Browsing by Subject "archive"

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    L.A., Berlin, and Beyond: Decentering German Film History
    (2016-11) Neuman, Nichole
    “L.A., Berlin, and Beyond: Decentering German Film History,” investigates different cinematic communities, questioning where German cinema occurs and what cinematic objects comprise German film history. This research focuses on the transatlantic migrations of a collection of German language Heimat films (the “LA-Sammlung”) in order to recast how national cinema is defined. In examining sites of German cinema outside its generic and geo-political borders, I call for a broad inclusion of Germanness in defining German cinema and cinema history. This work looks at German/-American Los Angeles in the mid 20th century and utilizes the theoretical framework of prosthetic memory to posit that the postwar Angeleno media (including the German theater, La Tosca) cultivated a West German identity, despite a heterogeneous German-speaking audience. It further examines the German film archive’s own institutional politics to illustrate both the restrictions and possibilities of a nationally based cinema. The final section looks at the postwar, West German Heimat genre’s influence on and presence in other national screen cultures, e.g., in Bollywood, to suggest that this so-called domestic genre has global reach.
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    Mohican Archival Activism: Narrating Indigenous Nationalism
    (2018-06) Miron, Rose
    This dissertation traces the creation of the Stockbridge-Munsee Mohican tribal archive and related historical projects from 1968 to the present to show how the Mohican Nation has recovered and reclaimed authority over their historical materials and by extension, their history. I collectively refer to these multifaceted efforts over the last fifty years as “Mohican archival activism” and define this in the context of indigenous studies as the construction of an archival collection that assembles previously scattered sources, establishing indigenous nations as the premier resources on their own history and giving them authority over the assembly and retrieval of those historical materials. I argue that these actions are a strategic type of activism that resists settler-colonial policies that sought to separate Native peoples from their history, allows Mohican tribal members to create new historical narratives of their nation, and constitutes a form of Mohican nation-building by enabling the tribe to assert sovereignty over the collection and presentation of their own historical materials. By tracing the creation of a tribal archive and its mobilization in various projects, I demonstrate how tribal archives have the potential to challenge the control non-Native institutions often hold over indigenous histories and use newly assembled historical materials to counteract damaging representations of indigenous nations.