This spring marked the 70th anniversary of the defeat of the Nazis and the end of the Holocaust in Europe. Memory of this genocide has occupied a central place in Israeli identity since the establishment of the state. This thesis explores the history of Holocaust memory in Israel and examines how public memory is constructed in the present, as the era of the survivor draws to a close and commemorative efforts linked to survivors take on a sense of urgency. The contemporary memorial places examined in this study are part of Yad Vashem, Israel*s premier institution for Holocaust commemoration. The thesis focuses on the museum*s Hall of Names and its analogous web space, the Central Database of Shoah Victims* Names. Specifically, I draw on two concepts from Rhetorical Genre Studies—the chronotope (Bakhtin) and antecedent genre (Jamieson)—to examine the relationship between genre and the making of public memory. The findings of this analysis point to the importance of the antecedent genre of Holocaust testimony in the construction of public memory at Yad Vashem. Through a chronotopic analysis of the Hall of Names and the Central Database, I found that the genre of testimony changed across these spaces to ideologically construct memory in different ways. It is in the Hall of Names and Central Database*s repurposing of the testimonial genre, and the expression of this genre through chronotopic arrangement in each of these locations, that a legacy of social concerns coalesces into the memorial expression of the contemporary moment. This study contributes to scholarship on the rhetorical construction of public memory and Rhetorical Genre Studies. First, it suggests the importance of genre and genre change in considerations of the rhetorical construction of public memory. Second, it suggests additional considerations in determining how context affects genre and vice versa when features of time and space are especially salient for meaning-making. Specifically, these findings suggest additional complexity in the relationship between genre and the chronotope: genre change across contexts may result from a genre*s integration into places with different space/time arrangements.

From the time of their occurrence up to the present, people have constructed and revised narratives about violent racial events in Florida. In the case of the racial violence in Ocoee and the lynching of July Perry, multiple accounts coexisted until one particular group in the 1990's contested earlier conservative white Southern narratives with new public memories containing African American perspectives of the events, demanding racial justice and memorialization of the events. A struggle over the power to construct this narrative resulted in compromises between the two sets of memories. While some goals were attained, the landscape of memorization remains undeveloped. The construction of a narrative concerning the meaning of Harry T. Moore's life and death entered the public domain at his death and remained unchanging, carried forward by the collective memories of African Americans in Florida. Historians reassessed his role as a martyr for civil rights to the first martyr of the Civil Right's Movement. A group of African Americans in Brevard County were successful in attaining resources that included landscape and a memorial complex during the 1990's and the first decade of 2000. The construction of public memories and the power to gain landscape and resources for commemoration reflected the aims and power of each group. Because the public memories of July Perry were contested, the group could not attain commemorative landscapes. However, the narratives about Harry T. Moore had consensus, allowing significant commemorations.

No description available.

No description available.

No description available.

Communicating Legacy: Media, Memory, and Harvey Milk examines publicly available media, artifacts and events in service of remembering Harvey Milk, who in 1977 became the first openly gay man elected to public office in California. Although he addressed issues of a diverse constituency, Milk is often remembered for demanding gay rights, his co-authorship of the San Francisco’s Human Rights Ordinance, and a successful campaign against the passage of Proposition 6 in 1978, a state proposition to prohibit gay men and lesbian women from working in public schools. His political career ended weeks later, when Milk was assassinated, along with San Francisco Mayor George Moscone, by former city supervisor and colleague Dan White. Forms of public and popular media addressing the remembrance of Milk and communicating his legacy include: journalism, books, documentary and fiction film, public art, theatrical and musical performances, memorials, commemorations, public history exhibitions, as well as types of legacy-naming. I term this media material media memoria – material in service of remembering. Through a mix of textual methods (visual/narrative/discourse), fieldwork (participant observation, interviewing) and archival/historical research methods, I examine how Milk media memoria create representations and narratives of Harvey Milk. I focus on how these representations narratives are used over time in the construction, negotiation and maintenance of local, LGBTQIA+ and eventually a larger public memory of Harvey Milk. This project is a mix of history, memory, and media analysis. It is written as an overlapping chronology, so the reader can experience the mediated communication of Milk’s legacy as it moves forward through time. It is situated within the study of media and communication but is interdisciplinary in that it finds inspiration from memory studies, film and media studies, museum and exhibition studies, and public history – all areas in which communication with a public, and mediated communication, play integral parts of collective memory narrative building. Communicating Legacy: Media, Memory and Harvey Milk aspires to be a contribution toward a more comprehensive history of the memory of Milk. The project concludes with a summary of the core and layered Milk memory narratives, a look at the key memory keepers and institutional players in Milk memory maintenance, and a discussion of the future of Milk memory. Through a discussion of how media memoria communicate the legacy of Harvey Milk, the dissertation adds to scholarly knowledge about how collective memory of public figures is constructed in American culture. Additionally, the dissertation works toward resolving deficiencies in research addressing LGBTQIA+ collective memory studies. / Media & Communication

abstract: The People's Republic of China's inexorable ascendancy has become an epochal event in international landscape, accentuated by its triple national ceremonies of global significance: 2008 Beijing Olympic Games, 2009 Beijing Military Parade, and 2010 Shanghai World Expo. At a momentous juncture when the PRC endeavored to project a new national identity to the outside world, these ceremonial occasions constitute a high-stake communicative opportunity for the Chinese government and a fruitful set of discursive artifacts for symbolic deconstruction and rhetorical interpretation. To unravel these ceremonial spectacles, a public memory approach, with its versatile potencies indexical of a nation's interpretive system of social meaning, its normative framework of ideological model, and its past-present-future interrelationships, is contextually, conceptually, and analytically diagnostic of a rising China's sociopolitical constellations. Thus employing public memory as a conceptual-methodological matrix, my dissertation focuses on the prominent texts in these ceremonies, excavates their historico-memorial invocation and sociocultural persuasion, and plumbs their discursive agenda, rhetorical operation, and sociopolitical implication. I argue that the Chinese government deliberately and forcefully strove for three interrelated communicative objectives at these three ceremonies--re-imaging, re-asserting, and re-anchoring its national identity as an ancient, emergent superpower. Yet in contemporary Chinese context, its discursive (con)quest to recast its leadership as a historically continuous, culturally orthodox, and ideologically legitimate regime has always been compromised by its mythologized historical representation and hegemonic rhetorical reconfiguration, countervailed by its political and ideological fragility, and contested by domestic and global publics. Besides its contributions to the current conversation on the PRC's ceremonial phenomena, discursive formations, and communicative dynamics, this dissertation further offers its diagnosis and prognostication of this projected leading country in the 21st century. / Dissertation/Thesis / Ph.D. Communication Studies 2012

abstract: In 1981, Fernando Valenzuela had one of the most unlikely rookie seasons for theLos Angeles Dodgers. Originally from a rural farm town in northern Mexico, he left an enduring legacy that persists within Mexican/American and Latinx fans and communities throughout Los Angeles. Not only did Fernando help the Dodgers capture the World Series, he captured the hearts of the people and the communities who had shunned the Dodgers for decades. This act of protest was a response to the destruction of three neighborhoods—La Paloma, Palo Verde, and Bishop—that were destroyed amid a protracted legal battle with the city of Los Angeles throughout the 1950’s that culminated in coercion, violence, and a new baseball stadium. This project intends to remember the neighborhoods of La Paloma, Palo Verde, and Bishop and those who lost their homes alongside the public memory of Fernando Valenzuela’s unlikely rookie season, dubbed Fernandomania, and his career with the Los Angeles Dodgers. I illumine how the public memories of Fernandomania, a moment of communitas, and Fernando Valenzuela have facilitated the public forgetting of La Loma, Palo Verde, and Bishop by making Chavez Ravine into a novel public idiom for American baseball rather than a site of violence and resistance. In the process of facilitating the public forgetting of these neighborhoods, the sports media commits a pernicious discursive violence upon Fernando Valenzuela’s hyper-visible brown body that reveals the workings of a white racial frame designed to protect American baseball’s white masculine ideology. Ultimately, the Los Angeles Dodgers benefit from Fernando’s unmistakably cultural and racial Mexican identity—the source of his otherization and incongruity with American baseball’s white heroism—as the transgressions of the past are slowly forgotten. / Dissertation/Thesis / Doctoral Dissertation Communication 2020

No description available.

No description available.