Oct 29, 2016 | 1:00 PM - 2:30 PM | MAIN LOFT

Ms. Amanda Rumba, M.A.

Inventing and Reinventing Identity in the Telling and Retelling

Progressive Nostalgia: Revision and Selective Memory in the Great Awakening

Nostalgia is typically associated with postmodern times and individual psychological issues, but the first Great Awakening provides an example of negotiated communal nostalgia in the eighteenth century.  Revivalists called for a return to a more pure time, seeking to reestablish a social order that was perceived as lost.  This perception was created using selective memory and new rhetoric to enhance the imagined past.  The proponents and participants of the Great Awakening challenged the basic assumptions of the Enlightenment, but simultaneously employed Enlightenment rhetoric and tools to accomplish their goals.  While the revivalists decried the increasing rationalism and reliance on human agency that had permeated religion as a result of the Enlightenment, they used this same language to further their message of condemnation, conviction, and redemption to their fellow colonists.  In this sense, the Great Awakening can be more clearly understood as nostalgic, but progressively so. The revivalists resisted, but did not reject, the unsettling changes of their own time, though they longed for the constancy of a selectively remembered reflection of the past.  What the leaders and participants of the Great Awakening desired most was stability: personal, social, and existential.  How did the revivalists use memory to create this desired stability?  What larger issues do these tensions within the Great Awakening indicate about the human experience?

Renee Gaarder, Purdue University

Memory and Music: The Reinvention of Charles Ives and Aaron Copland

Charles Ives and Aaron Copland are arguably the most well-known twentieth century composers, and the genesis of a new, modern musical style born in America has been attributed to both. Ives’s music integrates American and European musical traditions as well as innovations in rhythm, harmony, and form, with unique evocations of the sounds of life in a small, New England town. In recent years, Ives has been heralded as the first true American composer, based on his dates of composition instead of recognition. Similarly, Aaron Copland is one of America’s most enduring and successful composers.  He received extensive musical training in Europe, but ultimately created a distinctively “American” style and aesthetic in diverse genres and mediums. Both men reached a moment in their lives where they went through a process of reinventing themselves: for Copland this was a turn to a style more in line with popular musical taste, for Ives it was composing in his spare time rather than pursing music as a career, as he first intended. What underlying reasons did these two men have for their respective personal reinventions? How are truth and memory contested in personal memoirs, and what can we discover beyond the words on the page?  Using the life writings of both men, motivations are explored which will help explain these musical and personal shifts.

Arpita Mandal, University of Connecticut

Remembering through Film: Collective Memories as Sites of Nationalist Discourse

In 2015, British/Israeli filmmaker Leslie Udwin released the documentary India’s Daughter, which addressed a 2012 gang rape case in India. The production and reception of the documentary occurred amidst national outrage and a government ban on the film screening. This paper examines the narrative forms through which national collective memory was constructed and contested.  By analyzing the two different primary modes of narrative used in the film (journalistic evidence and documentary reception), the ways that collective memory is contested in its making becomes clear. The result of the contested collective memory is the erasure of the individual’s identity and the translation of the victim and her trauma into a wider nationalistic discourse. 

This case study reveals how the narrative that informs us of the individual’s trauma and memory is constructed around larger social goals. In this case, these goals privileged unified national mourning and consequently reduced the victim to a symbol or allegory. The film narrative in India’s Daughter allegorized the victim and displayed her transformation from a singular suffering woman to the violated daughter of the nation. The framing of the violation as a larger crime against the nation reinforced patriarchal codes about womanhood and femininity, thereby erasing the story of individual suffering.  What occurs when memories are collected, coopted, and re-presented in different formats and medium?  What is the effect on the potency or authenticity of personal memory when it is adapted and expanded beyond its origins?

Biographies

Amanda Rumba

Amanda earned her Bachelor's degrees in Intelligence Studies and Russian Language & Culture at Mercyhurst University in Erie, PA, then completed her Master's degree at the University of Chicago Divinity School before enrolling in the History PhD program at Purdue University. Her research interests focus on early American history, and particularly the shift between the British colonies and the early US Republic and explores questions of religion, politics, identify, memory, and nostalgia.

Arpita Mandal

Arpita Mandal is a PhD candidate in English at the University of Connecticut with an interest in human rights theory, feminist theory, and postcolonial studies. Her research is focused on Anglophone literatures with a particular interest in literatures of India and North Africa.

She is the author of book reviews on the following novels: The Upstairs Wife: An Intimate History of Pakistan by Rafia Zakaria and Desire of the Moth by Champa Bilwakesh. She has also published a blog post titled "The Politics of Beef in India" for Warscapes, an online literary magazine