During the last decade, Europe has faced what is considered to be the largest migration wave since the Second World War. It affected and continues to influence national and international socio...Show moreDuring the last decade, Europe has faced what is considered to be the largest migration wave since the Second World War. It affected and continues to influence national and international socio-political decisions and policies for European and Western countries. The migration wave peaked in 2015, with more than a million refugees, including Syrian refugees, seeking asylum. The main reason for Syrian migration was the Syrian revolution, sparked by the demonstrations that started in 2011. Pro-democratic protests called for freedom, aiming to end the oppressive regime under the Assad family that has exhausted the country for around five decades. The unforeseen result of these protests was a brutal war. The Syrian conflict and the Syrian diaspora have been framed in European news and media coverage as the “refugee crisis.” It has been framed as a crisis not only due to the severity of the situation but also based on a tradition of “Othering,” as the refugees generally come from a Muslim majority. While there is a common agreement on the passivity, generalization, and dehumanization at work in media coverage of the refugees, art, and literature often try to provide alternative narratives. Using critical analysis as a research method, this research investigates the representation politics of refugees in two case studies: a book by Wendy Pearlman, and an exhibition by Carlos Motta, focusing on the concept of belonging and its politics. Furthermore, I employ post-coloniality discourse that enables a critical reading of political and cultural power relations, including history, race, and queerness. The analysis of the cultural objects will show that these art-works have provided a personal space for refugees to tell their stories, which symbolizes a positive step away from the mainstream media representation. However, these representations do not automatically also generate a critical examination of the belonging crisis of refugees, especially while the art-works do not establish a dialogue with the “Other.”Show less
In the last few decades, there has been an emergence of feminist texts that relate themselves to Homer’s renowned myths, The Iliad and The Odyssey. Inspired by these feminist narratives that...Show moreIn the last few decades, there has been an emergence of feminist texts that relate themselves to Homer’s renowned myths, The Iliad and The Odyssey. Inspired by these feminist narratives that revolve around the centring of the female characters within a myth, this thesis poses an analysis of the emergence and importance of mythmaking by women writers. In my research, I have focused on Pat Barker’s The Silence of the Girls Madeline Miller’s Circe, two of the most recent examples of feminist mythmaking. Both Barker and Miller are able to give a voice to women that have often been silenced in ‘classic’ myths: Briseis and Circe. The texts foreground the complexity of their female protagonists by relating their stories to the patriarchal world surrounding them. Building onto this, both texts reflect on mythmaking and storytelling on an overarching level, thereby offering us a subtle critique on the way myths have been written and read in the past. Strikingly, scholars have recently studied these feminist mythmakings as mere ‘rewritings’ or ‘fictionalisations’ of Homer’s ‘classics’. The effect is a limiting analysis in which the true intertextuality of the stories gets lost in a restricting methodology. In this thesis, I propose a new way to analyze these mythmakings in an appropriate and respectful way, by using the concept of ‘mosaic mythmaking’.Show less
The main issue that this thesis aims to address is the marginalised position of the affective dimension in theoretical texts or the academic form. By means of an exploration into Severo Sarduy’s...Show moreThe main issue that this thesis aims to address is the marginalised position of the affective dimension in theoretical texts or the academic form. By means of an exploration into Severo Sarduy’s essay “Simulation” (La Simulacíon, 1982), this thesis aims to demonstrate the potential that lies in the employment of the affective dimension in theoretical writing- and reading processes. The analysis focuses on affective strategies in Sarduy’s essay or, in other words, the means in which the reader is incorporated into the text to fulfill an important role in the making of meaning of the text. This thesis aims to emphasise the ways in which the affective dimension is utilised to communicate the ontological perspective of Sarduy’s text as well as it aspires to show how these affective strategies have the ability to criticise and to mobilise change by providing a different kind of knowledge in academic discourses.Show less
Migration has always played a significant role in the history of the world, but never has it been regarded as such an extensive crisis until now. Millions of people are moving; they are fleeing...Show moreMigration has always played a significant role in the history of the world, but never has it been regarded as such an extensive crisis until now. Millions of people are moving; they are fleeing from poverty or war and try to ensure themselves a better place to live. Much is written on migration, fictional as well as non-fictional work. In these works, a pattern of standardized portrayals of both migrants as well as their journey comes to light. Exit West and Dit zijn de namen break with this pattern. Through analysis of both literary works, with a focus on the aspect of religion and the power of borders, this thesis demonstrates how these works deviate from the dominant discourse on migration and how these deviations provide insights that are valuable additions to this discourse.Show less
This thesis analyzes Khaleed Hosseini’s novels A Thousand Splendid Suns (2007) and And the Mountains Echoed (2013) by focusing solely on the notions of honor, shame, and the subsequent loss of the...Show moreThis thesis analyzes Khaleed Hosseini’s novels A Thousand Splendid Suns (2007) and And the Mountains Echoed (2013) by focusing solely on the notions of honor, shame, and the subsequent loss of the self in the social environment depicted in these novels. With a close reading of the cultural settings in the novels and the interaction of characters in their settings, this research explores the interrelationship of honor and shame and their interconnectedness with the cultural construction of the self. I will argue that the social factors of honor and shame influence the composition of various characters’ identity in the novels.Show less
The main subject of this thesis is “ambiguity”. This thesis focuses on the work by the poet Charles Baudelaire and by the painter Eugène Delacroix as objects of research, and approaches the art of...Show moreThe main subject of this thesis is “ambiguity”. This thesis focuses on the work by the poet Charles Baudelaire and by the painter Eugène Delacroix as objects of research, and approaches the art of ambiguity by these two artists from the perspective of color. It studies how Baudelaire and Delacroix use colors to evoke perceptual and conceptual ambiguity, adopting a cross-disciplinary methodology to examine the particular visual and verbal rhetoric that they use in their works.Show less
An analysis of three Indian-English novels, researching the functions of spirituality in contemporary Indian-English novels. Reading with religious sensibility, Nadieh Rijnbergen uncovers some...Show moreAn analysis of three Indian-English novels, researching the functions of spirituality in contemporary Indian-English novels. Reading with religious sensibility, Nadieh Rijnbergen uncovers some functions of spirituality. Spirituality represents, among others, a pre-colonial identity which questions modern day neo- or post-colonial identities.Show less
