English Language and Literature

Permanent URI for this collectionhttps://uwspace.uwaterloo.ca/handle/10012/9876

This is the collection for the University of Waterloo's Department of English Language and Literature.

Research outputs are organized by type (eg. Master Thesis, Article, Conference Paper).

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Contextual Complexities and Nelson Mandela's Braided Rhetoric
(University of Waterloo, 2019-05-21) Ofili, Patricia; Condon, Frances
This dissertation revolves around the complex political circumstances in apartheid South Africa that produced Nelson Mandela the rhetorician, human rights activist, and the longest political prisoner in human history. The manner in which Nelson Mandela deploys a braided rhetoric that is a combination of the African and Western rhetorical traditions for spearheading the anti-apartheid struggle in South Africa is investigated. Mandela draws upon the African rhetorical tradition through which his identity, selfhood, and ethos were forged, while appropriating the Western rhetorical tradition through which he attained his education and training as a lawyer. Also examined is the complexity of inter-ethnic strife among Black South Africans; a situation that was exploited by the apartheid regime and which made the western rhetorical tradition inadequate for addressing apartheid domination. The dissertation also studies Mandela’s dynamism as he navigates the murky waters of apartheid policies, which were not only smoke screens for veiling their racist intent but were enactments that kept morphing for the purpose of crushing any form of dissent. The complex situation produced an audience that was very diverse; and to appeal to these local and international audiences, Mandela required a rhetoric that was nuanced and effective enough to dismantle the apartheid racist order. Mandela employs narratives, which are performed in keeping with the African oral tradition - to unify, organize, and inspire his people; to call on the world beyond the borders of South Africa to account for their support of Apartheid; and to call out whites South Africans for their implicit and explicit consent to the evils of a racist social, political, and economic order. Mandela’s rhetoric is strengthened particularly because, even as he speaks and writes in service of a struggle against systemic racism, he rises above the reification of essentialism and thus resists complicity.
Debasing Dissent: The Role of The News Media in the Devaluation of Black Canadian Activism
(University of Waterloo, 2020-10-28) Irwin, Ashley; Smyth, Heather; Condon, Frances
My dissertation examines the way that the Canadian news media delegitimizes anti-racist activism to contribute to the harmful national narratives of racial equality disseminated by the white Anglophone majority. I examine the discourse used to frame three instances of Black Canadian uprising, the 1969 Sir George Williams Affair, the Yonge Street Uprising of 1992, and the 2016 Black Lives Matter sit-in at the Toronto Pride parade, in the Toronto Star, the Montreal Gazette, the Globe and Mail, and the National Post. Using critical discourse analysis as a methodology and critical race theory as a theoretical lens, I argue that these newspapers utilize racist discourses by attributing the presence of activism to Black cultural and biological deficiencies. The journalists covering the Sir George Williams Affair use xenophobic discourse and raise moral alarm in order to blame the uprising on West Indian students as well as international communist organizations and the Black Panthers. These discourses situate activism as a foreign import in order to disavow the existence of racism on Canadian soil. The coverage of the Yonge Street Uprising utilizes the discourse of the minimization of racism and the discourse of dichotomies to deny the existence of racism by blaming activism on the supposed Black predisposition toward criminality. Those covering the Black Lives Matter sit-in at the Toronto Pride parade utilize devolutionary discourse, the discourse of irrationality, and the discourse of immorality to devalue activist endeavours. These discourses portray Black activists as evolutionarily inferior, unintelligent, and immoral. I historicize, conceptualize, and analyze the discourses listed above arguing that Canadian journalists recycle racist ideology that once justified and sustained the transatlantic slave trade. Exposing these ideologies will force a necessary revision of the harmful national narratives that perpetuate the oppression of Black Canadians by disavowing the existence of racism.
Tongues Tide: Translingual Directions for Technologically-Mediated Composing Platforms
(University of Waterloo, 2018-09-26) Beer, Lacey; Condon, Frances
This dissertation examines the link between classroom practices, language policies, and writing technologies in a translingual framework. Specifically, in the context of higher education, I explore the ways in which English-only policies dominate the academy and discourage linguistic diversity and inclusivity. This monolingual approach is emulated by composing software like MS Word and Google Docs, which surveil and constrain the languages and discourses available to student writers. These programs take a Current-Traditionalist approach to writing that is characterized by preoccupation with error and the positioning of the teacher as disciplinarian. In doing so, they inhibit translingual teaching and learning. Drawing upon the results of my ethnographic study on the composing processes of students in ENGL 109: Introduction to Academic Writing (a course taught at the University of Waterloo), I offer suggestions for improving the design of these technologically-mediated composing platforms to better accommodate translingual users.
A Transmogrifying Discourse of Sexual Violence: Resisting, Redressing, and Re-writing Racial Scripts in Contemporary African American Women's Theatre
(University of Waterloo, 2019-02-14) Haider, Amna; Condon, Frances; Young, Vershawn A.
This dissertation examines contemporary African American women's theatre that addresses the absented and erased reality of black women as victims of sexual violence. This thesis investigates how contemporary African American Theatre and performance unfolds two realities of rape: one reality is of the erased victims, and the second of the perpetrators of sexual violence. Working at the intersections of gender and black feminist studies, critical race theory and performance studies this dissertation studies how the African American creative impulses are re-writing rape narratives by deconstructing debilitating racist myths and stereotypes. It seeks to expand limited definitions of rape in legal discourses, pointing out limitations of concepts like date rape and issues of consent, but also looks at forms of sexual violation that simply do not usually register within legal parameters like lesbian rape, rape through verbal sexual harassment, and medical rape. Furthermore, this project engages with racist stereotypes that either nullify black women's experiential realities of sexual violence or demonize black men. One of the main objectives of this dissertation is to examine the perpetrators of violence as well as the victims through dramatic and performative engagements with sexual violence. Therefore, this thesis examines the rapist, be it a man, a lesbian, a mother, or an adolescent youth as part of African American contemporary Theatre's engagement with the narratives of rape. This equalizing representation of sexual violence as an act not just done to black women, but is done by men and women to black women makes African American Theatre and performance redress the imbalance wherein black women as victims of sexual violence bore the burden of the violence committed against them alone. This impulse to redress the imbalance raises many thorny issues of black manhood, black motherhood, and the role of black community that these playwrights fiercely bring into conversation, not to repeat historical racist narratives this dissertation contends, but to re-evaluate the roles and responsibilities of black people, and what it means to be black in the face of sexual violence.

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Browsing English Language and Literature by Author "Condon, Frances"