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Hoerlk26758.Pdf Copyright by Kristen Elizabeth Hoerl 2005 The Dissertation Committee for Kristen Elizabeth Hoerl Certifies that this is the approved version of the following dissertation: The Death of Activism?: Popular Memories of 1960s Protest Committee: Dana L. Cloud, Supervisor Barry Brummett Richard Cherwitz Rosa A. Eberly Sharon Jarvis The Death of Activism?: Popular Memories of 1960s Protest by Kristen Elizabeth Hoerl, B.S., M.A. Dissertation Presented to the Faculty of the Graduate School of The University of Texas at Austin in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy The University of Texas at Austin August 2005 For my parents, for whom the memory of 1960s activism is alive and well; and for my grandmother, who taught me to cherish memories and question history Acknowledgements Dana Cloud deserves special recognition for her direction of this dissertation. I could not have asked for a more supportive and intellectually engaging advisor. She has challenged me with her insightful comments on numerous drafts of this dissertation, and has inspired me by her dedication to social justice. I also thank the members of my dissertation committee, Richard Cherwitz, Barry Brummett, Sharon Jarvis, and Rosa Eberly for reviewing this dissertation and for shaping my previous scholarship in rhetoric and popular media. Rosa Eberly also provided me with valuable places, physically and figuratively, from where I could begin thinking and writing about the relationship between public tragedies and shared memories. Numerous graduate student colleagues at The University of Texas at Austin have helped me during my process of completing this dissertation. I am especially grateful to Lisa Foster, Angela Aguayo, and Caroline Rankin for their advice, encouragement, and friendship. I am also indebted to my parents Lesley and Donald Hoerl, to my brother, Kent Hoerl, and to my grandmother, Wanda McCollom, for supporting me and for making the struggles of ordinary people central to our family history. v The Death of Activism?: Popular Memories of 1960s Protest Publication No._____________ Kristen Elizabeth Hoerl, Ph.D. The University of Texas at Austin, 2005 Supervisor: Dana Cloud Between 1988 and 2002, the films Mississippi Burning (1988), Ghosts of Mississippi (1996), Malcolm X (1992), Panther (1995), Berkeley in the Sixties (1990), and The Weather Underground (2002) recalled 1960s protest movements. This dissertation examines these six films and journalistic coverage of them to explore the relationship between popular culture and historical understanding. More specifically, this dissertation develops answers to the following questions: How do particular texts in popular culture ascribe meaning to the past? How do particular texts establish themselves as important sources of historical knowledge? How do counter-memories of activism become part of broader cultural discourses? I apply methods of rhetorical criticism to films and journalism reviews to explain how popular culture has attributed meaning to 1960s activism. Patterns across films about 1960s protests symbolically declared the death of activism, but they did not establish the popular meaning of activism entirely. The films’ narrative genres, stylistic devices, and journalism reviews appeared in different and often contradictory ways to vi construct a range of messages about the role of activism. Each of these films’ rhetorical stances regarding historical reality contributed to their roles as a source of popular memory. Mainstream journalism reviews also contributed to the meaning of 1960s activism by conferring, or denying, legitimacy to particular films as sources for remembering the past. While these films’ status as truth contributed to their roles as sources of historical information, this status did not guarantee the films’ positions as part of popular memory. Documentary films that did not adopt conventions of entertainment film had limited popular appeal. Alternatively, films that were hybrids of documentary and entertainment films functioned as sources of popular memory by adopting both generic narratives that appealed to mainstream audiences and stylistic devices that establish films as sources of historical information. I conclude that films that produce contradictions between the generic conventions of film and the cinematic depictions of the past open spaces for secondary sources to deliberate about the past. Thus, the counter-hegemonic potential of films might not actually rest in the films themselves, but in the controversies that they provoke elsewhere in popular culture. vii Table of Contents Introduction..............................................................................................................1 The rhetoric of popular memory.....................................................................5 Films for consideration ...................................................................................7 Charting the landscape of popular memory..................................................10 Narrative and argument analysis..........................................................10 Formal analysis ....................................................................................11 The intertextuality of popular memory................................................13 Journalistic framings of 1960s protests................................................15 Journalistic framings as deliberative topoi ..........................................18 Chapter preview............................................................................................20 Notes to Introduction ....................................................................................27 SECTION ONE: POPULAR CULTURE AND CONTENTIOUS PUBLICS 29 Chapter One: The rhetoric of film, memory, and truth..........................................30 Publicity and publics.....................................................................................30 Films as rhetorical texts ................................................................................32 The rhetoric of documentary film........................................................33 The rhetoric of entertainment film.......................................................35 Political hegemony........................................................................................37 Popular memory............................................................................................39 Popular memory and political power............................................................41 The rhetorical implications of truth claims...................................................46 Notes to Chapter One....................................................................................50 Chapter Two: Publics, counter-publics and the trajectory of 1960s social movements ..........................................................................................................54 Participatory democracy and the public sphere ............................................55 Counter-publics and contentious political engagement ................................56 From reformism to radicalism: Civil Rights and New Left activism ...........63 The Civil Rights Movement during the early 1960s............................63 viii State violence against the Civil Rights Movement..............................65 The emergence of the New Left: Students for a Democratic Society..67 Berkeley’s Free Speech Movement .....................................................67 From resistance to confrontation ..................................................................68 The rise of the Black Power Movement ..............................................69 Growing confrontation in the Vietnam Anti-War Movement .............70 Radicalism and revolution at the end of the decade ............................73 Killing activism, framing activists.......................................................74 Activism in 1968 and beyond .......................................................................77 The rage and death of the New Left.....................................................78 Activism in the new millennium..........................................................81 Notes to Chapter Two ...................................................................................83 SECTION TWO: MEMORIES OF MISSISSIPPI 84 Introduction to Mississippi Burning and Ghosts of Mississippi.............................85 Notes to Introduction to Section Two...........................................................89 Chapter Three: Memory and counter-memory in Mississippi Burning.................90 Memory and amnesia in Mississippi Burning...............................................91 Mississippi Burning as an historical cop action docudrama ................91 Burning violence against blacks into popular memory........................95 Forgetting civil rights activism in Mississippi...................................101 Amnesia as a source for invention in journalistic memory.........................104 Notes to Chapter Three ...............................................................................113 Chapter Four: Melodrama and the scapegoat in Ghosts of Mississippi...............114 The instrumental role of popular memory ..................................................116 The triumph of a civil rights hero in Ghosts of Mississippi........................118 Leaving racism to the past .................................................................119
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