Browsing by Subject "Heritage"

Now showing 1 - 4 of 4
  • Thumbnail Image
    Item
    The lives of film: heritage, restoration, and the materialism of cinema
    (2013-11) Stoddard, Matthew Donald
    In this dissertation I argue that a new cinematic apparatus [dispositif] has appeared in the last three decades that ties the ontology of the medium to the precarious physical life of celluloid. I refer to this apparatus as the "new materialism" of cinema. The dissertation traces the development of this apparatus around film heritage and film restoration, and in the context of post-Fordism, that is, the post-industrialization of the global economy. I argue that this materialism, which centers on the conservation of celluloid as the material artifact of a fading era, points to significant new forms and functions of cinema. In the first half of the dissertation this argument is developed vis-à-vis several recent experimental films and in terms of what the United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) calls "intangible heritage." As intangible heritage, the history of cinema takes the form of a living archive of values, norms, and communicative procedures. This archive, I argue, is becoming directly integrated into the production of capital, and of social life more generally, and thus forms a new nexus of economic exploitation and political struggle. The second half of the dissertation examines how the dynamics of heritage are crystallized in, and shaped by, film restoration. For example, in the "before and after" demonstrations featured on many DVDs of restored films the image is posited as a material remnant of the past that is absorbed into the present and made viable for new markets. This process occurs through the application of technical expertise, rather than the traditional processes of mechanical duplication. Alongside such promotional materials, the dissertation also examines restoration through its effects on film form, focusing on restored versions of Alfred Hitchcock's Vertigo (1996) and Fritz Lang's Metropolis (2010). I contend that restoration creates an image with a peculiar ontology, which simultaneously invokes the authenticity of a photographic original and the interactive surfaces of new media. This image dramatically alters the construction of time in restored films and reflects structural shifts in the temporality of work. Overall, the dissertation provides both an original historical account of how cinema was re-imagined amidst pronouncements of the death of the medium, as well as a new type of historical materialism that links the details of cinematic form to emerging modes of labor.
  • Thumbnail Image
    Item
    New directions in international heritage management research.
    (2010-05) Adams, Jeffrey Lee
    Given the proliferation of heritage management research in recent decades and the reputedly threatened status of heritage resources, it is surprising to consider how little is known about the actual disposition of immovable heritage worldwide. Particularly with regard to the non-Western world, we lack a systematic understanding of what heritage resources exist, what is happening to them and why. An analysis of heritage management literature reveals a lack of coherence within the discipline and a lack of correspondence between it and the material realities of worldwide heritage use. This dissertation seeks to balance the qualitative, particularistic and geographically biased tendencies of much recent scholarship by making the case for a more scientific, applied and strategic study. The author argues that a broadly conceived stewardship principle, despite its Western origins, can guide this intellectual realignment by eliciting a critical reappraisal of research priorities. Fundamental to this exercise is recognition of the global dimensions of heritage consumption and the uneven international distribution of heritage management capacities. Two studies, each based on secondary research, illustrate the implementation of the proposed framework while addressing important, overlooked problem areas. The first, based on comparative international cases, seeks evidence for the attainment of equity in sustainable archaeological tourism development in less developed countries. The uniform absence of equitable outcomes is interpreted as a predictable result of preexisting, entrenched, endogenous inequalities and is represented in terms of an original, phased model. The second study, an unprecedented, exploratory analysis of government involvement in underwater treasure salvage, is intended to reconfigure the evidentiary landscape of the ongoing debate between advocates of heritage preservation and Admiralty law. Filling basic gaps in our knowledge of this shadowy practice, evidence from diverse countries is used to classify government positions and to separate stated rationales from underlying motivations. Preliminary identification of a common sequence of development fuels novel reinterpretation of the significance of public/private partnerships for the exploitation of shipwrecked heritage.
  • Thumbnail Image
    Item
    Performing the Oregon Trail: Belonging, Space, and Historical Representation in Settler Colonial Oregon
    (2022-05) Rorem, Jacob
    This dissertation examines the role that performances of the history and mythology of the Oregon Trail have had in securing the power and futurity of a settler colonial Pacific Northwest at the expense of other social, political, and spatial possibilities. It primarily focuses on how these practices naturalize particular modes of inhabiting and territorial belonging, as well as positions settler colonists as the rightful people of Oregon. To do so, I focus on a range of practices throughout the 20th and 21st centuries which celebrated, represented, and interpreted the Oregon Trail, the primary vehicle for settling the Pacific Northwest by the United States in the mid-19th century. These practices include trail marking, museums and interpretive centers, historical pageantry and parades, and nostalgic reenactments of a popular educational video game. My investigation teases out the role of both representation and performance within my objects of study, grounding both elements within the fundamental reality of settler colonialism: the expropriation and occupation of Indigenous lands by non-Indigenous settlers.
  • Thumbnail Image
    Item
    The syntax-pragmatics interface in language loss: covert restructuring of aspect in heritage Russian.
    (2010-05) Laleko, Oksana Vladislavovna
    Heritage grammars, linguistic varieties emerging in the context of intergenerational language loss, are known to diverge from the corresponding full-fledged baseline varieties in principled and systematic ways, as typically illustrated by errors made by heritage speakers in production. This dissertation examines covert restructuring of aspect in heritage Russian, a grammatical reorganization of the perfective-imperfective opposition not manifested in overt errors. The aspectual system instantiated in acrolectal varieties of heritage Russian is shown to exhibit signs of covert divergence from the baseline system at the interface between syntax and discourse-pragmatics, manifested in a reduction of pragmatically-conditioned functions of the imperfective aspect with total single events. This emerging restriction leads to a gradual shift from a privative aspectual opposition in baseline Russian, where imperfective is the unmarked member, to an opposition of the equipollent type. Experimental evidence presented suggests that heritage speakers differ from baseline Russian speakers in their use, acceptability ratings, and accuracy of interpretation of the imperfective aspect. In Russian, both aspects are compatible with completed events; however, aspectual competition is resolved in favor of the imperfective in the presence of discourse-pragmatic triggers that condition the general-factual functions of the imperfective: statement of fact, annulled result, thematicity and backgrounding. Assuming a multi-level approach to aspect, I maintain that the two aspectual systems converge on the level of the verbal predicate, where aspectual values of activities and accomplishments reflect compositional telicity, but diverge on the level of sentential aspect, where the contribution of telicity may be overridden by grammatical aspectual operators and discourse-pragmatic aspectual triggers. The restructuring of aspect in advanced heritage grammars affects the highest level of sentential structure, a domain in which syntactic information is mapped onto discourse-pragmatic information (the C-domain). In addressing the role of linguistic input in heritage language acquisition, the dissertation examines additional data from bilingual Russian-English speakers, including parents of heritage speakers. While bilingual speakers pattern with monolingual controls on comprehension tests, they differ from monolinguals in production of the imperfective with total single events, suggesting that competence divergence in advanced heritage grammars may be linked, across generations, to impoverished performance on C-domain properties.