“National Acts: Performance, Commemoration, and the Construction of American Public Memory” explores how sites of public commemoration created during and after the American Civil War crafted conceptions of American public memory and identities through performative processes. This dissertation looks at three commemorative efforts: the Freedmen’s Memorial Monument to Abraham Lincoln, the Statue of Liberty, and the Stephen Douglas Tomb. Each selectively upheld “American” ideals of freedom and liberty through their erection and continued presence in public space. While upholding these ideals, the social scripts prompted by human interactions with these monuments simultaneously expose the fractures generated by American identity-creation for people who did not fit within white, male, and privileged classes’ understandings of American identity. By investigating these forms of rhetorical experience as performance, this project demonstrates how acts of public commemoration constructed American identity through constitutive performative practices such as oratory, parades, audio tours, and (re)dedication ceremonies. It brings insights from performance to bear on the commemorative landscape of monuments in the United States in order to illustrate how material memorial objects are rhetorically understood across time in public discourse. Understanding these monuments as sites of performance for visitors, “National Acts” utilize methodologies from rhetoric, museum studies, memory studies, and critical race studies to augment understanding of social performance by visitors engaging in a continual process of public memory creation. The project follows three distinct phases of this process—rising (1861-1886), reification and revision (1941-1986), and reckoning (2001-2023)—to demonstrate how monuments change over time and how performance sheds light on this process. This dissertation examines disagreements over who should have final say in monument design, where a monument should be placed and what should go around it, and what any given monument should mean over time to show how these different phases are reflective of changes in American public memory over time. The interactions prompted by these monuments are embodied acts that occur over time, imbuing monuments with multiple layers of meaning. This project aims to define commemoration as a recurrent performative process that depends on discourses by which various groups both in and out of hegemonic power structures contribute to the memory work. While interactions may change because of the material nature of monuments and their presence in public space, they perpetuate over time. This project demonstrates how the contemporary contestation around commemoration is not a new phenomenon but rather a part of a sustained performative process.

Creator

• Bryer, Rebekah M

DOI

• https://doi.org/10.21985/n2-c1sh-5a81

Subject

• Theater history
• American studies
• Museum studies

Language

• en

Alternate Identifier

• http://dissertations.umi.com/northwestern:16732
• etdadmin_upload_1012939

Keyword

• public memory
• performance studies
• American culture
• public commemoration

Date created

• 2023-01-01

Resource type

• Dissertation

Rights statement

• In Copyright