Browsing by Subject "Archive"
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Item After the archive : framing cultural memory in ex-Yugoslav collections(2013-12) Kotecki, Kristine Elisa; Cvetkovich, Ann, 1957-; Carter, Mia; Hoad, Neville; Kuzmic, Tatiana; Shingavi, SnehalUpon Yugoslavia’s breakup into five successor states in the 1990s, its national archives also divided according to the new national borders. This re-ordering of institutional history took most dramatic form in the systematic destruction of the archival records held by Bosnia-Herzegovina; incendiary shells destroyed the holdings of its National Library in 1992. In contrast to the national divisions that “balkanized” and obliterated the archives, ex-Yugoslav compilations draw works from and about the region together. This dissertation analyzes the collections that formed as “alternative archives” in response to Yugoslavia’s dissolution and tracks how individual works within these collections are translated and reframed as they circulate internationally. It argues that distinct texts gathered together into the unit of the collection can effectively convey the complexity and contradiction of ex-Yugoslav cultural politics. Whereas compilations of texts of texts identified as representing various nationalities approximate international alliance through unities such as “internationals women’s solidarity,” “European unification” and “Yugoslav reunification,” close reading of the texts juxtaposed within the collections can also complicate the progressive solidarity that frames them. Ex-Yugoslav collections of print and film, and the situated interpretations they engender, provide a rich archive of responses to the post-Cold-War transition toward globalization and Europeanization in the midst of ethnic and religious extremism. In this project, I describe the “collection” as the product of gathering individual texts together, arranging them, and framing them with a unifying narrative. Literary anthologies, library archives, museum exhibits and film programs at festivals thus all function as collections, or archives, of cultural materials formed during and after Yugoslavia’s dissolution. I argue that the works in these collections reflect forms of organization and alliance that disrupt the common sense of existing geopolitical alignment and put pressure on normative desires for a post-Yugoslav future based on European attachments.Item "And one lucky bastard who’s the artist" : V. I. Lenin and Oscar Wilde's ideologico-aesthetic debate in Tom Stoppard's Travesties(2015-05) Stewart, Charles III, M.A.; Loehlin, James N.; Kornhaber, David DTom Stoppard's play Travesties was revised considerably between its first edition of 1975 and the new edition of 1994, with the parts pertaining to V. I. Lenin and Marxism bearing the brunt of the cuts. The political fall of Marxism is not sufficient to account for these cuts since the play occurs in 1974 via the erratic memory of Henry Carr, a minor official at the British consulate in Zurich in 1917. The published textual history of Travesties is also insufficient to account for Lenin's diminishment. The archive of the play's composition at the Harry Ransom Center at the University of Texas at Austin provides a more detailed history of the play's debate over whether or not an artist can also be a revolutionary, suggesting that the debate can be reduced to two sides, one representing the subversive wit of Oscar Wilde via the intertext The Importance of Being Earnest and the other Leninist-Marxist functional-revolutionary aesthetics. The genius of Wilde functions like an ideologico-aesthetic edifice, manipulating the action to maintain its hegemonic position via theatrical devices in three main ways. Joyce, Tzara, and Carr are pitted against each other in order to split the Wildean aesthetic that makes a claim to the inextricable linkage of freedom and subversion in a sort of aesthetic Bunburyism, which displaces the terms of the debate from an ontology of the artist to the ethics of art. The 'time slip' device simultaneously lets us enjoy and neutralizes the obscene underside of Wildean subversive wit by allowing the play to go "off the rails" (12) and quickly rebound to a state of normalcy. These previous two features represent an effort to demonize Lenin by denying the subversive creativity he shows in the pursuit of his goals. Travesties, in its valorization of detached subversive wit, answers the question of whether an artist can simultaneously be a revolutionary with a dizzying 'no.'Item Archiving the present in Beirut’s southern suburb : memory, history, and power at Umam Documentation and Research(2016-05) Maddox, Katherine Nora; Merabet, Sofian, 1972-; Asdar Ali, KamranUmam Documentation and Research, a private archive and non-governmental organization located in the Beirut’s southern suburb, states as its goal to “initiate collective reflection on the many different types of violence that plagued Lebanon’s past, weighs heavily on its present, and has [sic] the potential to influence its future as well.” This thesis seeks to interrogate the spaces and narratives that influence Umam D&R’s work as well as to analyze the forms and concepts in contemporary Lebanon that inform it. It begins with a description of the historic home, Villa Slim, in which the organization’s office and a large part of the archive are housed. From there, it shifts to focus on The Hangar and its relationship to the broader arts and culture milieu that emerged in Beirut following the Lebanese civil war (1975-91). Finally, it addresses questions of intention and authenticity in the production of history through a comparison between Umam D&R’s work and the art of Lebanese artist Walid Raad, which also focuses on constructing and archiving memories of Lebanese conflicts. Through these three spheres of Umam D&R’s work, I will explore the underlying currents of their project – to intervene in the dominant historical narrative through conceptual efforts grounded in the discourse of documents and facts. Just as specific spaces shape Umam D&R’s work, certain notions of “truth” and “history” effect the way they construct the past through their multifaceted projects, which engage the present by projecting images onto the future, attempting to spark possibilities.Item Based on a true story : "The Gezi Film Poster Series" and the role of narrative in cultural history(2015-05) Aksu, Leyla Aylin; Straubhaar, Joseph D.; Fuller, KathrynFocusing on a series of hypothetical film posters titled the "Gezi Movie Theatre Poster Series," commissioned by Istanbul's independent magazine Bant Mag, this thesis is a multi-methodological, exploratory case study utilizing ethnographic methods, as well as visual, textual, and document analysis. The posters within this series narrativize and encapsulate instances that took shape on the ground during the Gezi protests in Turkey in the Summer of 2013. Embodying the confluence of larger contextual events through the micro-lens of a singular organization and cultural product, the series provides an instance in which key and complex factors regarding social structure, political activism, and cultural production come together in the form of visual narrative. This undertaken analysis seeks to bring together theoretical constructs of social structure, historicization, alternative media and cultural resistance, material culture, artistic creation, and the imaginary, and apply them, in order, to Turkey, Gezi, Bant Mag, and the posters themselves, in order to create an understanding of how they each play a role within the series and its archival formation. Utilizing a critical analytical framework by focusing on the series as art, artifact, and action, after firmly contextually situating the film poster series within Bant Mag's own organizational framework, internal discourse, and history as a magazine, zine, and online resource, this study hopes to demonstrate the affordances of art, imagination, and subjectivity in the creation, documentation, and conservation of historical micro-narratives.Item Digging through time: psychogeographies of occupation(2015-12) Simblist, Noah Leon; Reynolds, Ann Morris; El-Ariss, Tarek; Mulder, Stephennie; Di-Capua, Yoav; Flaherty, GeorgeThis dissertation is about the relationship between contemporary art and politics in the case of Israel-Palestine and Lebanon. Specifically, I look at the ways that artists have dealt with the history of this region and its impact on the present, using four moments as the subject of the following chapters: ancient Palestine, the Holocaust, The nakba, and the 1982 Israeli invasion of Lebanon. The historiographical impulse has a particular resonance for artists making work about the Middle East, a political space where competing historical narratives are the basis for disagreements about sovereignty. I focus on works by Avi Mograbi, Gilad Efrat, Ayreen Anastas, Amir Yatziv, Yael Bartana, Omer Fast, Khaled Hourani, Dor Guez, Campus in Camps, and Akram Zaatari. A number of patterns emerge when we look at how these artists approach history. One is the tendency for artists to act like historians. As a subset of this tendency is the archival impulse, wherein artists use found photographs, film or documents to intervene in normative representations of history. Another is for artists to act like archaeologists, digging up repressed histories. Another is to commemorate a traumatic event in a way that rejects traditional forms of memorialization such as monuments. At the core of each chapter are examples of artistic practices that use conversation as a medium. I analyze these conversations about history as a dialogical practice and argue that this methodology offers a uniquely productive opportunity to work through the ideologies embedded within the psychogeographies of Israel-Palestine and Lebanon. Within these conversations and other aesthetic structures, I argue that these artists emphasize the all too common challenge in producing new forms of civic imagination – the tendency to address historical trauma though repetition compulsion and melancholia. They react to this challenge by engaging collective memory, producing counter-memories and, in some cases, produce counterpublics.Item Joseph Cornell's "Clowns, elephants and ballerinas" : archive and performance(2012-05) Welch, Elizabeth Jean; Reynolds, Ann Morris; Henderson, LindaIn this thesis, I explore the June 1946 issue of Dance Index: Joseph Cornell’s “Clowns, Elephants and Ballerinas.” Through the archive of materials collected and presented by Cornell, I attempt to understand the histories of performance offered to the magazine’s readers. Despite the rich field of scholarship dedicated to Cornell and his art, very little work has been dedicated to his contributions to Dance Index. I interpret “Clowns, Elephants and Ballerinas” as both a collage and a series of histories, and I present the magazine as a serious work in Cornell’s oeuvre. I also endeavor to provide an understanding of Cornell’s working method, his sense of history, and the ways his juxtapositions of word and image provide meaning to readers. Weaving together the visual and textual, contemporary and historical, Cornell explores performance legacies, American and European exchange, and pantomime, dance, and circus performance tradition through this magazine issue. Cornell uses each of his diverse materials to explore larger social and political issues as well as artistic traditions. “Clowns, Elephants and Ballerinas” represents a crystallization of a moment in one of his many “explorations.”Item Moving in Choctaw time : baseball and the archive in LeAnne Howe’s Miko Kings : An Indian Baseball Story(2012-05) Lederman, Emily Ann 1985-; Cox, James H. (James Howard), 1968-; Cvetkovich, AnnLeAnne Howe’s second novel, Miko Kings: An Indian Baseball Story (2007), brings together story, theory, performance, and document to create an archive that positions American Indians in the center and foundation of American culture, shifting the meaning of the “All-American Pastime” and reclaiming baseball’s American Indian history and pre-colonial existence. While a student at boarding school, Choctaw time theorist Ezol Day draws a picture of a tree with an eye at its base and six others floating around its seven branches, gazing in multiple directions. She refers to this tree as a part of herself that allows her to see patterns and develop theories of relativity based on Choctaw temporality. I read this image as indicating a particular depth of sight, representative of looking around, beyond, and through colonial archives and histories to form a Choctaw archive, an act that I argue is part of the project of Howe’s text. In this paper, I use the eye tree as a theoretical lens to examine how Choctaw storytelling and temporality can reframe colonial documents so that they tell a different history. Reading through colonial archives demonstrates their instability; in other words, using these documents to see American Indian histories renders clear the narrow construction of colonial narratives. The histories seen through this archive allow a reimagining of the past that impacts the present, as Howe’s novel suggests that engaging with these histories can strengthen a sense of Choctaw identity and nationhood. Miko Kings presents archiving as an active process of creation that has far-reaching implications across time and space.Item Performing unreachable bodies : the politics of encounter in Alison Bechdel's Fun home(2010-05) Francica, Cynthia Alicia; Cvetkovich, Ann, 1957-; Moore, Lisa L.Readings of Fun Home thus far have tended to focus on the representation of Alison Bechdel’s traumatic life experiences and on the ways in which the memoir bears witness to that trauma. While Jennifer Lemberg explores the role of drawing in overcoming the difficulty or impossibility of naming the traumatic experiences Alison undergoes (135), Ann Cvetkovich draws attention to the cultural and political work the memoir performs by making space for everyday life histories of trauma and for accounts of forbidden, pathologized desires (111). I would like to explore the ways in which Fun Home foregrounds those illicit desires, and performs that political work, not only through the telling of Alison’s story but, more specifically, by mobilizing the reader’s affective capabilities in the face of what may be read as surprising, emotionally charged objects and situations. I suggest that Bechdel’s memoir boldly sets the stage for an affective and cognitive encounter with out-of-bounds, unapproachable bodies and histories. Our assumptions about hetero and homonormativity, as well as our conception of home and the family as heterosexual, normative spaces, are interrogated in and through those encounters. I analyze the fundamental role of the graphic narrative form, and the employment of archival objects and elements of performance in particular, in setting the stage for the reader’s affective encounter with Alison’s family history.Item Real vs. imaginary users: measuring the impact of home movie collections on historical scholarship(2014-08) Treat, Laura Jean; Galloway, Patricia Kay; Frick, CarolineIn the past thirty years, a growing community has emerged to advocate for the preservation and recognition of home movie collections based on their historical significance. Despite the significant cost of preserving and providing access to these collections and the myriad challenges they pose to archivists and researchers, no substantive research exists that evaluates their actual scholarly use or impact. Through a publication analysis and a survey of the Association of Moving Image Archivists, I sought to determine if there is a difference between whom archivists think should be using home movie collections and who is actually them. Though my findings suggest that home movies have yet to impact the scholarly work of historians, I offer recommendations for future research and professional development that may encourage increased scholarly use as well as increased collaboration between archivists and historians.Item Using online primary source resources in fostering historical thinking skills : the pre-service social studies teachers’ understanding(2010-05) Liaw, Hongming; Resta, Paul E.; Salinas, Cinthia; Liu, Min; Hughes, Joan; Galloway, Patricia K.This dissertation entailed a qualitative case study on the confluence of technology and social studies in fostering a constructivist education. Through the examination of pre-service social studies teachers’ understanding of the online primary source resources (OPSR), three themes emerged. The first exposed the fragmented understanding of important pedagogical theories of constructivism and historical thinking among participants; the second suggested that OPSR was mostly valued by pre-service teachers for its provision of primary sources; and the third related to how pre-service teachers viewed the current state of technology and context as problematic for technology integration. Accordingly, four findings were revealed. First, the pre-service teachers in the study demonstrated a limited understanding of the application of foundational theories central to their field of study; second, there were instances of deeper appreciation of the potential of OPSR, indicating that pre-service teachers’ theoretical understanding is ix nascent and may deepen overtime; third, the full potential of technologies such as OPSR was not recognized; and fourth, the pre-service teachers’ perceptions of school and educational system conditions tended to negatively influence their views toward the integration of technology into their teaching practices. Implications indicate that first, foundational pedagogical theories are critical with regard to technology integration in education and as such teacher preparation programs must not assume what is taught is what is learned; second, instances of deeper understanding among pre-service teachers only appeared during the application of their theoretical understandings; third, context is critical in how OPSR would be used in classrooms and such contextual issues must not be ignored by teacher preparation programs; and fourth, teachers’ technological pedagogical content knowledge (PCK/TPCK) is critical in the integration of technology in education.