| 1. |
- Johansson, Andreas, 1980-
(författare)
-
Pragmatic Muslim Politics : The case of Sri Lanka Muslim Congress
- 2016
-
Doktorsavhandling (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- This dissertation investigates the use of religious terms and symbols in politics. More specifically, it investigates Muslim politics. Its aim is to analyze the role of religious terms and symbols within a non-fundamentalist political party, namely the Sri Lanka Muslim Congress (SLMC), a Muslim political party that has been part of the democratic process in Sri Lanka since the 1980s. I thereby hope to broaden the range of research concerning political parties founded on religious ideologies. The empirical focus of the dissertation is on the official documents of the SLMC, such as internal documents to members, online publications from their official website and social media. The empirical data also includes parliamentary speeches made by the late leader M.H.M. Ashraff during the years from 1989 to 1992 and parliamentary speeches made by the current leader Rauff Hakkem during the years from 2006 to 2011. I have also conducted interviews with 33 leading members of the party on three different occasions. In 2006, 2011 and 2013 I visited Sri Lanka and had Colombo as my base.This thesis also contains an introduction to the history of Muslims in Sri Lanka and thereafter the structure of this thesis follows the different empirical data that I have collected. The first of my empirical chapters focuses on official documents written by the SLMC. The second presents and examines interviews with leading members of the SLMC. The third and fourth empirical chapters concern the parliamentary speeches of the two party leaders mentioned above, M.H.M. Ashraff (1989–1992) and Rauff Hakeem (2006–2011). The final chapter discusses the conclusions drawn from the empirical chapters in relation to the theoretical framework presented in Chapter 2.In sum, “Pragmatic Muslim politics” can be seen as the complete opposite of a politics that is ideology driven and utopian. This fits well with what has been observed in the case of the SLMC. The main use of references to Islam as a religious tradition in the party has been to delimitate Muslims as a specific group in a political situation in post-colonial Sri Lanka. While there have been some initial attempts made, particularly during the 1990s, to put forward specific “Islamic” solutions to social problems, with direct references made to the scriptures particularly in the field of economics, few if any such attempts can be seen today.
|
|
| 2. |
- Lund, Martin
(författare)
-
Rethinking the Jewish-Comics Connection
- 2013
-
Doktorsavhandling (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- Popular Abstract in English The publication of Michael Chabon’s Pulitzer-prize winning novel The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay (2000) brought the Jewish–comics connection to popular attention. The novel illuminated the fact that many of the pioneers of American mainstream comics were Jewish. Owing to this history, and to the fact that there today exists a large and growing library of self-consciously Jewish comic books and graphic novels, much has been written about the meaning of the connection. Engaging in a critical dialogue with extant writing on the subject, this thesis argues that much of the popular and scholarly writing on the subject of Jews and comics is historical in the sense that it is a product of its own time, rather than in the sense that it critically investigates the past. Rethinking the Jewish¬–Comics Connection presents three studies of commonly cited mainstream comics texts written by Jewish Americans: the character Superman from his first appearance in June 1938 until America’s entry in the Second World War in December 1941; comics writer, artist, and advocate Will Eisner’s The Spirit (1940–1952) and long-form comics (1978–2005); and the first and second series of X-Men comic books (1963–1970 and 1975–1991). Situating these texts in their respective contexts and offering alternative interpretations, the thesis suggests that the historical Jewish–comics connection most clearly emerges as an expression of what it meant, for the writers, to be Jewish Americans in relation to their own time.
|
|
| 3. |
|
|
