Despite significant evidence to the contrary in the Latvian language, especially the memoirs of General Peteris Radzins, Latvians, historians included, and others, have persisted in mythologizing the military events of 8 October to 11 November 1919 in Riga as some sort of national miracle. Since this Latvian army victory, first celebrated as Lacplesis Day on 11 November 1920, accounts of this battle have been unrepresented, poorly represented or misrepresented. For example, the 2007 historical film Rigas Sargi (The Defenders of Riga) uses the 1888 poem Lacplesis by Andrejs Pumpurs as a template to portray the Latvians successfully defeating the German-Russian force on their own without Allied military aid. Pumpurs' dream and revolutionary legacy has provided a well used script for Latvian nation building. However, the reality documented by Radzins in 1922 clearly gives most of the credit to the Allied Fleet which provided two significant series of well planned and well coordinated naval artillery barrages in support of Latvian infantry offensives which succeeded in driving their dual enemy out of Riga thereby ending Russian-German hegemony in the Latvian territory and making Latvian independence possible. How the poem, military event, and film are related in a problematic way with respect to Latvian/Russian relations is the subject of this thesis. / Graduate / mackie9@telusplanet.net

Calls for examining the interrelations between individual and collective processes of remembering have been repeatedly made within the field of memory studies. With the tendency being to focus on either the individual or the collective level, there have been few studies that have undertaken this task in an empirically informed manner. This thesis seeks to engage in such an examination by undertaking a multi-level study of the remembrance of the Bhopal gas disaster of 1984. The gas leak in Bhopal (India) was one of the world s worst industrial disasters and has seen a long-running political contestation involving state institutions, social movement organisations (SMOs) and individual survivors. Employing an ethnographic methodology, incorporating interviews, participant observation and archival research, the study seeks to examine similarities and divergences in how these institutional, group-level and individual actors have remembered the disaster. It identifies the factors that modulated these remembrances and focuses on examining the nature of their interrelationship. The study conceptualises remembering as memory-work : an active process of meaning-making in relation to the past. The memory-work of state institutions was examined within the judicial and commemorative domains. The analysis demonstrates how state institutions engaged in a limiting of the meaning of the disaster removing from view the transnational causality of the event and the issue of corporate liability. It tracks how the survivors suffering was dehistoricised and contained within the framework of a localized claims bureaucracy. The examination of SMO memory-work focused on the activities of the two most prominent groups working in Bhopal. The analysis reveals how both organisations emphasise the continuing suffering of the survivors to challenge the state s settlement of the event. However, clear differences are outlined between the two groups in the wider frameworks of meaning employed by them to explain the suffering, assign responsibility and define justice. Memory-work at the individual level was accessed in the memory narratives of individual survivors generated through ethnographic interviews. The study examined how individual survivors have made sense of the lived experience of suffering caused by the disaster and its aftermath. The analysis revealed how the frameworks of meaning imposed by the state are deeply incommensurate with the survivors needs to express the multi-dimensionality of their suffering; it tracks how the state imposed identities are resisted but cannot be entirely overcome in individual remembrance. Engagement with the activities of the SMOs is demonstrated as enabling the development of an alternative activist remembrance for a limited group of survivors. Overall, the thesis seeks to provide a complex and empirically grounded account of the relations between the inner, individual level processes of memory linked to lived experience and the wider, historically inflected, collective and institutional registers of remembrance. The examination of the encounters between these diverse individual and collective remembrances in the context of an on-going political contestation allows the study to contribute to ongoing discussions within the field about memory politics in a global age and memory and justice.

Challenges to the legitimacy of established collective memory can prove so inflammatory that mass violence, ethnic cleansing and even genocide have followed in their wake. However, if few doubt that the ethno-nationalist memory wars during the 1980s collapse of Yugoslavia contributed to the real wars and ethnic cleansing witnessed in the 1990s, no previous research has been able to explain why this is so. This paper pinpoints the determinant variable and causal link between attacks on memory and subsequent mass violence (or a lack thereof). It uses a theoretical model that ties together memory, legitimacy and power to compare the cases of West Germany’s 1968 student movement and Serbia’s 1986-1989 anti-bureaucratic revolution before establishing that the level of prior state repression is one factor that determines whether memory challenges will turn violent. The paper recommends further theory building over the permeable boundary that separates state and civil society, particularly in terms of how accessible state functions are to those social movements that seek to challenge and delegitimise memory.

The aim of my dissertation is to understand and critically evaluate how the idea of European memory has been conceptualised by different actors at the European level and to develop a novel, pluralist conception. Attempting to ground European integration and the attachment to Europe in historical narratives has become increasingly important for the EU since the loss of its main ideological “Other,” the Soviet Union. The projects adopted in this vein often have the explicit goal to address the “legitimacy problem” and the “democratic deficit” by promoting European identity. In the EU politics-academia nexus, where most of the related debate takes place, the buzzword “European memory” has become very fashionable in the last decade. The idea has been conceptualised in a variety of ways, but most of these are characterised by teleological frameworks and problem-solving thinking. In my dissertation, I examine and critically evaluate how the idea of European memory has been conceptualised by different actors at the European level, and I develop a novel conception based on radical democratic theory. I analyse how the concept of European memory has been used in different European institutions and cultural projects (such as the European Parliament and the House of European History), and I critically reflect on these practices. In my pluralist vision of the European mythical space, conflicting visions of the past are not regarded as an anomaly that needs to be overcome by rational consensus or as an asset that can be harvested in order to bolster the legitimacy of certain political bodies. This vision takes difference to be an inevitable condition of social life and it argues that, instead of trying to resolve conflicting interpretations of the past, social difference should be embraced and the nature of conflict should be changed so that antagonistic relationships can become agonistic ones through dialogue and education. On the one hand, my dissertation contributes to the field of memory studies with a comprehensive pluralist approach to myth. On the other hand, I contribute to European studies, and more specifically to the academic discussion about European memory, when I contextualise this theory of myth in the contemporary European politics of the past.

The aim of this investigation is to study the various cinematic and rhetorical strategies that Chilean filmmaker Patricio Guzmán uses to construct a complex image of the postdictatorial Chilean society. By analyzing three of his documentaries from the late 1990s and early 2000s (Chile, Obstinate Memory; The Pinochet Case and Island of Robinson Crusoe), I argue that Guzmán's cinematic images expose the challenges of constructing a collective memory of the 1973 coup in Chile and its aftermath. In an attempt to interrogate the social, political and economic dynamics of the Chilean transition to democracy that began in the year 1990, Guzmán's documentaries also explore the consequences of the Pinochet dictatorship (1973-1989) in the present. The historical conjuncture of postdictatorial Chile is connected to at least three geopolitical phenomenons: the Post-Cold War international arena formed after the dissolution of existent socialist regimes, the advent of neoliberalism as a transnational economic paradigm, and the struggle for global human rights. The documentaries of Patricio Guzmán are poetic responses to each of these geopolitical phenomenons that affect the constitution of the Chilean present. / Dissertation

Dissertation thesis analyses the ideological processes of art discourse in the last decade of the 20th century – the formation and decline of different value related and ideological orientations, and their correlation, which makes an influence upon the changing conception of art and artist. These processes are analyzed referring to the reviews of the exhibitions of the discussed period, the exhibitions themselves, the declarations by the artists, who actively participated on the art scene, and their works, which were shaping the public art life. A separate attention is devoted to various layers of the artistic field – to the sociopolitical context, the works of art, the institutional exhibitions, and to the texts in cultural periodicals. The main aim of the thesis is to make a thorough analysis of the ideological and value related changes, which took place in the Lithuanian art discourse in the 1990s, and by underlining the artistic, institutional and sociopolitical contexts to reveal the changing content of symbolic constructions and their influence on the struggles for legitimization in the artistic field. The tasks of the research are: to define the role of the postsoviet intellectual (artist) in the Lithuanian art processes during the Rebirth period and in the years of independence; to explore the forms of politics of memory, which were established in the public discourse; to define the specificity of the concept of ideology in the postsoviet society; to analyze the... [to full text] / Disertacijoje analizuojami XX a. paskutiniojo dešimtmečio meno diskurso ideologiniai procesai: skirtingų vertybinių, ideologinių orientacijų formavimasis, nykimas ir jų koreliacija, daranti įtaką meno ir menininko sampratos kaitai. Šie procesai analizuojami remiantis aptariamo laikotarpio parodų recenzijomis, pačiomis parodomis, aktyviai meno scenoje veikusių menininkų pasisakymais, jų kūriniais, formavusiais viešąjį dailės gyvenimą. Atskiras dėmesys skiriamas įvairiems meno lauko pjūviams – sociopolitiniam kontekstui, meno kūriniams, institucinėms parodoms ir tekstams kultūros savaitraščiuose. Ideologijų ir vertybių pokyčiai, vykę Lietuvos meno diskurse XX a. paskutiniajame dešimtmetyje, darbe tyrinėjami akcentuojant meninius, institucinius ir sociopolitinius kontekstus, atskleidžiant kintantį simbolinių konstrukcijų turinį bei jų poveikį meno lauko kovoms už legitimaciją. Disertacijoje keliami šie uždaviniai: apibrėžti posovietinio intelektualo (menininko) vaidmenį atgimimo ir nepriklausomybės metų Lietuvos meno procesuose; ištirti viešajame diskurse įtvirtintas atminties politikos formas; apibrėžti ideologijos sampratos specifiškumą posovietinėje visuomenėje, analizuoti ideologinį modernistinio meno pobūdį; apibrėžti pagrindinių meno institucijų ideologines nuostatas, atskleisti institucijų ideologinių susidūrimų pobūdį ir priežastis; išanalizuoti reikšmingiausias parodas ir atskleisti jų konstruotų naratyvų ideologines potekstes; atskleisti svarbiausius šio laikotarpio... [toliau žr. visą tekstą]

La construction de la paix en matière de sortie de crise admet l‟importance du rôle de la mémoire comme en témoigne la montée en puissance des politiques de la mémoire à qui incombe l‟apaisement de la mémoire collective d‟une société dans la résolution des conflits et le changement de régime politique. Cette entreprise reste assujettie à la connaissance ou non des violations graves des droits de l‟homme, à la réparation matérielle et symbolique à l‟égard des victimes en quête de reconnaissance ainsi qu‟à la réécriture de l‟histoire dans le but de changer les stéréotypes à l‟origine d‟une conflictualité à dominante communautaire.Du fait de l‟absence d‟un système judiciaire indépendant et d‟un État en position de tiers, les politiques de la mémoire initiées dans la résolution des crises congolaises tendent plutôt à légitimer un régime politique autoritaire au lieu de promouvoir la réconciliation. La constitutionnalisation de la paix, les mises en cause limitées des criminels de guerre et le déficit de « congolité » révèlent les lacunes de ces politiques et les constantes des politiques du pardon engagées sur la scène internationale.Dans cette optique, l‟édification d‟une paix positive différente d‟un simple arrêt des hostilités appelle l‟instauration d‟une corrélation entre le pardon et la justice dans une quête d‟accountability. Une telle approche requiert une attitude nouvelle à même de favoriser la mutation des conduites négatives en postures rationnelles afin d‟oublier les avanies du passé et de promouvoir un nouveau vivre en commun novateur. À ce titre, la réussite des politiques de la mémoire reste inséparable de la promotion graduelle d‟un projet commun entre les anciens belligérants. Si la mise en place de mécanismes de résolution des conflits futurs apparaît comme un facteur majeur, toute sortie de crise reste partielle quand elle n‟est pas affiliée à un processus de réconciliation. / Building peace following a conflict reveals the importance of the role of the memory as witnessed by the increased importance of the memory policies witch are responsible of conflicts and the change of political regimes. This undertaking remains subject to the knowledge, or lack of it, of the serious violations of the rights of man, and the material and symbolic redress for victims seeking recognition as well as the rewriting of history with the aim of changing stereotypes at the origin of conflicts within a particular community.Given the absence of an independent judicial system and a third party State, the memory policies initiated in the resolution of Congolese conflicts tend towards legitimizing an authoritarian political regime rather than promoting reconciliation. The constitutionalizing of peace, the limited accusation of war criminals and the deficit of “congolité” reveals the inadequacy of these policies, and the continuance of the international pardon policies.In light of this, the edification of a positive peace that differs from a simple cessation of the hostilities requires the establishment of a correlation between forgiveness and justice in a quest for accountability. This approach calls for a fresh attitude capable of favouring the transformation of the negative behaviours into rational positions with the aim of forgetting past outrages in order to work toward promoting a new innovative communal life. If the establishment of the future resolution mechanisms appear to be a major factor, any withdrawal from a crisis remains partial when not associated with a process of reconciliation.

Este trabalho investiga o processo que levou à transformação dos Arcos do Bixiga em monumento da cidade de São Paulo, no final da década de 1980. Busca identificar quais memórias foram silenciadas no processo de disputa pela área onde estão localizados os Arcos, e de que forma o poder público se articulou para que, por meio de políticas públicas, fosse possível o prevalecimento de seus interesses, em detrimento dos interesses dos moradores do local. Tenta-se mapear e interpretar os fatos ocorridos, assim como as ações de cada grupo de atores envolvido no processo, em um primeiro momento, através de uma revisão bibliográfica acerca dos principais conceitos relacionados à memória coletiva, aos lugares de memória e às políticas de memória. Posteriormente, por meio de pesquisa documental, utilizando notícias de jornais e entrevistas semiestruturadas como fontes primárias, será realizada uma contextualização histórica do caso, seguida de análise empírica relacionando os conceitos revisados nos capítulos anteriores aos dados obtidos neste último. Justifica-se essa pesquisa, a partir da identificação do uso de argumentos relacionados à memória coletiva como base para justificar políticas públicas voltadas para o atendimento dos interesses do setor imobiliário, em detrimento do interesse histórico e social / This research investigates the process that led to the transformation of the Arcos do Bixiga into a monument of the city of São Paulo in the late 1980s. It aims to identify which memories were silenced in the process of claiming the area where the Arcos are located, and how the public authority managed to serve its interests through public policies, to the detriment of the local residents\' interests. An attempt is made to map and interpret the facts, as well as the actions of each group of actors involved in the process, at first, through a literature review concerning the main notions related to collective memory, the realms of memory and politics of memory. Therefrom through an extensive documentary research, employing news from newspapers and semi-structured interviews as main sources, a historical contextualization was attempted, followed by an empirical analysis, connecting the reviewed notions to the gathered data. This research is justified by the acknowledgement of the use of arguments related to collective memory as a base to justify public policies directed to the serving of the real state industrys interests, to the detriment of a historical and social interest

This thesis explores the potential of domestic space to act as the ground for new forms of community and sociability in Argentine and Chilean films from the early twenty-first century. It thus tracks a shift in the political treatment of the home in Southern Cone cinema, away from allegorical affirmations of the family, and towards a reflection on film’s ability to both delineate and disrupt lived spaces. In the works examined, the displacement of attention from human subjects to the material environment defamiliarises the domestic sphere and complicates its relation to the nation. The house thus does not act as ‘a body of images that give mankind proofs or illusions of stability’ (Bachelard), but rather as a medium through which identities are challenged and reformed. This anxiety about domestic space demands, I argue, a renewal of the deconstructive frameworks often deployed in studies of Latin American culture (Moreiras, Williams). The thesis turns to new materialist theories, among others, as a supplement to deconstructive thinking, and argues that theorisations of cinema’s political agency must be informed by social, economic and urban histories. The prominence of suburban settings moreover encourages a nuancing of the ontological links often invoked between cinema, the house, and the city. The first section of the thesis rethinks two concepts closely linked to the home: memory and modernity. Analysing documentary and essay films, Chapter 1 suggests some political limitations to the figure of the fragment which dominates scholarly discussion of memory in Latin America. Chapter 2 studies films which explore the inclusions and exclusions created by modernist domestic architecture. The second section focuses on two human figures found on the threshold of the home: the domestic worker and the guest. Chapter 3 analyses unorthodox representations of domestic work, and explores how new materialist approaches can enhance readings of the political potential of ‘art cinema’. Finally, in Chapter 4 I examine films depicting household visitors that upset urban class divisions, and question the possibility of ‘domestic cosmopolitanism’ (Nava 2006) in contemporary Latin America. My comparative analysis of these films explores a rupture between physical dwelling and imagined home that points towards new political practices in a neoliberal, post-dictatorship context.

Disertacijoje analizuojami XX a. paskutiniojo dešimtmečio meno diskurso ideologiniai procesai: skirtingų vertybinių, ideologinių orientacijų formavimasis, nykimas ir jų koreliacija, daranti įtaką meno ir menininko sampratos kaitai. Šie procesai analizuojami remiantis aptariamo laikotarpio parodų recenzijomis, pačiomis parodomis, aktyviai meno scenoje veikusių menininkų pasisakymais, jų kūriniais, formavusiais viešąjį dailės gyvenimą. Atskiras dėmesys skiriamas įvairiems meno lauko pjūviams – sociopolitiniam kontekstui, meno kūriniams, institucinėms parodoms ir tekstams kultūros savaitraščiuose. Ideologijų ir vertybių pokyčiai, vykę Lietuvos meno diskurse XX a. paskutiniajame dešimtmetyje, darbe tyrinėjami akcentuojant meninius, institucinius ir sociopolitinius kontekstus, atskleidžiant kintantį simbolinių konstrukcijų turinį bei jų poveikį meno lauko kovoms už legitimaciją. Disertacijoje keliami šie uždaviniai: apibrėžti posovietinio intelektualo (menininko) vaidmenį atgimimo ir nepriklausomybės metų Lietuvos meno procesuose; ištirti viešajame diskurse įtvirtintas atminties politikos formas; apibrėžti ideologijos sampratos specifiškumą posovietinėje visuomenėje, analizuoti ideologinį modernistinio meno pobūdį; apibrėžti pagrindinių meno institucijų ideologines nuostatas, atskleisti institucijų ideologinių susidūrimų pobūdį ir priežastis; išanalizuoti reikšmingiausias parodas ir atskleisti jų konstruotų naratyvų ideologines potekstes; atskleisti svarbiausius šio laikotarpio... [toliau žr. visą tekstą] / Dissertation thesis analyses the ideological processes of art discourse in the last decade of the 20th century – the formation and decline of different value related and ideological orientations, and their correlation, which makes an influence upon the changing conception of art and artist. These processes are analyzed referring to the reviews of the exhibitions of the discussed period, the exhibitions themselves, the declarations by the artists, who actively participated on the art scene, and their works, which were shaping the public art life. A separate attention is devoted to various layers of the artistic field – to the sociopolitical context, the works of art, the institutional exhibitions, and to the texts in cultural periodicals. The main aim of the thesis is to make a thorough analysis of the ideological and value related changes, which took place in the Lithuanian art discourse in the 1990s, and by underlining the artistic, institutional and sociopolitical contexts to reveal the changing content of symbolic constructions and their influence on the struggles for legitimization in the artistic field. The tasks of the research are: to define the role of the postsoviet intellectual (artist) in the Lithuanian art processes during the Rebirth period and in the years of independence; to explore the forms of politics of memory, which were established in the public discourse; to define the specificity of the concept of ideology in the postsoviet society; to analyze the... [to full text]