Showing 1 - 3 of 3 Items

Date: 2020-01-01

Creator: Diego Rafael Grossmann

Access: Open access

The Colombo-Venezuelan Border Through the Lens of the Colombian Press examines the dominant Colombian press coverage of crises of sovereignty at the Colombo-Venezuelan border, Venezuelan migration, and the February 2019 attempt to introduce humanitarian aid into Venezuela, as seen in El Espectador and El Tiempo’s coverage from the period of August 2018-November 2019. Through theories of nations and power, this thesis reveals the divergent editorial lines and dominant narratives within each newspaper’s construction of the relation between the Colombian and Venezuelan nations, states, and their people. The study details how both newspapers construct different “truths” through divergent constructions of similar events in a manner coherent with the ideological affinities and conceptions of Colombian national identity held by their respective audiences and editorial leadership, constrained further by economic factors. The thesis is split into three main chapters. Chapter 1 addresses the construction of Colombian nationhood rooted in militarism and the presentation of the Colombian state as a protector in El Tiempo’s coverage concerning binational tensions at the border. Chapter 2 traces the coverage regarding Venezuelan migration to Colombia within El Espectador, detailing the conception of national identity rooted in liberal-democratic values that the newspaper constructs and appeals to. Chapter 3 considers both newspaper’s coverage of the attempt to introduce humanitarian aid into Venezuela in 2019. Ultimately, this thesis argues that the discursive actor––and construction––of Venezuela permits the “imagining” of the Colombian nation, a project framed through a discussion of the Colombian conflict and official commitments to multiculturalism by the Colombian state.

Date: 2020-01-01

Creator: Faria A Nasruddin

Access: Open access

After the abolition of slavery, the Colonial Office instituted an indentured labor scheme that lasted from 1838 to 1917, in which they brought East Indians to the plantation colonies as laborers under five year contracts. Due to the planter class’ desire for permanent sources of labor in British Guiana, the Colonial Government incentivized East Indians to permanently settle. East Indians thus dominated the British Guiana’s agricultural landscape and became the single largest ethnicity in the Colony by 1920. This thesis explores the early negotiations of the meaning of diaspora and diasporic citizenship for East Indians in British Guiana. They comprised a diverse conglomerate of different socio-economic positions: agricultural estate laborers, village residents, and middle-class business professionals. Each socioeconomic group had a different lived experience in the colony and different outlook on what it meant to be a creole-born East Indian. This thesis traces the multiple and contingent ideas of citizenship and nationality that were circulating at the time. Against a backdrop of changing imperial politics that promoted modernity and the discourse of the nation, East Indian visions centered around how to construct permanence, and negotiate belonging. By drawing on colonial documentation–local reports, commission transcripts, personal correspondence–and documentation produced by East Indians–memorandums, speeches, and books–this thesis ultimately argues that East Indians came to view culture as integral to their self-worth and definitions of place within the imperial system. Culture thus became the primary lens to negotiate the various meaning of citizenship and place in the imperial-national moment.

• Embargo End Date: 2028-05-18

Date: 2023-01-01

Creator: Sofie Brown

Access: Embargoed