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Has files: YesSubject: search.filters.subject.430313 History of empires, imperialism and colonialism

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    On the bones of Batala : exploring the colonization of the Tagalog Region through tabletop role-playing game design : an exegesis presented in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Design at Te Kunenga ki Pūrehuroa Massey University, Te Whanganui-a-Tara Wellington, Aotearoa New Zealand
    (Massey University, 2025) Bañas, Ar-Em
    The collaborative narrative space of tabletop role-playing games (TTRPGs) can create opportunities for the TTRPG designer, the Game Master (GM), and the players to engage in conversation about real-life issues such as the impact of colonialism in the Philippines. It can also be a vehicle for counter-hegemonic narratives (Scherff iii–iv) by allowing marginalized players to engage with their culture and folklore through anticolonial play within a fictional environment. Growing up in Metro Manila, Philippines, which historian William Manchester described as the second most destroyed Allied city after Warsaw and “one of the greatest tragedies of World War II” (413), I found little space for Filipinos to discuss colonial violence and trauma specific to the Tagalog region. This project provides an avenue to address that need thereby offering the potential for creative expression and collective healing. Reimagining the colonization of Metro Manila and the Tagalog Region through a folk-horror TTRPG allowed me to navigate and process its violent and traumatic history while offering an outlet for other Filipino players to explore their own feelings about colonialism. On the Bones of BATALA positions players as Katauhan, the human survivors in an alternate-history folk-horror setting. They survive on the Rotting Isles, an archipelago built on the corpse of the Tagalog supreme god, Batalang Maykapal, who was slain by the god-like colonizers. The game’s development was guided by the question, “How do I recontextualize my experiences with colonial violence, trauma, and hegemonic narratives through tabletop role-playing game design to enable Filipino players to regain agency over their own experiences through play?”
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    Colonial discourses of deviance and desire and the bodies of wāhine Māori : a thesis presented in fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in Creative Arts at Massey University, Manawatū, New Zealand
    (Massey University, 2024) Allen, Elizabeth Anne
    This research traces how colonial ideologies of race, gender, and sexuality contributed to nineteenth and early twentieth-century representations of wāhine Māori and questions how these repetitive inscriptions might continue to have a negative impact on perceptions of wāhine Māori and kōtiro Māori in contemporary culture. As a Mana Wahine study, I demonstrate that fundamental codes of the developing colonial state were affirmed by how Pākehā guarded sexuality, ordered gender, and surveilled race. As a wahine Māori centred project, it examines the colonial dimensions of “domesticity,” the “civilising mission,” and the ‘paternalism of liberalism’ in Aotearoa/New Zealand, specifically, on the assumption that differentiations of race and colonial power were essentially ordered in terms of Western notions of gender. Of particular concern is the management of wāhine Māori sexuality, procreation, child-rearing, and marriage as a mechanism of colonial control of their bodies. Focusing on spaces of perceived proximity and desire as a source from which we can search for newly recognisable forms of social perceptions in relating, it offers an engagement with myriad forms of art across multidisciplinary fields to provide a unique window into a colonial exercise of the imperial project that had a direct impact on the bodies of wāhine Māori. A critical examination of the colonial metaphors around desire and degeneration, of the intimate and affect, attempts to decolonise its representative paradigms by addressing the consequential structural and material histories that, for wāhine Māori, resulted in meting out differential futures based on ‘fabulated’ divisions of worth, prompting the central questions of the dissertation, how are bodies similar or not? How are bodies available or not? How are bodies knowable or not? And to whom?