Composing, Remembering, and Performing Identity at Charles Towne Landing, 1966 through 1971: Rhetorical Identification as Defensive and Antagonistic Strategies (original) (raw)
Related papers
2013
This article presents the results of a research project comparing the speeches and sermons of Acadians and descendants of the Saint John Loyalists in the 1880s. At this pivotal moment in New Brunswick history, Loyalist descendants were celebrating a century of survival and progress while Acadians were regrouping after a century of silence. Each group sought to assert its place in a rapidly evolving society. Since neither group could claim for itself a specific geographic territory or a centralized government, a collective identity could be shaped only through the recognition of common values, a shared past, and a collective future. Using text analysis software programs Hyperbase and Sphinx, we explore the lexical worlds by which Loyalist descendants and Acadians expressed their collective identities, and we compare the specific traits and discursive strategies in each of these groups.
Markers of Collective Identity in Loyalist and Acadian Speeches of the 1880s: A Comparative Analysis
Journal of New Brunswick Studies Revue D Etudes Sur Le Nouveau Brunswick, 2013
This article presents the results of a research project comparing the speeches and sermons of Acadians and descendants of the Saint John Loyalists in the 1880s. At this pivotal moment in New Brunswick history, Loyalist descendants were celebrating a century of survival and progress while Acadians were regrouping after a century of silence. Each group sought to assert its place in a rapidly evolving society. Since neither group could claim for itself a specific geographic territory or a centralized government, a collective identity could be shaped only through the recognition of common values, a shared past, and a collective future. Using text analysis software programs Hyperbase and Sphinx, we explore the lexical worlds by which Loyalist descendants and Acadians expressed their collective identities, and we compare the specific traits and discursive strategies in each of these groups.
There are many valid vantage points from which to view African-American history, however, one perspective that has not been fully explored is the interlocking connection between memory, history and narrative representation. The struggle over the loss of history, and the struggle to create memory have come to the fore in the post-civil rights era movement toward a new African-American identity that can be fully incorporated into American society. The desire to create a collective self-image that simultaneously incorporates African-Americans as full members of American society, yet acknowledges the horror of past history has necessarily entailed conflict over forgetting and remembering. Ground zero for the materialization of this form of "contested remembrance" is the plantation museum. Many plantation museums offer "living history" programs where volunteers dress in period attire and "interpret" history for visitors, making complex connections between the interpreter's present being and historical past. These complicated and conflicting dynamics came to the surface in 2005 when slave interpreters at Historic Brattonsville, a plantation and living museum in South Carolina, reinterpreted their roles. The following paper explores how conflict plays out over contested narratives as they engage history and memory, and as they necessarily manifest in representational forms at Historic Brattonsville. By perceiving narrative as the process by which memory and history mix and become legible, and also as naturally tending toward stasis and reification, we can better understand why the radical action of the interpreters failed to produce change.