Current scholarship recognizes that music is a powerful channel that can manifest individual identity. But such research takes for granted music as a symbol of collective cultural identity, and, therefore, neglects examining how music in general, but musical performance in particular, functions to produce and reproduce a society at large. Indeed, what is missing is a rigorous understanding of not only how the act of performing forms collective identity, but also how it acts as an agency, indeed, perhaps the only agency that enables this process. As Thomas Turino suggests, externalized musical practice can facilitate the creation of emergent cultural identities, and help in forming life in new cultural surroundings. The present thesis examines the dynamics between cultural identity and music from the perspective of the performing musician. By examining musical situations in the context of the Armenian – Canadian diaspora, I will show how performers themselves both evoke feelings of nostalgia for the homeland and maintain the traditions of their culture through the performance event, while simultaneously serving as cultural ambassadors for the Armenian – Canadian community. My thesis outlines four key themes that are crucial in understanding the roles of musicians in Armenian culture. They are tradition bearer, educator, cultural ambassador, and artisan. As boundaries between peoples and nations progressively blur, I conclude that performance proves a vital medium where a search for national identity can occur, frequently resulting in the realization of one’s ethnic identity. Ultimately, without the labors of the performing musician, music would be unable to do the social work that is necessary in forming cultural, social, or even personal identities.

In a 1954 Library Science textbook author Ernestine Rose asked her readers to ponder whether the public library is either “unique and indispensable“ or “incidental and pleasant—the frills on our civic costume”. Over sixty-five years later these opposite constructs are still valid to frame my thesis with the questions, What is important about a library, What does it mean and to whom does it matter?

Este trabajo explora los temas de la nostalgia y la amnesia, de los africanos inmigrantes así como de los españoles, representados en tres películas contemporáneas españolas que se tratan de la inmigración de los africanos a España. Va a explorar estos temas de la amnesia y la nostalgia a través de los pasos de un inmigrante africano – 1ª paso) el viaje difícil de África a España, 2ª paso) la vida del inmigrante dentro de España, y 3ª paso) el regreso a África - como representados, respectivamente, en las siguientes películas: 14 kilómetros (2008), Said (1998), y Pobladores (2006).

Tails & Tales is a collection of work that explores the construction of identity within a contemporary painting practice. Based on an autobiographical use of my own body as source material, this series of paintings and drawings incorporates narrative strategies of representation alongside imagery that is reminiscent of childhood states of being.<p>This thesis exhibition and support paper explore the liminal period of pre-adolescence and poses questions about the positing of identity. There is a focus on the construction of masculinities and sexualities, with a particular interest in how cultural, social, and moral norms are encoded into being.

Face2Face is a photographic project realized by JR, an undercover photographer and Marco, a technology consultant, in 2007 in the Middle East context. It consisted of taking the portraits of Israeli and Palestinian people who were doing the same job, printing them in huge formats and putting them on various unavoidable places in Israeli and Palestinian cities. The project was based on the idea that Israeli and Palestinian people were so much similar to each other, as if they were &lsquo / twin brothers raised in different families&rsquo / but that they were not aware of that. Therefore, the artists decided to provide them with images of the other side which would make people be surprised, laugh, stop for a while and think about the other side once again. The artists hoped that such a reworking of the ideas about the other side would hopefully motivate people to enter into dialogue with each other, which would eventually end up in peaceful co-existence. This thesis sets this photographic project as its starting point. It focuses upon its conceptualization of dialogue, which is based on the idea of seeing the other from a new perspective, and compares it with Mikhail Bakhtin&rsquo / s concept of dialogue and Emmanuel Levinas&rsquo / s concept of face-to-face, which are based on the idea of disrupting the self. It then criticizes the project for its neglect of various dimensions which shape Israeli and Palestinian identities, such as diaspora, nostalgia and home and of the heavy burden of the past on these two communities&rsquo / present. As a result, the thesis focuses upon the concept of collective memory at length and then discusses photography at the service of collective memory. Another section is devoted to the analysis of Israeli and Palestinian collective memories. The photographic project Face2Face is discussed all throughout the thesis in terms of its failure to spot the crucial dimensions in Israeli-Palestinian context, no matter how well intended it was.

Thesis (M.A.)--University of Hong Kong, 2001. / Includes bibliographical references.

Spanish travel writings on China at the end of the 19th century have been largely ignored in the history of literature. Nevertheless, this topic deserves a thorough examination since these texts constitute a particular and important vision of an "Orientalized" country about an Oriental nation during a critical and complicated historical moment. On one hand, Spain was characterized by an irreversible decadence. Thus, in contrast to British and French imperial discourse, which reflects colonial experiences, Spanish travel writings provide a unique perspective from a Western empire that shared a similar fate with the Other: both being traditional and decadent nations. Furthermore, although China was a goal of imperial ambition, it was far less colonized than other regions. As a result, the commanding imperial gaze and fearless exploration were less likely to be cast on China. In addition, despite its general decline, China remained the home of an ancient and highly advanced civilization that still deserved Western respect and offered the West much to learn. Considering these facts, this dissertation consists of a general analysis of Spanish travel literature on China from 1870 to 1910. The primary purposes of the dissertation are to portray the bibliographic genealogy of references on Spanish travelers and their writings on China during this period; to depict their particular vision in which the construct of colonial discourse is transformed into a pretension to recover the lost imperial prestige and an interiorized reflection on Spain's own problems and possible solutions; and to present a fundamental ambivalence or even difficult conciliation between the colonial discourse and its resistance, ideology and utopia, as well as imperialist ambition and national crisis. Spanish travel writings on China consequently become an allegory of imperial nostalgia: a yearning for the imperial power that had vanished, without hope of restoration. / text

This research has identified elements of the social memory of librarianship from the last half of the twentieth century by collecting and examining thirty-four oral history interviews of librarians at the end of their careers. These professional life stories trace an important arc through the history of library and information science. Many of these librarians began their careers prior to the use of any form of computer technology in libraries. This cohort ushered in a wave of technological innovations that has revolutionized the access to information. These oral history interviews are part of the Capturing Our Stories Oral History Program of Retiring/Retired Librarians sponsored by the American Library Association and the School of Information at the University of Texas. The social memory includes regret and nostalgia for the librarianship practiced at the beginning of their careers, excitement and wonder about how technology has fundamentally changed the profession, and perspectives on the popular stereotype associated with their careers. / text

Feeling forgotten charts a shift in late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century English literature that is structured on a crisis of memory. This shift consists in a movement towards a literary construction of aesthetic and moral self-forgetfulness that draws its intense power from an anxiety about human mortality and historical forgetting. Through analyses of texts that depict the need to overcome individual and cultural loss through a desire for oblivion, Feeling forgotten contends that the Romantic period gave birth to anti-mnemonic aesthetic in which the displacement of a perceived loss of the feeling of lived memories into various literary fictions preserves the past in such a way as to answer an unavoidable loss of feeling by asserting that the past, one's own and others, can be felt (again) in the complex affective experience found in reading about the past. In a more ambitious sense, Feeling forgotten attempts to point the way towards an understanding of Romantic and post-Romantic nostalgia as a strong rejection of its melancholic forbearers and as a response to late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century self-forgetting. Indeed, the rejection of this more complex Romantic form of nostalgia, one in which the always frustrated attempt to inscribe forgetfulness itself into the text of memory is productive of the ongoing act of writing, would become the founding principle for later forms of nostalgia that seek to render forgetting as an act that resides outside the written text. Based on a reorientation of Charlotte Smith's poetic archive of feelings, which defines feeling as the failure of poetry to contain and defuse feelings themselves, and the passionate rationalism of William Godwin's early nineteenth century texts, in which self-analysis serves as both the generator and corruptor of the sympathetic feelings found in sentimental literature, Walter Scott's passive, amnesiac romances stage the fantasy of an evasion from the political and material significance of history. / text

Between 1950s and 1990s, Hong Kong had a frenzy for writing and re-writing materials from classical literature and myths. The myth of Madame White Snake is one of the most well known stories that survived a long period of time. The earliest known version of Madame White Snake was a supernatural story in 1550, which later became a prototype of numerous subsequent versions starting in 1624. This prototype was repeatedly re-written throughout history and was also made into different genres including plays, playlets, novels, films and television dramas. One of the latest versions was written by Li Pikwah, a popular novelist in Hong Kong, in 1993, titled, Green Snake. Green Snake is a parody of Madame White Snake written from the perspective of Little Green, the servant of Madame White and an auxiliary figure in the tradition. The novel is also an autobiography of Little Green, who satirically criticizes the story of Madame White Snake in retrospect. Little Green’s autobiography is a nostalgic reflection of the past as well as a critique of the structure of the story that has survived throughout history. These implications made in the story hint at the author’s personal yearning for traditional China as a Chinese resident in Hong Kong. Her nostalgia for traditional China is not idealistic but paradoxical, because her re-writing of the story was an avenue to understand and re-negotiate her identity. Li is also well-known for her other novels, which are parodies of classical literature, traditional myth and legend. Many of these works were also made into films in the 80’s and 90’s. These novels and films were part of a phenomenon in contemporary Hong Kong literary and popular culture that tried to grasp a cultural connection with traditional China in order to embrace the return to mainland China in 1997 after a hundred years of British colonial rule.