopolitical import of reparative aspirations for the Anthropocene. I specifically focus on the nature of reparative desires in the face of ecological crisis and climate change and argue for the critical necessity of reconciling with reality's ambivalence. Finally, I speculate on the how the individuated conceptualization of Kleinian subjectivity can be brought to notions of collective care in the context of the Anthropocene. I provide a close reading of reparation as a matter of care, politicizing Klein for this contemporary sociopolitical moment and contemplating both the psychic life of engaging in ethical obligations of care for ecological crisis and the critical role of narration in fostering care. Throughout, I illustrate the sociopolitical consequences of calls for caretaking in the Anthropocene through reference to museology as an exemplary realm for the public interpretation and curation of narratives of external reality. I analyze how storytelling practices are tethered to ontological conditions and consider how the perception of crisis impacts the activation of different capacities for engagement or intervention into crisis.
  • ItemOpen Access
    Relations and States
    (2022-03-03) Bukan, Yasar; Visano, Livy A
    This dissertation attempts to re-interpret the concept of relations as such and examines their actualization in relation to the relations of states. It is divided into two parts. In the first part, it examines past interpretations of the concept of relations and provides a different understanding of the concept. It argues that relations should not be perceived solely as that which occurs either as an extension of things or as between things, rather that relations are such phenomena that can also actualize as autonomous existents alongside of other existents that constitute reality. Furthermore, it argues that to adequately understand relations as such one must study conditions such as de-relationism, arelationism, and not-relating, conditions that are not necessarily the binary opposites of relations but forms of realities that coexist with relations as such. It further aims to develop a relational way, a method per se, that can best be utilized in the relatal analysis of relations, in the ways in which relations exist, and in the ways in which relations relate and un-relate. In the second part, the dissertation primarily focuses on certain broad categories of the relations of states and of the world. For instance, it examines the concept of the world, the current state of the relations of the world, the concepts of relations of states, inter-state relations, as well as categories such as the state of incompleteness, uncertainty, and relations that are oriented towards the future.
  • ItemOpen Access
    Orientalism and its Challenges: Feminist Critiques of Orientalist Knowledge Production
    (2021-07-06) Alghamdi, Sameha Gaber; Agathangelou, Anna M.
    Orientalism has shaped conventional Euro-American epistemologies and approaches towards non-US/European people. Orientalism, as a set of epistemologies has enabled the co-production of multiple violence and imperial domination. The production of Orientalist knowledge is not only an archive; but rather it is still inscribed and alive in much of the knowledges produced about a notion of the Arab world. Problematic portrayals and representations of Arab and Muslim women are inscribed in contemporary knowledge systems. This thesis aims to examine how can feminist critiques of the concept/notion of epistemes and approaches about the other of Orientalism open up new ways of understanding knowledge production. In what ways do such insights contribute toward decolonizing the dynamics of Eurocentric knowledge and power relations in literature and representation? This dissertation grapples with a number of feminist critiques of Orientalism in order to theorize notions of female agency and problematize depictions of passivity, sexuality and dominant gendered systems. Analytically, I concentrate on the work of Edward Said. I draw extensively on different feminist critiques of his work and show how orientalist knowledges and understandings co-construct Orientalism and Eurocentric genealogies of knowledge and power. Feminists have problematized Said's literal inattention to the role of sexuality and gender in Orientalist discourses. However, Said's work has contributed to the discussions about the human of modernity by arguing that this human is a man whose masculinity has been pivotal in domination of others and the other women. Ultimately, I produce a feminist analytic by stretching Said's Orientalism through a reading that points to how Orientalism is a set of complex relations between knowledge (i.e., representations) and power and has concrete material implications on how we understand and organize subjects to challenge the representation of Arab and Muslim women as passive or exotic some representations that have come to be universalized.
  • ItemOpen Access
    Affect & Play: Socio-political Videogames as a Site of Felt-knowledge Production
    (2021-03-08) Shamdani, Sara; Bell, Shannon M.
    Videogames are affective networks, made up of organic and in-organic matters that come to create a space, where the player learns through doing and watching herself do. For decades, videogames researchers and players have discussed the myriad of ways in which videogames carry enormous pedagogical potentials through their procedures and the creation of a space of play that immerses the player in those procedures and the story of the game. This dissertation builds on this body of knowledge by bringing together the different understandings of affect and affective capacities to further examine the pedagogical potentials of socio-political games through the creation of a felt-knowledge-producing assemblage. I argue this felt knowledge is achieved through the processes of acting in the space of play, watching that action while it takes place, and then engaging with the consequences of the said action. The socio-political videogames curated for the purposes of this research are primarily from the perspectives of civilians living in a warzone, engaging in revolutionary efforts, or civilians who are forced to cross borders as refugees and immigrants as a result of chaos and violence of their homelands. I examine the affective capacities of the space of play through the works of D. W. Winnicott, and I assert that the unique space of videogame play is not only a space where we work through sensations that impact us through play, but we also experience affective intensities that would otherwise remain invisible. In order to access this space of play, I claim the player becomes an assemblage, a network of connectivity, with the power to observe itself forming and reforming through the connections that make the entity: the player+avatar. For this I turn to the work of Gilles Deleuze and assemblage theory. This dissertation, itself, is an assemblage of affect theories and socio-political videogames that capture the invisibilities of our socio-political reality and make them known through the process of play. These games put the player in the story of anothers suffering and oppression by capturing the affective sensations and intensities of a refugee camp or a war zone and ask the player to engage and experiment with what would have been otherwise remained unknown. These socio-political videogames are a new genre of art for an age of digital (mis)information that bring forth a space of play where we can experience and experiment with sensations, vibrations, and affective forces of oppression in order to feel something of it and to know it differently.
  • ItemOpen Access
    The Affectivity of White Nation-Making: National Belonging, Human Recognition and the Mournability of Black Muslim Women
    (2021-03-08) Mendes, Jan-Therese; Hadj-Moussa, Ratiba
    Drawing Canadian and Swedish national imaginaries into comparative dialogue, this dissertation considers how ideals of liberal, anti-racism paradoxically persist alongside white supremacist investments in the sanctity and authenticity of a white citizenry as well as the terror of Black and Muslim subjects. A sense of fear, threat and vulnerability are examined as useful bad feelings nurtured for the ends of white nation-making; while, the contingencies for assimilation reveal how ideals of racial tolerance can simultaneously be retained. Engaging with tropes of rescue-ability this dissertation proposes that the Muslim woman who performs witnessable acts of assimilation and possession can allay the terror of Islam that she otherwise represents. A death by honour-killing however is what signifies her most triumphant assimilatory act and greatest prospect for national and human belongings. White liberal solidarities solidify through a collective mourning and horror over her brutal death and thus fear of violent, unassimilable Muslims can persists. Contemplating the refusal of Black humanity, the unremarkableness of Black death, the dread of Black reproduction, and the fetishization of Black womens pain this dissertation questions whether assimilatory futures and mournable human life are equally available to Black Muslim women. Analyzing case studies from Canadian and Swedish media, I argue that Black Muslim women must figuratively kill their Black and Muslim selves for the possibility of being re-born into the grievability of Canadian or Swedish whiteness. Even so, the narratives of Afro-Swedish Muslim women reveals how one might trespass on the dictates of assimilation by refusing to wholly surrender the antagonist parts of the self. Women become slippery subjects who are unpredictable in their acculturation. Public humiliation, however, is wielded as a painful pedagogy to discipline she who troubles the matrices of assimilation. Finally, by analyzing representations of the Black Muslim female figure in Canadian performance and visual art, this dissertation explores what it might mean to release desires for national and human belonging by choosing to embody the alien or the monster. In this way, women are visually displayed as releasing the demands of assimilation as they willfully inhabit the non-human.
  • ItemOpen Access
    Living Within Hyphenated Paradoxes - The Canadian Adolescent Refugee Experience
    (2020-11-13) Noori, Sofia; Visano, Livy A.
    In 2018, the Canadian government admitted 46,500 refugees. This followed a remarkable record resettlement of Syrian refugees in Canada from 201517, with just under half aged 17 or younger. This dissertation addresses how adolescent refugees negotiate the issues and aftermath of living in civil unrest, war, migration, transitory states, refugee camps, and resettlement. I analyze published memoirs and vlogs by Canadians who were adolescent refugees when they arrived in this country. By highlighting the life stories of ten Canadians who experienced varying degrees of refugee-ness, I argue that these asylum seekers contend with paradoxical claims to their subjectivities. While witnessing conflicts and camps traumatizes these young people, they successfully achieve independence and greater stability after settling in Canada. Shifting cultural practices informed by their native and host countries are factors that influence refugees sense of identity liminalities: being too young, too old, not westernized enough, not native enough, lacking schooling and wanting academic accolades. Readings of their narratives informed by psychoanalysis and postcolonial theory show that young refugees employ ancestral coping mechanisms, intellectualization, and sublimation to make meaning from their experienced losses and grief. Fanons and Saids theories address the violent colonial context of exile and alienation. Anna Freud and Winnicott explain the internal mechanisms of resistance. In the native land, children inherit epistemologies of coping to survive and make sense of the atrocities they witness. During escape plans, young asylum seekers come to face their greatest fear and reality of losing their loved ones and voices. The disorganized and inhumane conditions of refugee camps further develop an inferiority complex. For the fortunate ones who make it to Canada, they must navigate through refugee boards, schools, and formalities that position them as outsiders. Ultimately this dissertation provides a platform for the various socio-political complexities and challenges (acculturation, enculturation, racism, sexism, relationships, learning) that adolescent refugees must bring to a functional cohesion as they form a sense of self and stability from the chaotic marginal world they are emerging from.