Thesis advisor: David Quigley / This thesis will explore the factors that contributed to the enshrinement of the immigrant, in relation to places relevant to the Old World immigrant narrative. The chapters concentrate on the area around New York Harbor, often referred to as "the gateway," where turn-of-the-century immigrants sailed and settled and to where public memory made its return in the late sixties, seventies, and eighties. Public attentiveness to ethnic identity affected the character of historic preservation, prompting the creation of new symbols of American history. Many Americans' own Roots narratives brought them here, to the very place the immigrants began their American stories. Chapter One puts the spotlight on New Jersey, exploring how Jersey City claimed its part in the immigrant narrative, and how the state government organized its multi-ethnic character. Chapter Two opens to the national level, illustrating how the enshrinement of Ellis Island and the Statue of Liberty Centennial embodied the nationalism that came with the rise of conservatism. Chapter Three surveys immigrant memory in the Lower East Side, the quintessential neighborhood of nations, exploring what the Lower East Side Tenement Museum has done to pay homage to the "urban pioneers" of American history, using the past to affect contemporary immigration issues. The public memory that took shape at these historic sites resulted from not solely a revived interest in Old World ethnicity, but through a combination of factors. This thesis will also show how the ethnic revival helped draw attention to aspects of American life such as urban living, and provoked public discourse and scholarly research to attend to the people that history previously overlooked. / Thesis (BA) — Boston College, 2008. / Submitted to: Boston College. College of Arts and Sciences. / Discipline: History. / Discipline: History Honors Program.

O presente trabalho tem como objetivo a análise das condições contemporâneas de preservação de áreas com importância histórico-cultural, discutindo os sentidos do conceito de identidade e memória, dentro das tendências atuais de renovação urbana pela atuação do mercado ou do Estado. Um segmento da Avenida Conselheiro Nébias, em Santos, cujos quarteirões apresentam algumas edificações remanescentes da passagem do século XIX para o XX, período em que Santos se firmou como maior porto de exportação brasileiro, encontra-se em iminente ameaça e é objeto de estudo representativo desta problemática. Esse eixo, que conduziu o desenvolvimento da cidade, alcançou grande prestígio por se tornar local de moradia da elite comercial, política e dos profissionais ligados à economia do café que tentavam fugir do caos em que a cidade havia se transformado. Nas primeiras décadas do século XX, o trecho sofreu grande desvalorização após a migração dessas camadas abastadas para a orla, passando a ser ocupado por uma população de baixa renda da qual faziam parte portuários e operários, além de exescravos e imigrantes. As disposições do Plano Diretor de 1998 parecem conduzir para verticalização da área, o que pode resultar não só na expulsão da sua atual população, sob processo de gentrificação ou elitização, como também podem apagar vestígios capazes de reavivar a memória pública sobre uma região tão importante para a história santista, paulista e brasileira. Sendo assim, o trabalho defende sua preservação diante do valor cultural e histórico materializado nas suas construções, ao mesmo tempo em que alerta sobre as ameaças das atuais estratégias de gestão urbana. / The following research intends to analyze the contemporary conditions for preserving areas with historical and cultural significance, arguing the concepts of identity and memory, within the current trends of urban renewal by the performance of the market or the state. A segment of the Conselheiro Nébias Avenue, in Santos, whose building blocks have some remnants of the passage of the nineteenth century for the twentieth, period in which Santos was signed as bigger port of Brazilian exports, is in imminent threat and is an illustrative case study of this problem. This axle, which effectively led the development of the city, it reached great prestige for becoming place of residence of the comercial, political and professional elite linked to the coffee economy who tried to run away from the chaos that was taking over the city. In the first decades of the twentieth century, this part of the avenue suffered urban devaluation after that rich people migrated to the edge, being occupied by a low-income population, which were workers of the port, besides former slaves and immigrants. The provisions of the 1998 Managing Plan seem to lead the verticalization of the área, which can result not only in the expulsion of its current population, under a gentrification process, but also can erase traces able to revive the public memory on a so important region to History of Santos, Sao Paulo and Brazil. Thus, the work ahead defends its preservation before the cultural and historical value materialized in their buildings while at the same time warning us about the threats of current strategies of urban management.

In this dissertation, I conceptualize common sense racism as the material basis for the unconscious rhetorical processes that shape and normalize unsympathetic and uncritical public responses to racialized violence against black communities, and which thereby perpetuate racial structures of power and foment white innocence and indifference. This form of common sense is comprised of a set of deeply embedded logics and rationalities—fragmented forms of prepropositional knowledge—that have evolved over time through the shapeshifting ideologies of white supremacy and anti-blackness to partly determine how civil society understands and interprets ongoing legacies of violence. Rather than just thinking of common sense in how we discuss it in everyday talk, I conceptualize and critique it with regard to how it animates and informs some of the fundamental cultural constructs, such as language, time, and humanity, that "we" as a nation rely upon to orient ourselves to and make sense of the world around us. Through these frameworks, common sense racism structures rhetorically how civil society's institutions make meaning in moments of racial crisis, tension, and transformation, and how its dominant publics relate to ongoing histories of racial oppression and abuse, or rather, how they do not relate to them at all. Through three case studies, a theoretical chapter, and an introduction and conclusion, I offer a critical vocabulary for understanding the nation's inability to confront racialized violence while considering the means by which these systems of meaning-making can be disrupted by black vernacular rhetorical practices.

This dissertation explores the manner in which theological elements from a biblical literalist perspective undergird and authorize the historical memory texts produced by Christian nationalist advocates in support of conservative Protestant religious establishment. Christian nationalist discourses exploit notions of divine warrant, public remembrance, and "historical evidence" as means to read the nation and contemporary far right ideological commitments as biblically founded, and hence, as binding upon the nation. Focusing on the rhetoric of David Barton, Christian nationalist par excellence and Republican Party operative, I argue that discourses of Christian nationhood mobilize the theologies of providence, inerrancy, inspiration, and literalism as rhetorical strategies to situate God's law as the definitive legal standard through which American law and cultural values are (de)authorized. Drawing upon the presumptions of biblical literalism to present the textual "proof' of a Christian nation, the politics of this memory work (and the many ways these discourses presume to furnish textual proofs of a biblical nation) aims to influence and to shape public memory, opinion, political behavior, and policy formation in favor of far right Protestant hegemonic interests.

abstract: Scholars of rhetoric, critical intercultural communication, and gender studies have offered productive analyses of how discourses of terror and national security are rooted in racialized juxtapositions between "East" against "West, or "us" and "them." Less frequently examined are the ways that the contemporary marking of terrorist bodies as "savage" Others to whiteness and western modernity are rooted in settler colonial histories and expansions of US and Anglo-European democracy. Informed by the rhetorical study of publics and public memory, critical race/whiteness studies, and transnational and Indigenous feminisms, this dissertation examines how memoryscapes of civilization and its Others circulate to shape geopolitical belongings in three cases: (1) public memory places in the US Southwest; (2) pro-Israel rhetorics enacted by the US organization Christians United for Israel; and (3) the embodied and mediated protests of European feminist organization FEMEN. In bringing these seemingly unrelated cases together as elements of a larger assemblage, I draw attention to their symbolic and material connectivities, examining the racialized, gendered, national, and imperial logics that move between these sites to shore up the frontiers of whiteness. Specifically, I argue for conceptualizing whiteness as a global assemblage that territorializes through settler colonial memoryscapes that construct "modern" national and global citizen-subjects as those deemed worthy of rights, protection, land, and life against the threatening bodies of Otherness seen to exist outside of the shared times and places of normative democratic citizenship. In doing so, I also examine, more broadly, how assemblage theory extends current approaches to studying rhetoric, public memory, and intercultural communication in global, trans/national, and (post)colonial contexts. / Dissertation/Thesis / Doctoral Dissertation Communication 2016

The aim of the paper is to further discussion on legitimation in international fora, and to contribute to the scholarly debate on the role of the interpretation of the past in state actors’ legitimation. This is pursued by conducting a descriptive qualitative study of Israel’s justification of political claims by remembrance of the past in the General Debate of the United Nations General Assembly, between 2009-2017. In a theoretic framework that bridges legitimation theory and the theory of public memory, it is hypothesised that legitimation aid state actors to define national interests, identify threats, mobilize publics and perceive options. The results demonstrate that legitimation through referring to the past is employed by Israel for a wide variety of contemporary political issues, and that different aspects of the past are recalled for different issues. The conclusion is that legitimation through the remembered past seems to support the hypotheses of legitimation, and that Israel’s political leaders during the studied timespan appear to promote some parts of the past over others for justifying political stances.

O presente trabalho tem como objetivo a análise das condições contemporâneas de preservação de áreas com importância histórico-cultural, discutindo os sentidos do conceito de identidade e memória, dentro das tendências atuais de renovação urbana pela atuação do mercado ou do Estado. Um segmento da Avenida Conselheiro Nébias, em Santos, cujos quarteirões apresentam algumas edificações remanescentes da passagem do século XIX para o XX, período em que Santos se firmou como maior porto de exportação brasileiro, encontra-se em iminente ameaça e é objeto de estudo representativo desta problemática. Esse eixo, que conduziu o desenvolvimento da cidade, alcançou grande prestígio por se tornar local de moradia da elite comercial, política e dos profissionais ligados à economia do café que tentavam fugir do caos em que a cidade havia se transformado. Nas primeiras décadas do século XX, o trecho sofreu grande desvalorização após a migração dessas camadas abastadas para a orla, passando a ser ocupado por uma população de baixa renda da qual faziam parte portuários e operários, além de exescravos e imigrantes. As disposições do Plano Diretor de 1998 parecem conduzir para verticalização da área, o que pode resultar não só na expulsão da sua atual população, sob processo de gentrificação ou elitização, como também podem apagar vestígios capazes de reavivar a memória pública sobre uma região tão importante para a história santista, paulista e brasileira. Sendo assim, o trabalho defende sua preservação diante do valor cultural e histórico materializado nas suas construções, ao mesmo tempo em que alerta sobre as ameaças das atuais estratégias de gestão urbana. / The following research intends to analyze the contemporary conditions for preserving areas with historical and cultural significance, arguing the concepts of identity and memory, within the current trends of urban renewal by the performance of the market or the state. A segment of the Conselheiro Nébias Avenue, in Santos, whose building blocks have some remnants of the passage of the nineteenth century for the twentieth, period in which Santos was signed as bigger port of Brazilian exports, is in imminent threat and is an illustrative case study of this problem. This axle, which effectively led the development of the city, it reached great prestige for becoming place of residence of the comercial, political and professional elite linked to the coffee economy who tried to run away from the chaos that was taking over the city. In the first decades of the twentieth century, this part of the avenue suffered urban devaluation after that rich people migrated to the edge, being occupied by a low-income population, which were workers of the port, besides former slaves and immigrants. The provisions of the 1998 Managing Plan seem to lead the verticalization of the área, which can result not only in the expulsion of its current population, under a gentrification process, but also can erase traces able to revive the public memory on a so important region to History of Santos, Sao Paulo and Brazil. Thus, the work ahead defends its preservation before the cultural and historical value materialized in their buildings while at the same time warning us about the threats of current strategies of urban management.

Notre époque connaît-elle véritablement une surenchère mémorielle ? L'idée d'une perte nous serait en tout cas devenue presque insupportable. En sciences humaines, de nombreux travaux ont été consacrés à la mémoire (Halbwachs, Le Goff, Yates…). Ces vingt dernières années pourtant, l'oubli a préoccupé les artistes (Pascal Convert ou Anne et Patrick Poirier), et les intellectuels (Augé, Todorov, Ricoeur). À la Renaissance déjà, le peintre et biographe Giorgio Vasari prétendait lutter contre cette « seconde mort » que serait l'oubli. En partant de la notion renaissante de renommée, de ses liens avec l'histoire, nous aimerions faire la généalogie de cet oubli « négateur », empêcheur d'une juste mémoire, à partir de plusieurs images, de plusieurs figures de l'oubli. En effet, il convient d'une part d'analyser des « formes de l'oubli », et d'autre part d'examiner la façon dont les artistes ont pu donner une « figure » à l'oubli. C'est donc un travail sur l'image de la mémoire publique que nous proposons (à condition que nous regroupions sous ce même terme images matérielles et images produites par le discours). Comment l'oubli peut-il être perçu tour à tour comme un lieu, un personnage, un processus? Quels sont ses liens avec l'entreprise historiographique? Pour répondre à de telles questions, il est nécessaire d'examiner les intrications entre histoire et mémoire, historiens et œuvres d'art, artistes et discours légitimant la pratique de ces derniers. Selon notre thèse, la mémoire publique, loin de connaître un excès, serait entrée au contraire dans un important, et croissant, déficit. / Does our time truly know a memorial bidding? The idea of a loss would become almost unbearable to us. Many humanities studies have been devoted to memory (Halbwachs, Le Goff, Yates ...). For the last twenty years, however, oblivion has preoccupied artists (Pascal Convert or Anne and Patrick Poirier) and intellectuals (Augé, Todorov, Ricoeur). During the Renaissance already, the artist and biographer Giorgio Vasari claimed to fight against this "second death" that oblivion would represent. Starting from the re-emerging notion of glory,, from its links with history, we intend to draw a genealogy of this "contrarian" oblivion which prevents a just memory, using several images, several figures of oblivion. Indeed, we should firstly analyze "forms of oblivion", and then examine how artists have given a "figure" to oblivion. It is then a study on the image of public memory that we offer (provided that we include in the same term material images and pictures of the speech). How does oblivion can be perceived in turn as a place, a character, a process? What is its connection with the historiographical undertaking? In order to answer such questions, we need to examine the intricacies between history and memory, historians and works of art, artists and speeches that legitimize their practice. According to our work, public memory, far from knowing an excess, has known a large deficit instead.

abstract: While the African American civil rights movement of the 1950s and 60s is one of the most famous and celebrated parts of American history, rhetoric scholars have illuminated the ways this subversive movement has been manipulated beyond recognition over time. These narrative constructions play a role in preserving what Maegan Parker Brooks calls the "conservative master narrative of civil rights history," a narrative that diminishes the work of activists while simultaneously promoting complacency to prevent any challenge to the white supremacist hegemony. This dissertation argues that the graphic memoir trilogy March by John Lewis, Andrew Aydin, and Nate Powell challenges this conservative master narrative through visual rhetoric, in particular through the comics techniques "braiding" and "weaving." Braiding occurs when authors create "webs of interrelation" (Miodrag 134) by repeating a technique throughout the text, which can sometimes involve a secondary narrative (Groensteen). Braids are associations in the network of panels of the comic that go beyond the parameters of strictly linear storytelling as panels echo those the reader has encountered before. The braids in March compare the past and present through a direct juxtaposition of January 20, 2009—the inauguration day of Barack Obama—with John Lewis' activism from 1959 to 1965. While this juxtaposition risks reinforcing a progress narrative that suggests racism is in the past, in fact, the braided inauguration scenes help the reader connect the moments of the past with their present, calling to mind the ways white supremacy endures in contemporary America. Weaving refers to the reader’s action of moving back and forth in the comics narrative to create meaning, and artists use techniques that facilitate this behavior, such as leaving out or minimizing significant cues and creating a sense of ambiguity that leads the reader to become curious about the events in the sequence. Weaving can disrupt an easy linear narrative of depicted events—such as Fannie Lou Hamer's testimony at the Democratic National Convention—as artists present several opportunities for the reader to interpret these stories in ways that challenge a conservative master narrative of the events in the trilogy. / Dissertation/Thesis / Doctoral Dissertation English 2019

This research approaches archaeological human remains in museum collections from a rhetorical perspective. Instead of joining the body of scholarship in museum studies that focuses on the process of curatorial interpretation, this project applies public memory studies to explore what happens to curatorial interpretation when it goes out into the world and is taken up in public circulated discourse. With a focus on publics, the moment of knowledge construction when visitors approach a display of human remains in a museum is captured and analyzed through the lenses of new materialism, rhetoric in situ, and public memory studies. Each lens represents the chosen approach to each of the three elements that converge at the moment of knowledge construction ? publics, objects, and place ? which are grouped together as a triangle of interrelated dynamics all working in a situationally-contingent rhetorical ecology of other factors and influences. Thus, the dynamic inseparable trio of publics, objects, and place are coined the ?ecotriangle.? For museum studies, rhetoric?s foundational work can provide critical perspective into the nature of communication and meaning-making that happens when publics meet human remains in a museum space. In order to explore the ecotriangular relationship of publics, objects, and place with an interdisciplinary approach, this project begins by interrogating the implicit assumptions within the defitions of terms like ?public? and ?object? then develops collaborative definitions from the scholarship in rhetoric, archaeology, and museum studies. The particular case of human remains challenges most scholarships? definitions of object. Yet as this research reveals, human remains as case study help develop and refine the approach to objects, materiality, interpretation, and museum display when challenged to inclusively frame such a case instead of treat human remains as an exception or outlier to scholarship on objects. Exploring the ecotriangle as a heuristic model for conceptualization of interrelational dynamics in knowledge construction extends current scholarship in rhetoric, especially rhetoric in situ and rhetorical ecology, and also reinforces existing interdisciplinary bridges between the fields of rhetoric, archaeology, and museum studies.