This is a research study that explores the kind of pedagogical possibilities that collective remembrance mediated by practices of drama in education, might offer to the work of memory. Under study is a drama-remembrance (an artistic and pedagogical project) that attempts to link significant historical learning with critical remembrance through the classroom drama praxis. Assuming the school as a terrain within which a community of memory is possible, this research is concerned with educational processes that facilitate the understanding of the ‘work of collective memory’. The hypothesis is that through the work of drama framed as a performative practice of remembrance, students can productively explore the work of memory; its functioning, implications and structures. In addition, by manipulating the elements of the art form, it is proposed that students also learn how drama works, its mechanisms and devices. I call this approach “Drama-Remembrance Praxis”, as it constitutes a particular application of theatre to the memory and remembrance framework. This dissertation provides an account of and analyzes key episodes of the research journey of a group of 16 students in a Grade 10 drama class, their drama teacher and myself -a drama artist, researcher and educator- as we collectively explored issues of historical memory through practices of process drama. The setting for this exploration was a project to initiate a drama classroom-based "community of memory" with one class in the Normal-Distrital Maria Montessori School, in Bogotá, Colombia, South America. Participant-researchers worked through questions regarding the public remembrance of the story of the Colombian Afro-descendant Manuel Saturio Valencia, one of last prisoners to be executed by the State before capital punishment was eliminated from Colombia in 1910. As an Afro-descendant, the story of Saturio's life and subsequent execution remains little known in Colombia. Thus at stake in this project was the recovery of forgotten stories, the construction of a more inclusive public memory, and the formation of a critical historical consciousness.

This is a research study that explores the kind of pedagogical possibilities that collective remembrance mediated by practices of drama in education, might offer to the work of memory. Under study is a drama-remembrance (an artistic and pedagogical project) that attempts to link significant historical learning with critical remembrance through the classroom drama praxis. Assuming the school as a terrain within which a community of memory is possible, this research is concerned with educational processes that facilitate the understanding of the ‘work of collective memory’. The hypothesis is that through the work of drama framed as a performative practice of remembrance, students can productively explore the work of memory; its functioning, implications and structures. In addition, by manipulating the elements of the art form, it is proposed that students also learn how drama works, its mechanisms and devices. I call this approach “Drama-Remembrance Praxis”, as it constitutes a particular application of theatre to the memory and remembrance framework. This dissertation provides an account of and analyzes key episodes of the research journey of a group of 16 students in a Grade 10 drama class, their drama teacher and myself -a drama artist, researcher and educator- as we collectively explored issues of historical memory through practices of process drama. The setting for this exploration was a project to initiate a drama classroom-based "community of memory" with one class in the Normal-Distrital Maria Montessori School, in Bogotá, Colombia, South America. Participant-researchers worked through questions regarding the public remembrance of the story of the Colombian Afro-descendant Manuel Saturio Valencia, one of last prisoners to be executed by the State before capital punishment was eliminated from Colombia in 1910. As an Afro-descendant, the story of Saturio's life and subsequent execution remains little known in Colombia. Thus at stake in this project was the recovery of forgotten stories, the construction of a more inclusive public memory, and the formation of a critical historical consciousness.

This dissertation will examine the speech practices of collectives of Ixhil Mayas in post-war Guatemala. Specifically I analyze the way that historical memory of the recent period of violence, which culminated in genocide in the 1980s, is encoded in Ixhil ways of speaking and constitutes social action among Ixhil collectives. I propose an ethnographically situated framework within which to consider Ixhil historical memory which includes Ixhil concern for relationships with the dead, proper treatment of cornfields, innovations on community practices that were threatened during the war, and discourses about the injustice of an unarmed population confronted with armed soldiers of the government of Guatemala. Such a framework critiques views that see historic memory as externally imposed or as a manifestation of trauma and brokenness. Rather, the framework I offer allows us to see how discourses of historical memory make use of the resources of the Ixhil language and the conventions of various Ixhil ways of speaking in order to continue to constitute Ixhil communities and the collectives of political society. In this dissertation I likewise propose a broader view of the politics arising from Ixhil historical memory. In addition to the simultaneously spiritual and overtly political reburial ceremonies for the wartime dead, political rallies, and formal exhumations, the post-war politics of historical memory includes a proliferation of community-based organizations which have begun to take key positions in Ixhil communities. Ixhil genres of prayer, political speech, meeting talk, collective narratives, funeral speeches, and the talk used when visiting the sick provide the discursive tools to encode historical memory and new forms of community. In the aftermath of genocide that sought to destroy Mayas’ ability to exist as a collective, these acts of community-making among groups formed in response to the peace accords offer a version of post-war politics of historical memory. / text

Postwar Guatemala continues to contend with ongoing criminal and state violence, insecurity, racial exclusion and disparity, exacerbated by neoliberal and neocolonial economic policies. These patterns are rooted in centuries of colonial exploitation that intensified in genocide against the Mayan and other indigenous peoples in the early eighties. This thesis explores Maya Achi youth interpretations of the historical and contemporary roots of violence through their interaction with the mandates and practice of the New Hope Foundation Intercultural Bilingual Institute in Rabinal. The institute combines historical memory, a participatory methodology, and cultural revitalization within an intercultural framework. By embracing institute themes of interculturalism, citizenship, leadership and cooperative learning, participants provide insight into the potential to transform structural violence through the promotion of alternative visions of grassroots development and reweaving community in this rural municipality, still impacted by the traumas of armed conflict.

This dissertation investigates the relationship between György Ligeti’s soundmass works and the musical past. After his emigration in 1956, Ligeti (1923-2006) gained renown for his sound-mass style, exemplified in works such as Apparitions (1958- 59), Atmosphères (1961), Requiem (1963-65) and Lontano (1967). These works minimize the perceptual salience of melody, rhythm and harmony, instead foregrounding orchestral clusters and thus suggesting that timbre is the central compositional issue. Despite his immersion in the creative atmosphere of the Darmstadt circle, Ligeti’s soundmass works diverged from the serial, pointillist style that preoccupied the European avant-garde at the time. However, I argue that Ligeti’s distance from the Darmstadt avant-garde is only apparent. In fact, this milieu served as his primary socio-cultural reference point after his emigration. The concept of “historical memory,” following from the work of French sociologist Maurice Halbwachs (1877-1945), suggests that Ligeti’s understanding of the musical past was deeply shaped by the collective interpretations in circulation amongst the Darmstadt avant-garde circle. Analysis of Ligeti’s sketches, writings and scores shows that he recollected historical influences that were important in the discourses of his milieu and redeployed them in his sound-mass works. For example, Ligeti’s Apparitions shows traces of the analyses of Debussy’s Jeux that were produced by Herbert Eimert and Karlheinz Stockhausen. Atmosphères, though it is an acoustic work, reflects the collective representation of electronic music that had developed at the Westdeutscher Rundfunk studio in Cologne. The Darmstadt composers’ sustained interest in the concept of Klangfarbenmelodie, as practiced by both Schoenberg and Webern, informs Ligeti’s use of timbre in Lontano and the Cello Concerto. Finally, Ligeti capitalizes upon the popularity of Webern around Darmstadt, using Webern’s music as an opportunity to recast Bartók’s achievements to his new Western European colleagues in the Requiem. Ligeti’s renegotiation of the musical past, within the discourses of his Darmstadt avantgarde milieu, was crucial for his composition of the sound-mass works. / text

This thesis uses the example of Yugoslavia-the land of the South Slavs (also known as the Balkans) - to study how the twists and turns of historical evolution have been reflected in communal understanding of that history.

This thesis uses the example of Yugoslavia-the land of the South Slavs (also known as the Balkans) - to study how the twists and turns of historical evolution have been reflected in communal understanding of that history.

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This project addresses the Republic of Serbia’s current accession negotiations with the European Union, and asks how the country’s long and often turbulent history affects that dialogue. Using Filip Ejdus’ concept of historical memory and Benedict Anderson’s “imagined community” theory of nationalism, this paper discusses how Serbia has reached a critical moment in its history by pursuing European integration. This contradicts their historical pull towards their longtime ally Russia. What role does historical memory play in these negotiations, and is integration truly possible? Additionally, how is Serbia’s powerful president, Aleksandar Vucic, using the Europeanization process to strengthen his hand domestically? / Master of Arts / This thesis addresses the Republic of Serbia’s current accession negotiations with the European Union, and asks how the country’s long and often turbulent history affects that dialogue. I argue that Serbia is at a crossroads in its history: on one hand, it wishes to join the European Union, but on the other is continually pulled to the east with their historical ally, Russia. I argue that President Aleksandar Vucic is using the EU negotiations to enhance his own power and that if the EU admits Serbia into the body they will be trading regional stability for Serbian democracy.

This dissertation adds to the discussion of historical memory in Spain regarding the Spanish Civil War and the Franco dictatorship by examining three texts published between 2000 and 2004: Las esquinas del aire: En busca de Ana María Martínez Sagi (2000) by Juan Manuel de Prada; Soldados de Salamina (2001) by Javier Cercas; and El vano ayer (2004) by Isaac Rosa. I argue that these texts exemplify a unique tendency in the literature of historical memory that articulates the act of remembering through new narrative and ethical postures born of what I term journalistic affect. This dissertation identifies the tendency beginning in the early 2000s for fiction to articulate the act of remembering through the compilation and examination of truth objects. Not only do the truth objects shape the narrative of these novels, endowing the act of remembering with real-world consequences, but also the truths are embodied in objects thereby locating them outside the framework of contestable speech acts. Moreover, the search for and collection of these objects operate within a journalistic epistemological framework in that the authors or protagonists use the truth(s) embodied in one object to locate another, resulting in the act of assembling a constellation of embodied truths and the shaping of a more holistic understanding of the individual that is the aim of the search. The protagonists in these novels have to search for the modernizing discourses that never took root in a Francoist Spain that never entirely faded away, never had an overt counter-revolution, and never proved itself completely criminal on the public stage the way other nationalist dictatorships in Europe and Latin America had. They show us a Spain that has to catch up with discourses about ethnicity, gender (homosexuality), rural/urban spaces in modernization, and an historical iconography for nationhood that had not essentially been renovated since the mid 1960s. As such, the individuals in these works see an inherent lack in the Europeanized Spain that has been culturally colonized by the continent, a situation that engenders a need to reevaluate a national subject position largely frozen since 1939. / text