Date: 2021-01-01

Creator: Marcus Helble

Access: Open access

Throughout the 20th century, Argentine leaders and social actors attempted to shape distinct national identities and a sense of nationalism that corresponded to their respective political ideologies. Beginning in the first couple decades of the 20th century, the formation of a Jewish “other” would be central to the construction of both Argentine national identity and nationalism. This thesis argues that the military dictatorship that led the country from 1976 to 1983 built on this othering of the Jewish community as military leaders sought to forge a national identity linked to Catholicism. It focuses first on three separate periods of the early and mid-20th centuries and how governments in that period built, maintained, and altered the view of the Jewish community as a not fully Argentine “other” living in the country. Using several editions of a far-right antisemitic periodical, declassified State Department documents, and testimonies of Jewish political prisoners and soldiers, the thesis transitions to focus on the military dictatorship of the 1970s and 1980s. It examines two separate periods of the dictatorship, highlighting first the role antisemitic beliefs, and opposing such views, had in an internal power struggle within the military government. In the second period of the dictatorship, during the Malvinas (Falklands) War, the thesis examines how antisemitism became a central part of the military’s efforts to consolidate a sense of national unity during the conflict, even as Jews participated largely for the first time within Argentine nationalism and the military.

Date: 2022-01-01

Creator: Reed Foehl

Access: Open access

During the mid-20th century, a new form of Algerian literature emerged, thematically detached yet linguistically tied to France. Novelists aligned with this littérature algérienne de langue française used their narrative power to expose the atrocities of the colonial period, while emphasizing the rising nationalist spirit throughout the country. A peculiar aspect of this national literature is the presence of a child protagonist. Many of Algeria’s most prominent authors centered their first novels on a young boy. This leads to my central question: does the récit d’enfance (childhood narrative) possess certain qualities that lend it useful for representing ubiquitous suffering, as well as an imminent national awakening. My research focuses on two Algerian novelists, Mouloud Feraoun and Mohammed Dib, who employ the récit d’enfance for different aims. In this paper, I first define the récit d’enfance and show how Feraoun and Dib implement this literary style. Secondly, I argue that Mohammed Dib’s trilogy is distinctly political. Employing the critical theories of Frantz Fanon and Benedict Anderson, I contend that Dib’s trilogy, published between 1952-1957, is a littérature de combat (combat literature). Although Feraoun’s publication of Le Fils du Pauvre in 1950 inaugurated Franco-Algerian literature, his work is more reflective than political. Comparing Feraoun and Dib’s early work, allows me to expose the disparate narratives arising in the decade prior to Algerian independence. Their portrayal of colonial oppression, as well as the courage and ambition of an exploited people, remains useful when studying models of colonial and post-colonial nationalism and nation-state.

Date: 2022-01-01

Creator: Rahul Prabhu

Access: Open access

Sexuality was at the fulcrum of various issues facing late-colonial India from social reform projects such as child marriage, women’s rights and birth control to concerns of socioeconomic, physical and sexual weakening. The question of sexual modernity became implicated in imaginations of the modern post-colonial nation, setting the stage for a period of energized, linguistically plural projects of sexual knowledge production. While science was used to authorize such projects in the West, where could authority be located in a context where science held plural meaning and authority itself was highly contested? This paper asks how scientific authority was understood, deployed and shaped by the eugenics project of Narayan Sitaram Phadke (1894-1978) and the sexology project of A.P. Pillay (1890-1956). This thesis argues that the mechanics of each figures’ utilization of science captures how the interaction between scientific authority and society was understood by Phadke and Pillay in different ways. While both figures subscribed to the idea that science was universally authoritative in the making of sexual modernity, Phadke’s and Pillay’s projects show the plurality in how science was understood by social reformers. Furthermore, the thesis presents the differences between Phadke’s and Pillay’s projects as a product of the larger movements – British-era birth control advocacy, Hindu nationalism, upper-caste marriage reform and global sexology – that Phadke and Pillay were distinctly invested in or separated from. Scientific authority and the mechanics of its use is proposed as a vivid lens into the complex dynamics of modernization in late-colonial India.