abstract: ABSTRACT The Wesley Bolin Memorial Plaza is located across the street from the state capitol building in Phoenix, Arizona. Here, pieces of Arizona’s history are commemorated through monuments and memorials. Monuments and memorials reflect how people have conceived their collective identity, especially when those choices are made in public spaces. The markers in the Wesley Bolin Plaza reflect the changing identity of Arizonans, both locally and in connection to national identity. Over time, they have become crucial to shaping the landscape and the historical memory of the city, state, or country. Of note, the memorials on the Arizona State Capitol grounds are unique in how they are placed all together in a park directly across the street. In 1976, the Wesley Bolin Memorial Plaza emerged through a conversation with broader currents in the region’s and nation’s history. Over time, the plaza has become a sacred space because so many of its memorials include relics and artifacts, or list the names of those who have lost their lives in their service to Arizona. In these ways the plaza became a landscape of memory where visitors come to remember and honor those people and parts of Arizona history. The memorial plaza also influences Arizonans’ knowledge of history. It engenders a local as well as a national loyalty and identity in its citizens and visitors. By researching the history of several of the prominent monuments and memorials in the plaza, I discovered a rich history and an intriguing story behind each one that is built. Most monuments and memorials are commemorating complex events or people in history, yet have only short inscriptions on them. As a result, much of the historical narrative, complexities, and symbolism can be lost. My purpose is to tell the story of the plaza, these memorials, and their history; highlighting their significance to Arizonans and explaining how the monuments and memorials fit into the larger story of historical commemoration. / Dissertation/Thesis / Masters Thesis History 2019

This dissertation examines commemoration of Russian poet Aleksandr Sergeevich Pushkin from the late Soviet period to the present, as a study of the nature and function of literary commemoration in a time of social, political, and economic instability. Since its inception in the late nineteenth century, the Pushkin cult has been Russia’s largest-scale government-sanctioned literary cult, showing remarkable endurance through the transitions from imperial to Soviet rule and then from Soviet to capitalist rule. In the post-Soviet context, Pushkin-related commemoration and the resulting debates address a key question in Russian culture: can old literary “heroes” continue to play a central role in national identity in a society that no longer grants central political importance to literature? If they do retain a broader political and social significance, how are they used to navigate nostalgia, on one hand, and a sense of cultural exhaustion, on the other? Scrutiny of the Pushkin myth today demonstrates how postmodernism and irony have been turned to the re-stabilization of an authoritative discourse about identity, which nonetheless continuously provokes parody and satire. I also examine the recently formed “cult” of Sergei Dovlatov (1941-1990), a late Soviet prose writer who was unable to publish his work at home and immigrated to the US, under government pressure, in 1979. Pushkin is central to Russia’s image of Dovlatov, who spent time working as a tour guide at the Pushkin estate museum in Pskov oblast in the 1970s and wrote a satirical novel about the experience, which I analyze alongside real-life accounts of the estate museum. Dovlatov achieved huge posthumous popularity in Russia almost immediately after his death, and is now the object of a distinctively post-Soviet literary cult, which I discuss in relation to the evolving Pushkin cult. In this way, I illuminate the peculiarities of Russian writer cults during a period when the social status of literature declined dramatically. I conclude that the Dovlatov cult serves as a vehicle for a carefully circumscribed variety of Soviet nostalgia, one that admits the many failings of the Soviet Union while also recalling many of its aspects with fondness and regret. As with Pushkin, the Dovlatov cult is used to create the impression of reconciliation among discordant political epochs and ideologies. My study of the Pushkin and Dovlatov cults is organized around two types of literary commemoration, both of which have deep roots in European culture: the jubilee, or anniversary celebration, and the literary house museum. I begin with a detailed study of the almost-forgotten 1999 Pushkin jubilee, the first large-scale post-Soviet Pushkin celebration. My analysis of the jubilee and the reactions it provoked from the press and the intelligentsia shows that while the jubilee was widely derided, it unintentionally united diverse factions of the press and intelligentsia, who banded together to defend Pushkin against exploitation by Russia’s new political elite. However, many writers also saw the jubilee as a confirmation that the possibilities of Russian literature had been exhausted: I explore some literary responses to this fear in my second chapter. I then move to Pushkin house museums, showing how they express different aspects of the Pushkin myth and Russian “national idea.” I show how the recently founded Dovlatov House museum, like the Dovlatov cult more broadly, parodies the Pushkin cult while also reinforcing many of the basic practices and purposes of Pushkin worship.

This research investigates particular ways that memorialising and mourning can be made manifest through public commemorative objects and spaces such as memorials and through smaller scale personal mementos. It also examines ways that these physical reminders can act as repositories and markers for memory, and as metaphors for identity. In particular the research is focussed on Traditional Southern Italian customs, reflecting on the ways that keepsakes and the cenotaph can provide allegories for declining cultural practices of Southern Italian migrants in Australia. The data collected for this thesis is based partly on participant observation, and on informal conversations with migrants from Southern Italy, regarding their funerary practices and stories told about the rural areas left behind in Italy. Research of visual and published material in the area of memorialising and memorial object are examined in order to gain an understanding of the language of death. The thesis also examines the use of Catholic religious objects in what anthropologist Per Binde has coined 'transactional acts', during supplication and remembrance and during times of mourning. An exploration of memorial and memento objects, by contemporary practitioners including Christian Boltanski, Lindy Lee, Julie Blyfield and Maya Lin has also been included. Inclusion of contemporary artists reflects on how memorials continue to play an important role in today's society as well as being integral in reflecting identity and maintaining connections with the past. Investigation of this genre is expressed through the research document and a body of studio-based research connected to the traditions of Memorialising. The studio research is expressed in the exhibition 'In Black' through the language of Catholic religious objects, memory boxes, personal mementos and cultural signifiers in wax, metal, and installation. These works, as time capsules are filled with significant representations of individuals and events that evoke memories through depictions of life, significant places and words descriptive of time and place.

Harm minimisation approaches to illicit drug use have proven extremely successful in reducing drug-related harm and improving health outcomes for those using drugs, their families and the broader community. Despite these successes, however, many harm minimisation programmes face strong community opposition, and many others are limited in their effectiveness by their reluctance to acknowledge the complex ways in which drug using contexts, social relationships, desire, pleasure and aesthetics are involved in the production and reduction of drug-related harm.[NP] Deleuze and Guattari’s ethico-aesthetic philosophy offers a conceptual framework through which to begin to grapple with the sensory and affective elements of illicit drug use and their implications for an embodied ethics. Following an introduction to their key concepts, this thesis explores the implications of their ontology for understandings of injecting drug use across four inter-related dimensions: the drug using body; urban spaces of injecting; public overdose memorials; and drug referenced, ‘heroin chic’ advertising imagery. It argues that aesthetics and ethics are complexly intertwined, and that ethically positive responses to drug use require an active appreciation of the ways in which aesthetics affect bodies and their capacities to form relations with others

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Were it not for mankind’s memory of Historic events there would be no need for the preservation and commemoration of those events and according to Nietzsche - the 19th century German philosopher - in order for the memory to remain it must cease to hurt (Dubow 2001). There is a process then by which tragic events and traumatic memories are eased into memory and it’s often the memorial which serves this “Cathartic Function” (Snyman 1999) removing the hurt and allowing the memory to live on, a process which is “necessary for survival” (Snyman 1999) Crain Soudien - author of Emerging discourses around identity in new South African museum exhibitions - has identified that in representing the new South Africa a particular politics of memory has surfaced “Consisting on the one hand, of discourses of nostalgia, and, on the other, discourses of reconstruction” (Crain 2008). In this treatise government policies are looked at briefly as a way to understand the dialogue of nostalgia, but the focus is on the latter; the discourse of ‘reconstruction’, the issues associated with reconstruction and construction and the mediums through which this has been or will be achieved both on an international and local platform. Having achieved this, a case will be made for the South African Anglo Boer wars and a discourse for the preservation and commemoration of this historic event will be sought. The South African Anglo Boer Wars of: 1881 and 1899 - 1902 dramatically changed the landscape of South Africa for ever. Originally known as the Boer War or even the Anglo Boer War the name was officially changed to the South African War before 1999 as the years 1999 to 2002 was the period of ‘Boer War’ centenaries. It was envisaged that the name change would better reflect the constitutional policy of all-inclusiveness in South Africa among fears that any centenary celebrations would be a sectarian affair as many considered, up until Peter Warwick produced his seminal study dispelling the “old hoary argument that this was essentially a “white man’s war” (Starfield, 2001) that the Anglo Boer War was a whites on whites War. This policy fell under a mandate known as the National Legacy Project (Marschall, personal communication) along with various other heritage projects. The South African Anglo Boer War - as it is often officially called - and its battlefields are protected under national heritage legislation and are therefore a determinant of our national identity. The battles of 1881 are precursors to the Great Boer War and are thus included. It is in this light that this study of heritage portrayal and celebration finds its case, in order to determine a design model for the preservation and commemoration of a part of our nations’ identity for generations to come. The theoretical framework determined to achieve this considers conceptual deliberations on: Issues of design, and mediums of design revealed in a range of precedents deliberately centred on the built environment as 'the museum or memorial is intended to create a setting for the projection of memory onto a built form providing a new linkage between memory and space” (Reconstructing Recollection 2000 cited by Mudenge 2006) Preservation and Commemoration: to keep alive or in existence; make lasting: to preserve our liberties as free citizens. and a service, celebration, etc., in memory of some person or event. Heritage: something that comes or belongs to one by reason of birth; an inherited lot or portion: a heritage of poverty and suffering; a national heritage of honour, pride, and courage. / Thesis (M.Arch.)-University of KwaZulu-Natal, Durban, 2010.

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Mode of access: World Wide Web. / Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Hawaii at Manoa, 2004. / Includes bibliographical references (leaves 353-376). / Electronic reproduction. / Also available by subscription via World Wide Web / iv, 376 leaves, bound 29 cm

This research investigates particular ways that memorialising and mourning can be made manifest through public commemorative objects and spaces such as memorials and through smaller scale personal mementos. It also examines ways that these physical reminders can act as repositories and markers for memory, and as metaphors for identity. In particular the research is focussed on Traditional Southern Italian customs, reflecting on the ways that keepsakes and the cenotaph can provide allegories for declining cultural practices of Southern Italian migrants in Australia. The data collected for this thesis is based partly on participant observation, and on informal conversations with migrants from Southern Italy, regarding their funerary practices and stories told about the rural areas left behind in Italy. Research of visual and published material in the area of memorialising and memorial object are examined in order to gain an understanding of the language of death. The thesis also examines the use of Catholic religious objects in what anthropologist Per Binde has coined 'transactional acts', during supplication and remembrance and during times of mourning. An exploration of memorial and memento objects, by contemporary practitioners including Christian Boltanski, Lindy Lee, Julie Blyfield and Maya Lin has also been included. Inclusion of contemporary artists reflects on how memorials continue to play an important role in today's society as well as being integral in reflecting identity and maintaining connections with the past. Investigation of this genre is expressed through the research document and a body of studio-based research connected to the traditions of Memorialising. The studio research is expressed in the exhibition 'In Black' through the language of Catholic religious objects, memory boxes, personal mementos and cultural signifiers in wax, metal, and installation. These works, as time capsules are filled with significant representations of individuals and events that evoke memories through depictions of life, significant places and words descriptive of time and place.