Producing Memories: Staging the Civil War in US Culture, 1867-1908
Item
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Title
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Producing Memories: Staging the Civil War in US Culture, 1867-1908
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Identifier
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d_2009_2013:1caca9459e37:12018
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identifier
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12720
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Creator
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Holmstrom, Bethany D.,
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Contributor
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Judith Milhous
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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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Theater history | American history | Civil War memories
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Abstract
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In this dissertation I examine the competing narratives of Civil War memories on stage, considering how race, ethnicity, gender, class, and history were performed. I argue that the memories audiences consumed via these performances influenced popular mental conceptions and --- by extension --- participated in the cyclical formation of juridical policy and social practice, ultimately revealing the unstable constructions of citizenship and the instability of the nation itself.;I use three broad strains of memories to interrogate the instability and political dynamics in theatrical stagings of War memories, broadly construed. I frame these stagings as "sites of memory," as places where politics and power are invested via production and consumption. The first strain of memories includes plays set during the war itself, including Grand Army of the Republic amateur dramas and commercial melodramas throughout the late nineteenth century. Because of the very structure of melodrama and the commercial demands of increasingly industrialized practices, even the "bloody shirt" rhetoric of the Union veterans morphs into a white reconciliationist vision of memories, excluding women and ethnic and racial Others. The second strain of memories includes African American performances of slavery and emancipation: black minstrelsy, plantation spectacles, and a handful of melodramas that grappled with broader questions of remembering slavery within the black community. These sites provided opportunities for black performers to establish careers, create a community/network, and --- at times --- celebrate emancipation, but the producers and performers also had to cater to white audience expectations. Ultimately, black-generated sites of memories in practice predominantly adhered to Booker T. Washington's model of progress via professionalization. My analysis then shifts to plays set in the post-war South --- with special attention to plays including the Ku Klux Klan --- and interrogates the romanticizing of the crumbling and ruined Southern landscape within the broader aims of the Lost Cause movement. The nostalgia and yearning for the "lost" planter class ultimately valorizes the Confederate cause through the workings of melodrama and the spectacle of Southern landscapes. Throughout the analysis of these sites of memories, I am constantly asking how the consumption of these memories might have influenced juridical realities.
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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
