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In the countries of Eastern Europe, the recent history of the communist regimes creates a context rich in various and often times contradictory remembering practices. While normative discourses of memory enacted in official forms of memory such as museums, memorials, monuments, or commemorative rituals attempt to castigate the communism in

In the countries of Eastern Europe, the recent history of the communist regimes creates a context rich in various and often times contradictory remembering practices. While normative discourses of memory enacted in official forms of memory such as museums, memorials, monuments, or commemorative rituals attempt to castigate the communism in definite terms, remembering practices enacted in everyday life are more ambiguous and more tolerant of various interpretations of the communist past. This study offers a case study of the ways in which people remember communism in everyday life in Romania. While various inquiries into Eastern Europe's and also Romania's official and intentional forms of memorializing communism abound, few works address remembering practices in their entanglements with everyday life. From a methodological point of view, this study integrates a grounded methodology approach with a rhetorical sensitivity to explore the discourses, objects, events, and practices of remembering communism in Bucharest, the capital city of Romania. In doing so, this inquiry attends not only to the aspects of the present that animate the remembering of communism, but also and more specifically to the set of practices by which the remembering process is performed. The qualitative analysis revealed a number of conceptual categories that clustered around three major themes that describe the entanglements of remembering activities with everyday life. Relating the present to the past, sustaining the past in the present, and pursuing the communist past constitute the ways in which people in Romania live their relationships with the communist past in a way that reveals the complex interplay between private and public forms of memory, but also between the political, social, and cultural aspects of the remembering process. These themes also facilitate a holistic understanding of the rhetorical environment of remembering communism in Romania.
ContributorsPaulesc, Marie-Louise (Author) / de la Garza, Sarah Amira (Thesis advisor) / Brouwer, Dan (Thesis advisor) / Gereboff, Joel (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2014
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Description
This research explores the various and often conflicting interpretations of the Battle of Horseshoe Bend, an event seemingly lost in the public mind of twenty-first century America. The conflict, which pitted United States forces under the command of Major General Andrew Jackson against a militant offshoot of the Creek Confederacy,

This research explores the various and often conflicting interpretations of the Battle of Horseshoe Bend, an event seemingly lost in the public mind of twenty-first century America. The conflict, which pitted United States forces under the command of Major General Andrew Jackson against a militant offshoot of the Creek Confederacy, known as the Redsticks, ranks as the single most staggering loss of life in annals of American Indian warfare. Today, exactly 200 years after the conflict, the legacy of Horseshoe Bend stands as an obscure and often unheard of event. Drawing upon over two centuries of unpublished archival data, newspapers, and political propaganda this research argues that the dominate narrative of Northern history, the shadowy details of the War of 1812, and the erasure of shameful events from the legacy of westward expansion have all contributed to transform what once was a battle of epic proportions, described by Jackson himself as an "extermination," into a seemingly forgotten affair. Ultimately, the Battle of Horseshoe Bend's elusiveness has allowed for the production of various historical myths and political messages, critiques and hyperboles, facts and theories. Hailed as a triumph during the War of 1812, and a high-water mark by the proponents of Manifest Destiny, Jackson's victory has also experienced its fair share of American derision and disregard. Whereas some have criticized the battle as a "cold blooded massacre," others have glorified it as a touchstone of American masculinity, and excused it as a natural event in the unfolding of human evolution. Despite the battle's controversial nature, on 3 August 1956, President Dwight D. Eisenhower, a strong supporter of the National Park Service, approved act HR 11766 establishing Horseshoe Bend National Military Park, the very first national park in the state of Alabama. Hailed and forgotten, silenced and celebrated, exploited and yet largely unknown. This research explores what happened after the smoke cleared at the Battle of Horseshoe Bend. It is a story about the production of history, the power of the past, and the malleability of the American mind.
ContributorsWeiss, Justin Scott (Author) / Fixico, Donald (Thesis advisor) / Schermerhorn, Calvin (Committee member) / Dallett, Nancy (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2014
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Description
International Relations has traditionally focused on conflict and war, but the effects of violence including dead bodies and memorialization practices have largely been considered beyond the purview of the field. This project seeks to explore the relationship between practices of statecraft at multiple levels and decisions surrounding memorialization. Exploring the

International Relations has traditionally focused on conflict and war, but the effects of violence including dead bodies and memorialization practices have largely been considered beyond the purview of the field. This project seeks to explore the relationship between practices of statecraft at multiple levels and decisions surrounding memorialization. Exploring the role of bodies and bones and the politics of display at memorial sites, as well as the construction of space, I explore how practices of statecraft often rely on an exclusionary logic which renders certain lives politically qualified and others beyond the realm of qualified politics. I draw on the Derridean notion of hauntology to explore how the line between life and death itself is a political construction which sustains particular performances of statecraft. Utilizing ethnographic field work and discourse analysis, I trace the relationship between a logic of haunting and statecraft at sites of memory in three cases. Rwandan genocide memorialization is often centered on bodies and bones, displayed as evidence of the genocide. Yet, this display invokes the specter of genocide in order to legitimate specific policymaking. Memorialization of undocumented immigrants who die crossing the US-Mexico border offers an opportunity to explore practices that grieve ungrievable lives, and how memorialization can posit a resistance to the bordering mechanisms of statecraft. 9/11 memorialization offers an interesting case because of the way in which bodies were vanished and spaces reconfigured. Using the question of vanishing as a frame, this final case explores how statecraft is dependent on vanishing: the making absent of something so as to render something else present. Several main conclusions and implications are drawn from the cases. First, labeling certain lives as politically unqualified can sustain certain conceptualizations of the state. Second, paying attention to the way statecraft is a haunted performance, being haunted by the things we perhaps ethically should be haunted by, can re-conceptualize the way International Relations thinks about concepts such as security, citizenship, and power. Finally, memorialization, while seemingly innocuous, is really a space for political contestation that can, if done in certain ways, really implicate the high politics of security conventional wisdom.
ContributorsAuchter, Jessica (Author) / Doty, Roxanne L (Thesis advisor) / Ashley, Richard K. (Committee member) / Talebi, Shahla (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2012
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Description
The Second World War has been portrayed as the central event for understanding the history of America in the 20th Century. This dissertation will examine the acts of commemoration and remembrance by veterans who served on the escort carriers, USS Block Island, CVE-21 & CVE-106. Acts of remembrance and commemoration,

The Second World War has been portrayed as the central event for understanding the history of America in the 20th Century. This dissertation will examine the acts of commemoration and remembrance by veterans who served on the escort carriers, USS Block Island, CVE-21 & CVE-106. Acts of remembrance and commemoration, in this case, refer to the authorship of memoirs, the donation of symbolic objects that represent military service to museums, and the formation of a veteran's organization, which also serves as a means of social support. I am interested in the way stories of the conflict that fall outside the dominant narratives of the Second World War, namely the famous battles of land, sea, and air, have been commemorated by the veterans who were part of them. Utilizing primary source material and oral histories, I examine how acts of remembrance and commemoration have changed over time. An analysis of the shifting meanings sheds light on how individual memories of the war have changed, in light of the history of the larger war that continues to ignore small ships and sea battles.
ContributorsHruska, Benjamin J. (Author) / Thompson, Victoria (Thesis advisor) / Warren-Findley, Jannelle (Committee member) / Longley, Kyle (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2012
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The constructing of visitor expectations and memory of historic sites is an important aspect of the heritage industry. This study examines the creation and change of dominant historical memories at four British palaces and ancestral homes. Through the close analysis of a variety of guidebooks beginning in the eighteenth century

The constructing of visitor expectations and memory of historic sites is an important aspect of the heritage industry. This study examines the creation and change of dominant historical memories at four British palaces and ancestral homes. Through the close analysis of a variety of guidebooks beginning in the eighteenth century as well as other promotional materials such as websites and films, this study looks at which historical memories are emphasized for visitors and the reasons for these dominant memories. Place theorists such as Yi-Fu Tuan and Michel de Certeau as well as memory theorists such as Maurice Halbwachs, Pierre Nora, and Eric Hobsbawm have influenced the analysis of the project's sources. This inquiry focuses on four palaces: Hampton Court Palace outside London; Edinburgh Castle in the heart of Edinburgh, Scotland; Cardiff Castle in Cardiff, Wales; and Chatsworth House in Devonshire, England. The Victorians have played a large role in determining dominant memories at these sites through their interest in and focus on both the medieval period and objects in the home. Dominant memories discussed focus on the Tudors, medieval military importance, the myth and imagining of the Victorian medieval, the Regency period of Jane Austen, and elite family-home relationships. This study argues that the emphases on certain subjects allow us glimpses into the national spirit (past and present) of the peoples of Britain.
ContributorsDeselms, Alexandra (Author) / Thompson, Victoria (Thesis advisor) / Tebeau, Mark (Committee member) / Warnicke, Retha (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2015
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Scholars of rhetoric, critical intercultural communication, and gender studies have offered productive analyses of how discourses of terror and national security are rooted in racialized juxtapositions between "East" against "West, or "us" and "them." Less frequently examined are the ways that the contemporary marking of terrorist bodies as "savage" Others

Scholars of rhetoric, critical intercultural communication, and gender studies have offered productive analyses of how discourses of terror and national security are rooted in racialized juxtapositions between "East" against "West, or "us" and "them." Less frequently examined are the ways that the contemporary marking of terrorist bodies as "savage" Others to whiteness and western modernity are rooted in settler colonial histories and expansions of US and Anglo-European democracy. Informed by the rhetorical study of publics and public memory, critical race/whiteness studies, and transnational and Indigenous feminisms, this dissertation examines how memoryscapes of civilization and its Others circulate to shape geopolitical belongings in three cases: (1) public memory places in the US Southwest; (2) pro-Israel rhetorics enacted by the US organization Christians United for Israel; and (3) the embodied and mediated protests of European feminist organization FEMEN. In bringing these seemingly unrelated cases together as elements of a larger assemblage, I draw attention to their symbolic and material connectivities, examining the racialized, gendered, national, and imperial logics that move between these sites to shore up the frontiers of whiteness. Specifically, I argue for conceptualizing whiteness as a global assemblage that territorializes through settler colonial memoryscapes that construct "modern" national and global citizen-subjects as those deemed worthy of rights, protection, land, and life against the threatening bodies of Otherness seen to exist outside of the shared times and places of normative democratic citizenship. In doing so, I also examine, more broadly, how assemblage theory extends current approaches to studying rhetoric, public memory, and intercultural communication in global, trans
ational, and (post)colonial contexts.
ContributorsChevrette, Roberta (Author) / Brouwer, Daniel C. (Thesis advisor) / Leong, Karen J. (Committee member) / Hess, Aaron (Committee member) / Nakayama, Thomas (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2016
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The struggle of the National Women’s History Museum (NWHM) to make space for women’s history in the United States is in important ways emblematic of the struggle for recognition and status of American women as a whole. Working at the intersections of digital-material memory production and using the NWHM as

The struggle of the National Women’s History Museum (NWHM) to make space for women’s history in the United States is in important ways emblematic of the struggle for recognition and status of American women as a whole. Working at the intersections of digital-material memory production and using the NWHM as a focus, this dissertation examines the significance of the varied strategies used by and contexts among which the NWHM and entities like it negotiate for digital, material, and rhetorical space within U.S. public memory production. As a “cybermuseum,” the NWHM functions within national public memory production at the intersections of material and digital culture; yet as an activist institution in search of a permanent, physical “home” for women’s history, the NWHM also counterproductively reifies existing gendered norms that make such an achievement difficult. By examining selected aspects of this complexly situated entity, this dissertation makes visible the gendered nature of public memory production, the digital and material components of that production, and the hybrid nature of emerging public memory entities which operate simultaneously in multiple spheres. Adopting an interdisciplinary approach and guided by Carole Blair’s work on rhetorical materiality, this dissertation explores key aspects of the NWHM’s process of becoming, including an examination of the centrality of the interpellation of publics to the rhetorical materiality of public discourse; an analysis of the material state of public memory production in national history museums in the U.S.; and an exploration of the embodied engagement that undergirds all interaction with and presentation of historical artifacts and narratives, whether digital, physical or both at once. In a synthesis of findings, this dissertation describes a set of key characteristics through which certain hybrid digital-material entities (including the NWHM) enact increasingly complex variations of rhetorical agency. These characteristics suggest a need for a more flexible analytic framework, described in the final chapter. This framework takes shape as an heuristic of functions across which digital-material entities always already enact a situated, active, embodied, and simultaneous agency, one that can account fully for the rhetorical processes through which space is “made” for women in U.S. public memory.
ContributorsChabot, Shersta A (Author) / Goggin, Maureen D (Thesis advisor) / Rose, Shirley K. (Committee member) / Long, Elenore (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2017
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This thesis argues that physical landscapes, from intentional sites of memory to average public spaces, play a foundational role in the formation and continuation of the official politics of memory that underpins Serbian cultural memory and collective identity. Thus, in order to understand the complexities of the Serbian collective identity,

This thesis argues that physical landscapes, from intentional sites of memory to average public spaces, play a foundational role in the formation and continuation of the official politics of memory that underpins Serbian cultural memory and collective identity. Thus, in order to understand the complexities of the Serbian collective identity, the landscapes that underpin such an identity must first be understood. Building off prior findings, the three landscapes to be considered relate to three pivotal moments in Serbian nation-building and identity formation: the end of the Ottoman presence, World War II and Yugoslavia, and the wars of the 1990s. This thesis put surveys of Serbian landscapes, which map both sites of remembrance and sites left to be forgotten in Belgrade, as well as oral histories with local young-adult Serbians in conversation in order to elucidate the extent to which individual conceptions of the past and of the Serbian identity correlate to the official politics of memory in Serbia. Young-adult Serbians have been selected, as their only personal experience with each moment of history under consideration is generational memory and state narratives of the past. Ultimately, this study seeks to expand and verify the themes of remembrance found in Serbia as well as understand how the reconstruction of the past, starting from the end of the Ottoman presence to the 1990s war, has figured into the various nation-building projects in Serbia. Building on Halbwachs and Nora, this study understands culture memory as dependent on objectivized culture, like buildings, which naturally challenges the traditional separation of memory and history. Though it does not represent the full Serbian public, this study demonstrates the limited role the physical landscape has in shaping the understanding of the past held by the Serbians interviewees.
ContributorsStull, Madeline (Author) / Manchester, Laurie (Thesis advisor) / Cichopek-Gajraj, Anna (Committee member) / Thompson, Victoria (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2021
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This thesis examines the evolution of the interpretation of the battle of Gettysburg, as well as how the analysis and presentation of the battle by multiple stakeholders have affected the public's understanding of the violence of the engagement and subsequently its understanding of the war's repercussions. While multiple components of

This thesis examines the evolution of the interpretation of the battle of Gettysburg, as well as how the analysis and presentation of the battle by multiple stakeholders have affected the public's understanding of the violence of the engagement and subsequently its understanding of the war's repercussions. While multiple components of the visitor experience are examined throughout this thesis, the majority of analysis focuses on the interpretive wayside signs that dot the landscape throughout the Gettysburg National Military Park. These wayside signs are the creation of the Park Service, and while they are not strictly interpretive in nature, they remain an extremely visible component of the visitor's park experience. As such, they are an important reflection of the interpretive priorities of the Park Service, an agency which is likely the dominant public history entity shaping understanding of the American Civil War. Memory at Gettysburg in the first decades after the battle largely sought to focus on celebratory accounts of the clash that praised the valor of all white combatants as a means of bringing about resolution between the two sides. By focusing on triumphant memories of martial valor in a conflict fought over ambiguous reasons, veterans and the public at large neglected unsettling and difficult conversations. These avoided discussions primarily concerned what the war had really accomplished aside from preserving the Union, as white Americans appeared unwilling to confront the war's abolitionist legacy. Additionally, they avoided discussion of the horrific levels of violence that the war had truly required of its combatants. Reconciliationist memories of the conflict that did not discuss the violence and trauma of combat were thus incorporated into early interpretations of Civil War battlefields, and continued to hinder understanding of the true savagery of combat into the present. This thesis focuses on the presence (or lack thereof) of violence and trauma in the wayside interpretive signage at Gettysburg, and argues that a more active interpretation of the war's remarkably violent and traumatic legacies can assist in dislodging a faulty legacy of reconciliationist remembrance that continues to permeate public memory of the Civil War.
ContributorsPittenger, Jack (Author) / Simpson, Brooks D. (Thesis advisor) / Schermerhorn, Calvin (Committee member) / Dallett, Nancy (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2013
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In speeches, declarations, journals, and convention proceedings, mid-nineteenth-century American woman's rights activists exhorted one another to action as equal heirs of the rights and burdens associated with independence and chided men for failing to live up to the founders' ideals and examples. They likened themselves to oppressed colonists and compared

In speeches, declarations, journals, and convention proceedings, mid-nineteenth-century American woman's rights activists exhorted one another to action as equal heirs of the rights and burdens associated with independence and chided men for failing to live up to the founders' ideals and examples. They likened themselves to oppressed colonists and compared legislators to King George, yet also criticized the patriot fathers for excluding women from civic equality. This dissertation analyzes these invocations of collective memories of the nation's founding, described as Revolutionary heritage rhetoric, in publicly circulated texts produced by woman's rights associations from 1848 to 1890. This organization-driven approach de-centers the rhetoric of the early movement as the intellectual products of a few remarkable women, instead exploring movement rhetoric across the first generation through myriad voices: female and male; native- and foreign-born; those who spoke extemporaneously at conventions along with well-known organizers.

Tracing the use of Revolutionary heritage rhetoric over a fifty-year span reveals that activists’ invocations of the founding were inseparably connected to their willingness to work for racial and class equality along with woman's rights. References to the Revolution and such slogans as “no taxation without representation” could be inclusive or exclusionary, depending upon how they were used and who used them. In the opening decades of the organized woman’s rights movement, claims to a shared Revolutionary heritage reflected larger commitments to racial, class, and gender equality. As organizations within the movement fractured around competing ideas about how to best improve women's lives, activists’ rhetoric changed as well. When the commitment to universal equality gave way to ideologies of race, class, and nativity privilege, references to the founding era morphed into justifications for limited, rather than equal rights. Revolutionary heritage rhetoric largely disappeared from suffrage, education, and pay equity arguments by the late 1880s, replaced by arguments grounded in white, Protestant, female moral superiority.
ContributorsLewis Butterfield, Emily (Author) / Simpson, Brooks (Thesis advisor) / Thompson, Victoria (Committee member) / Schermerhorn, Jack (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2016