Ghosted towns: Performing tourism, place, and cultural memory in the United States
Item
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Title
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Ghosted towns: Performing tourism, place, and cultural memory in the United States
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Identifier
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d_2009_2013:de888f067f65:11715
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identifier
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12310
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Creator
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Livingston, Lindsay Adamson,
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Contributor
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Marvin Carlson
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Date
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2013
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Language
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English
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Publisher
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City University of New York.
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Subject
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Performing arts | American studies | Recreation | Cultural Memory | Performance Studies | Place | Race | Tourism
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Abstract
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This dissertation explores three distinct memorial sites that are frequented by tourists and that shape cultural memory through performance in the United States of America: Tombstone, Arizona; Colonial Williamsburg, Virginia; and Nauvoo, Illinois. Each of these sites, I contend, is representative of influential narratives of national remembrance; each also, however, is simultaneously evidence of hidden and oppressed narratives that haunt the spaces of and performances featured at the site. Tombstone, Arizona, made famous by mediatized portrayals of the 1881 shootout at the O.K. Corral, embodies a hyper-violent romanticization of an individualistic "Wild West," but is shadowed by more communal and less aesthetic types of violence: the genocide and forced removal of American Indian tribes, the wanton eradication of wildlife, and the commodification of landscape and open space at the heart of westward expansion. Colonial Williamsburg, Virginia, advertised as the United States' "Revolutionary City," is a corporatized town whose curators attempt to create a balance between historical inquiry and patriotic celebration, but often fail to address the influence and distinctiveness of past and present experiences of African American inhabitants and visitors. Finally, Nauvoo, Illinois reproduces a time of religious fervor in the history of an "American" religion, the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (LDS or Mormon), but the pristine facade of sacred spatial encounters is disrupted by the doctrinal schisms that are revealed through spatialized performances of LDS history.;All three of these sites contribute to the formation of a conservative US identity that is based on revisionist national histories that whitewash the past; this study challenges that identity based on an examination of how performance is utilized by curators and historians to "make" memorial spaces that, in turn, affect how historical events are recorded and remembered in the United States. I argue within these pages that memorial places are characterized by their curators' creation and use of "performative space"---space which performs operations of remembrance for visitors---to reinforce particular national narratives of belonging and historical meaning. My analysis of memorial places poses the following questions: How is performance used to produce and circulate national memory? How does embodied experience of historical places affect one's understanding of the past? How are memorial places created, maintained, and marketed through performance? Ultimately, I claim that, by analyzing how these three memorial places are produced and experienced through performance, one can discover history's double, the US past which has been lost, hidden, or occluded in the celebratory narratives that have long shaped what it means to be a US American.
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Type
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dissertation
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Source
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2009_2013.csv
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degree
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Ph.D.
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Program
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Theatre
