Research master thesis | Middle Eastern Studies (research) (MA)
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The colonial partition of the Middle East is one of the most recurrent topics of the scholarship on the region. In the last decade, many scholars have shifted their attention from the diplomatic...Show moreThe colonial partition of the Middle East is one of the most recurrent topics of the scholarship on the region. In the last decade, many scholars have shifted their attention from the diplomatic and military history of these borders to their economic and social significance. This thesis aims at completing this shift in regard to the boundary between the British Mandate on Palestine and the French Mandate on Syria and Lebanon. Assuming a borderland perspective, this research looks into the different ways in which local, regional and colonial actors engaged with the border and its administration. It reconstructs the evolution of state border practices on both sides in the years from the British redeployment along the OET line in 1919 until the demise of the Palestine Mandate in 1948. Looking into the agency of a wide range of actors, including peasants, travelers, smugglers and illegal migrants, this thesis argues that the relation the indigenous population had with the border cannot be understood solely through an oppositional frame. Rather, it suggests that this relation was extremely dynamic, and that the subversion of the new territorial order went along with forms of compliance with state regulations and exploitation of the limits of state jurisdictions.Show less
This thesis analyses Gloria Anzaldúa’s redefinition of "home" in her ground-breaking book Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza and applies it to Sandra Cisneros's The House on Mango Street....Show moreThis thesis analyses Gloria Anzaldúa’s redefinition of "home" in her ground-breaking book Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza and applies it to Sandra Cisneros's The House on Mango Street. Anzaldúa redefines home as a space of contradictions, instead of comfort, and this notion of home can also be seen in The House on Mango Street, especially towards the end of the novel. Importantly, home in the borderlands Anzaldúa and Esperanza inhabit is closely connected with their fractured sense of identity. However, both Anzaldúa and Esperanza eventually are able to make a home in the borderlands and resolve their identity struggles, albeit in different ways. Anzaldúa accomplishes this by theorizing what she calls a “mestiza consciousness,” which allows her to accept her multiple identities and to make a home in the contradictory space of the borderlands, while Esperanza makes her home by writing about growing up in the poor urban Latino neighborhood of Mango Street and thus comes to terms with her identity conflicts by constructing an identity for herself as a Chicana writer.Show less
