Arts and Humanities Commons^™

Memory, Violence, And Detours: Strategies Of Resistance To Epidermal Invisibility Within The French Republic, Claudine E. David

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

The subjection of black citizens in France and their invisibility in the (post)colonial space has been marked by segregation in peripheral urban zones, with a hardening of policing methods and controls based on racial appearanc. I argue that monumental representation in public space is not neutral but participates in the promotion of a specific ideology. I show thé ellipses in French patrimonial monumental glorification, including the appropriation of the memory of revolutionary heroes such as Louis Delgrès and Toussaint Louverture, concomitant with the occultation of many other black figures. I argue that representation matters, that France must repair this asymmetrical …

The Persephone Series: Storytelling, Art, And Making Sense Of Myself, Katie M. Frank

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

What can I do with what I already have? How can I make of it something beautiful, or useful, or interesting? Over the past two and a half years, I have been creating wall sculptures and collages out of found objects that speak to the history of my family, the way the earth reclaims its space after being used by humans, and how our individual lives have impact beyond our recognition. The people we love, the things we have lost, the garbage and grief we try to bury: it doesn’t go away. It comes back to the surface in shapes …

Heritage Repair: Revisiting Familial And Collective Histories In Filiation Narratives By Dalila Kerchouche, Colombe Schneck And Martine Storti, Rebecca R. Raitses

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This thesis offers a critical reading of three French narratives: Dalila Kerchouche’s Mon père, ce harki (2003), Colombe Schneck’s Les guerres de mon père (2018), and Martine Storti’s L’arrivée de mon père en France (2008). These works combine representations of familial history with the explorations of personal and collective traumas or repression. The study addresses the following dimensions of the texts: 1) The catalyst of intergenerational silence behind these and many other similar works; 2) The textual interplay between storytelling and material evidence; 3) The ways in which the authors combine narratives of familial hardships on one hand, and of …

"Never Forget": Embodied Absence And Extended Relations Of Care After 9/11, Sophie L. Riemenschneider

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation is a reflection on how loss was articulated in the wake of 9/11. The terror attacks engendered a memorial style that sought to give shape to grief, acknowledging it without filling it in or erasing it. This new style, which I term embodied absence, exists across a range of mediums, from literature to architecture. It is such a potent memorial form because it also captures the traumatic process, which is prolonged, layered, and potentially open-ended. However, despite their ability to mirror the nature of trauma, instances of embodied absence never verbalize the attacks’ root trauma—the disconnect between our …

Returning To Childhood: Memoirs Of Childhood Reading, Stephanie Montalti

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This thesis analyzes Francis Spufford’s The Child that Books Built: A Life in Reading, Jane Sullivan’s Storytime: Growing up with Books, and Margaret Mackey’s One Child Reading: My Auto-Bibliography to investigate how memoirists recall events and reread stories from childhood. I argue that memoirs of childhood reading or bibliomemoirs temporarily fuse childhood and adulthood through the act of rereading, which produces emotional responses, and writing a memoir. By rereading childhood stories, memoirists identify with their child self and express feelings comparable to those they felt upon first reading. In bibliomemoirs, passive and active reading create what I describe as a …

Más Allá De La Comisión De La Verdad Y Reconciliación: Memoria, Cuerpo Y Producción Cultural De Mujeres En El Perú (2005–2013), Otilia M. Mendiolaza

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation examines literary and cinematographic works concerning the war between the Peruvian Armed Forces and the Peruvian Communist Party Shining Path (1980-2000) produced by contemporary women artists. In particular, it analyzes how these works reveal topics overlooked by the report of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Peru (CVR) published on August 28, 2003. To do so, it studies the socio-political and cultural factors that contributed to the violation of human rights during the internal military conflict, especially of women, focusing on questions of memory, identity, and the body. The dissertation analyzes Rocío Silva Santisteban’s poetry collection Las hijas …

Después Del Exilio: El Regreso Y El Retorno En La Autoficción Latinoamericana Del Siglo Xxi, Joan C. Aguirre

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

The present work analyzes the return—both the physical return and anticipated physical return— to the homeland after living in exile, the act of remembering caused by this process, and the metareflective role that the genre of autofiction plays in this interaction. The dissertation examines the twenty-first century autofictions of four Latin American countries: La casa de los Conejos by Laura Alcoba of Argentina; Memorias prematuras by Rafael Gumucio of Chile; ConPasión absoluta by Carol Zardetto of Guatemala; and El sueño del retorno by Horacio Castellanos Moya of El Salvador. These autofictions are part of an important corpus, one that offers …

Getting Dressed And Being Dressed: A Constructed Autobiography Of Identity, Jana Jarosz

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This written and visual capstone project examines how feminist theories surrounding the construction of a gendered subject are related and situational to the narrative of a lived body experience within a layered context of clothing. It opens up a discussion concerning the negotiated space between an individually-empowered, subject-in-process and the boundaries of social expectations outlining gender and cultural identities. The thesis introduces the concept of using an automediality framework to connect the material culture of clothing to still and motion imagery with text as a way to encapsulate and illustrate the fluid nature of becoming. It concludes by suggesting that …

Desde El Margen: Teatro Alterno Y Comunidades Hispanas De Nueva York, 1997–2017, Pablo D. García Gámez

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Esta disertación analiza ocho textos de los autores Tere Martínez, Jorge Merced, Marco Antonio Rodríguez, Eva Cristina Vásquez y cuatro performances en la calle. La misma explora las relaciones entre los cuatro dramaturgos y las comunidades hispanas de Nueva York. Indaga en el proceso de cómo la memoria de estas comunidades se refleja en un repertorio teatral. Por otro lado, revisa la organización del performance cultural en las comunidades.

La hipótesis de esta investigación es que en el teatro hispano alterno hay obras que son reflejo y reflexión sobre los grupos periféricos y que el performance es una herramienta social. …

Between The Living And The Dead, Laura Henriksen

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Throughout my studies at the Graduate Center, I have attempted to deepen my understanding of how some people, such as myself and my family, came to be white, and what that means, and how it can be undone. This question of whiteness has pushed me further back ontologically, or deeper down, to include how some people came to be human, and then even further, how some matter came to be living. In my thesis project I attempt to participate in dismantling one of the most fundamental binaries in binary thinking — the strict and uncomplicated division between the living and …

Reversing Borrón Y Cuenta Nueva: The Curative Power Of Family Memory In The Novels Of Loida Maritza Perez And Nelly Rosario, Ivonne Gonzalez

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

I examine two novels, Geographies of Home by Loida Maritza Perez and Song of the Water Saints by Nelly Rosario, written by Dominican American authors, to determine how they present identity with relation to family history in conjunction with an analysis of my life and the circumstances that have helped define my identity. I explore how the characters in the texts are affected by the loss of family history, the role that gaze and family memory play in reclaiming that which is lost, and how these all shape identity. The families in the novels seem destined to lead desolate lives; …

Memory In Memoir & Biography: Science, Place, And Agency, Johnathan E. Longo

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This thesis explores modern scientific understanding of memory in humans and how it affects works of life writing. Scientific research shows that memory is unreliable and often misunderstood by the general public, and this has implications for different forms of life writing. This paper uses biographies, memoirs, and hybrid forms of life writing to explore how memory, with all its limitations, is used in service of a life story. How do writers of these sub-genres use memory and why are those strategies different from one another? Questions of agency and authority over written and spoken material make the issues still …

Never Forgets: Traumatic Trace Within Public Space, Jan Descartes

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This paper will interrogate the ways in which ephemera from events affects the human and non- human environment and how the absence, manipulation or presence of traumatic trace weaves itself into the atmosphere of the past, present and future. It will look at space and the ways that trace manifests itself in hierarchal spaces and Lebbeus Woods’ concept of heterarchial spaces, which are organic and/or horizontally organized. A thread throughout is the question that if trace from trauma can exist in the visual field, i.e. the physical or digital landscape, in a way that maintains a discourse without perpetuating oppression. …

Consciousness, Perception, And Short-Term Memory, Henry F. Shevlin

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Dissertation Abstract: Consciousness, Perception, and Short-Term Memory

When we engage in almost any perceptual activity – recognizing a face, listening out for a phone-call, or simply taking in a sunset – information must be briefly stored and processed in some form of short-term memory. For philosophers attempting to develop an empirically grounded account of perception and conscious experience, it is therefore crucial to engage with scientific theories of the kinds of short-term memory mechanisms that underlie our moment-to-moment retention of information about the world. To that end, in this dissertation I review recent scientific evidence for a new form of …

"What's The Use Of Trying To Read Shakespeare?": Modes Of Memory In Virginia Woolf's Fiction And Essays, Sara Remedios Bloom

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation maps the relationship between Virginia Woolf’s fiction and essays, and William Shakespeare’s person and plays. I argue that Woolf’s writing is intended as an interactive practice of cultural memory, challenging her readers to become responders and to engage critically with the canon. I further argue that Woolf offers herself as inheritor of a literary practice that actively seeks to shape the values and social ideology of the time. The introduction defines three modes of memory operating in Woolf’s work: memory as opiate; memory as political instrument; and memory as dialectic. The first chapter shows the cultural memory of …

Crossing The Great Divide: An Investigation Of Data And Memory, Julia Pollack

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Crossing the Great Divide has been a working project for over two years. The project was initially inspired by the maps drawn and paths traversed by Meriwether Lewis and William Clark 1804-1806. From June to August of 2015 a few travelers and myself followed their historic journey and traversed the landscapes of the American frontier on bicycle. We chose this mode of travel as it put us into a direct intimate relationship with the landscape and thus a more sympathetic connection to the histories that preceded us. Leaving from Clark’s survey point of Indian Boundary Line on the shore of …

A Psychoanalytic Exploration Into The Memory And Aesthetics Of Everyday Life: Photographs, Recollections, And Encounters With Loss, Dimitrios Mellos

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

The project at hand explores some of the psychological functions of photography as both an everyday and an artistic cultural practice from a psychoanalytic perspective. It is proposed that, contrary to commonsensical opinion, photographs are not accurate depositories of memory, but rather function as a functional equivalent of screen memories, thus channeling the subject's memory in ways that are objectively distorted and distorting, but psychologically meaningful and important; moreover, they are a special kind of screen memory in that they are often created pre-emptively and are physically instantiated.

Additionally, it is suggested that, by dint of their materiality, photographs achieve …

Coming Of Age During The Sixties: A Narration Of Lives Through Music And Battle, Jennifer L. Oliveri

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This thesis has been written based on my retrieved memory, as it concentrates on autobiographical memories and the lives of two politically opposing men, from the American sixties. I discuss the effect of music and the war in Vietnam as it was experienced by these men--a moderately angry veteran and a "hippie." I examine how their stories were "retold" to me, which in turn created new memories. This is a study in the memory of memories.