Browsing by Subject "Archive"
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Item Open Access Dwelling in the Barzakh: Mad Archives of the Lebanese Civil War(2020) Ragin, Renee MichelleThe idiom of madness is ubiquitous in Lebanese cultural production about the country’s 1975-1990 civil war. Despite this, there has been no investigation into what, and how, this madness signifies. In Dwelling in the Barzakh: Mad Archives of the Lebanese Civil War, I work to fill this gap through an analysis of representations of madness in fiction, documentary film, and photography-based art from 1975-2015. I argue that madness is defined multiply throughout this time period, reflecting and responding to the political and social realities, as well as psychic perceptions, of life in Lebanon. The forms of madness articulated through these cultural texts are to be understood as the symptom of a populace dwelling in the barzakh, here defined as a spatiotemporal site of simultaneous rupture and (re)unification.
In what follows, I offer historicized close-readings of Arabic-, French- and English-language cultural texts. Analyzing these texts alongside the political backdrops against which they were produced, I derive theories of madness from the texts, pinpointing how both medium-specificity and the historical contingency of production help inform respective theories of madness in and after war.
Item Open Access Graphic Intimations: Postwar to Contemporary Asian Diasporic Art and Writing(2019) Douglas, KitaGraphic Intimations: Postwar to Contemporary Asian Diasporic Art and Writing follows the oblique tensions in Asian diasporic creative compositions between art and writing, performance and inscription. Identifying the graphic—written and/or drawn—as a preeminent form for Asian diasporic artists and writers in North America, this project connects scholarship in Asian American literary studies on questions of form and social formation with the material histories of Asian diasporic visual culture. From postwar graphic internment memoirs to New York City subway writing, this dissertation traces the Asian diasporic graphic’s investments in embodied creative practices that intimate the sensible and sensual in queer, interracial, and cross-cultural liaisons.
Charting the history of the graphic as a twinned positivist technology of measurement and a visceral aesthetic response, this dissertation proposes that the Asian diasporic graphic intimates social possibilities formed in, but not necessarily of, the purview of nation and the state regulation of Asian North Americans as populations. Accordingly, this work examines how these artists’ staging of the graphic encounter might enact disruptive performances of unforeseen social intimacies and political affiliations during these decades that trouble the fidelity of visual documentation.
Item Open Access In the Bird Cage of the Muses: Archiving, Erudition, and Empire in Ptolemaic Egypt(2010) Yatsuhashi, Akira V.This dissertation investigates the prominent role of the Mouseion-Library of Alexandria in the construction of a new community of archivist-poets during the third century BCE in the wake of Alexander the Great's conquests. I contend that the Mouseion was a new kind of institution--an imperial archive--that facilitated a kind of political domination that worked through the production, perpetuation, and control of particular knowledges about the world rather than through fear and brute force.
Specifically, I argue that those working in the Mouseion, or Library, were shaping a new vision of the past through their meticulous editorial and compilatory work on the diverse remnants of the pre-conquest Greeks. Mastery of this tradition, in turn, came to form the backbone of what it meant to be educated (pepaideumenoi), yet even more importantly what it meant to be a Greek in this new political landscape. In contrast to many studies of politics and culture in the Hellenistic period which focus on the exercise of power from the top down, I explore how seemingly harmless or even esoteric actions, actions that seem far distant from the political realm, such as the writing of poetry and editing of texts, came to be essential in maintaining the political authority and structures of the Hellenistic monarchs.
In developing this vision of the cultural politics of the Hellenistic Age, my first chapter examines the central role of the Mouseion of Alexandria in making erudition one of the key sources of socio-cultural capital in this ethnically diverse and regionally dispersed polity. Through the work of its scholars, the Mouseion and its archive of the Greek past became the center around which a broader panhellenic community and identity coalesced. In chapter two, I explore the implications of this new institution and social type through a close reading of Lykophron's enigmatic work, the Alexandra, presenting it as a poetic archive that used philological practices to make the past relevant to a new group of elite consumers scattered throughout the Hellenistic world by re-imagining the conflict between Europe and Asia. In the final chapter, I argue that this new institution gave rise to a new type of man, the archivist-poet. I examine how this new figure of subjectivity became one of the primary means of participating in Hellenistic empires of knowledge through the genre of literary epigram.
Item Open Access Wolf Vostell's Fluxus Zug, Model Museum, Academy, Archive(2013) Hanas, ErinThis dissertation analyzes Wolf Vostell's Fluxus Zug, 1981, arguing that it was simultaneously a work of art, a museum, an academy, and an archive. I explore the art work/alternative institution in relation to other museums that Vostell conceived and realized from the 1960s until his death in 1998; the interdisciplinary collaborations that he established in the 1960s; his concept for an ideal academy from 1969; the archive that he began building in the 1950s; and recent theories of the Archive. This microhistorical study reveals Vostell's centrality to contemporary experimental art. I argue that the spirit of Vostell's art and ideas are very much alive today as artists demonstrate widespread interest in curating as an art practice, in the construction of alternative pedagogies, and in working in, with, and against the Archive.