Date of Graduation

Spring 5-18-2024

Document Type

Thesis

Degree Name

Master of Arts in International Studies (MAIS)

College/School

College of Arts and Sciences

Department/Program

International Studies

First Advisor

Quỳnh N. Phạm

Second Advisor

Jennifer Murphy

Abstract

Colonialism is deeply and violently embedded in Western knowledge formation—dominant power structures produce epistemes that uphold and perpetuate colonial narratives. This kind of knowledge production forecloses other possibilities. Western discourse of truth becomes universalized to the point that other worldviews, other knowledges that do not conform to hegemonic norms, are suppressed or silenced. This thesis examines three areas of hegemony and erasure: art, gender, and land. First, the history of art clearly marks a delineation between Western elitist artistic masterpieces and non-Western ethnographic artifacts. Eurocentrism of art in the academy determines what counts as art and how art is categorized. Second, the gender binary perpetuates not just the inequality and subordination of women, but the very existence of the rigid notion of gender at all. Science is deployed to legitimize the naturalized truth claims about gender. Third, land holds the tension of being both home to ancestral plants, animals, and Native peoples; and also a location of historic and current ecological violence and dispossession. Indigenous memory and knowledge re-story land as part of a relationship of reciprocity. Overall, this thesis analyzes knowledge production and what has been made to be unthinkable.

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