Composing, Remembering, and Performing Identity at Charles Towne Landing, 1966 Through 1971: Rhetorical Identification As Defensive and Antagonistic Strategies
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University of Tennessee, Knoxville TRACE: Tennessee Research and Creative Exchange Doctoral Dissertations Graduate School 5-2013 Composing, Remembering, and Performing Identity at Charles Towne Landing, 1966 through 1971: Rhetorical Identification as Defensive and Antagonistic Strategies Deidre Anne Evans Garriott University of Tennessee - Knoxville, [email protected] Follow this and additional works at: https://trace.tennessee.edu/utk_graddiss Part of the Rhetoric and Composition Commons Recommended Citation Garriott, Deidre Anne Evans, "Composing, Remembering, and Performing Identity at Charles Towne Landing, 1966 through 1971: Rhetorical Identification as Defensive and Antagonistic Strategies. " PhD diss., University of Tennessee, 2013. https://trace.tennessee.edu/utk_graddiss/1724 This Dissertation is brought to you for free and open access by the Graduate School at TRACE: Tennessee Research and Creative Exchange. It has been accepted for inclusion in Doctoral Dissertations by an authorized administrator of TRACE: Tennessee Research and Creative Exchange. For more information, please contact [email protected]. To the Graduate Council: I am submitting herewith a dissertation written by Deidre Anne Evans Garriott entitled "Composing, Remembering, and Performing Identity at Charles Towne Landing, 1966 through 1971: Rhetorical Identification as Defensive and Antagonistic Strategies." I have examined the final electronic copy of this dissertation for form and content and recommend that it be accepted in partial fulfillment of the equirr ements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy, with a major in English. Michael Keene, Major Professor We have read this dissertation and recommend its acceptance: Janet Atwill, William Hardwig, James Stovall Accepted for the Council: Carolyn R. Hodges Vice Provost and Dean of the Graduate School (Original signatures are on file with official studentecor r ds.) Composing, Remembering, and Performing Identity at Charles Towne Landing, 1966 through 1971: Rhetorical Identification as Defensive and Antagonistic Strategies A Dissertation Presented for the Doctor of Philosophy Degree The University of Tennessee, Knoxville Deidre Anne Evans Garriott May 2013 DEDICATION I dedicate this work to my husband, Todd Garriott. You are the reason I rediscovered Charles Towne Landing. Thank you, Todd, for your love and support through these five years of writing and research while we discovered our own love. And to my parents, the Reverend V. Creighton Evans, Junior, and Nina Evans. I never would have pursued a PhD in English if you hadn’t provided me with an endless supply of novels, blank notebooks, and pens, and if you hadn’t encouraged me to be weird. And to my grandmothers, Joan Welsh Evans, and the late Frances Grimball Ash. Together and separately, they taught me the best aspects of Southern culture. ii ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS Thank you to all the staff at the South Carolina Department of Archives and History for pulling boxes of documents, for copying hundreds of pages of letters, memos, and reports, and for always being cheerful when I submitted yet another request for more boxes and more copies. iii ABSTRACT This dissertation contributes to the growing body of research in rhetorical studies of identity theory. In this dissertation, I look at alternative texts that seek to construct and forward communal identities. In particular, this dissertation investigates Charles Towne Landing, a historical state park in Charleston, South Carolina, to study the ways historical sites of public memory are sites of rhetorical identification. The State of South Carolina’s legislature authorized a body called the South Carolina Tricentennial Commission to plan and execute a celebration of South Carolina’s three-hundredth anniversary, which would take place in 1970. The commission planned and built three parks in South Carolina as exhibition sites for the Tricentennial Celebration. Charles Towne Landing is the only one that still exists. The commission intended Charles Towne Landing to represent colonial life in South Carolina, focusing on the years between 1670 and 1770. They decided to build Charles Towne Landing on a piece of land called “Old Town” in the West Ashley-are of Charleston on Highway 171. The chose this site because several historical documents suggested that it was the first British settlement in South Carolina. Upon breaking ground at the site in 1969, construction workers and archeologists discovered artifacts from the Kiawah who had originally lived at this site. This discovery caused a crisis about identity and memory that pervaded the local and state media. In this dissertation, I conduct archival research of official documents from and related to the South Carolina Tricentennial Commission (1966-1970) to compose a narrative of how the park was built. I then analyze these documents considering their rhetorical nature, focusing on the implicit and explicit arguments of identity. I also analyze photographs of historical performances and celebrations of historical memory. Using this park and the methods of identity construction that the commission used as a case study, I argue that to analyze rhetorics of identity, rhetoricians must acknowledge and study their inherently defensive and antagonistic natures. iv TABLE OF CONTENTS Chapter One: Introduction .................................................................................................. 1 Analyzing Charles Towne Landing as a Site of Public Memory and Rhetorical Identity ......................................................................................................................................... 4 The Arguments of this Dissertation ................................................................................ 5 Outline of the Introduction.............................................................................................. 8 Historical Introduction: The Formation of the Tricentennial Commission and the Conditions of South Carolina, Post-Civil Rights Movement.......................................... 8 The Brief Summary of the Conditions South During and After the Civil Rights Movement ................................................................................................................... 9 Charles Towne Landing as a Rhetorical Text and the Tricentennial Commission as Rhetors .......................................................................................................................... 16 Methods......................................................................................................................... 21 Intersecting Rhetorics of Identity, Materiality, and Place/Space as a Theoretical Frame ....................................................................................................................................... 24 Terminology .................................................................................................................. 29 The South (and the Southerner) ................................................................................ 29 Experiential Rhetoric ................................................................................................ 30 Regionalism (Rhetorically) ....................................................................................... 31 Dissertation Outline ...................................................................................................... 34 Chapter Two: Literature Review ...................................................................................... 37 Rhetorical Theorists and Theories ................................................................................ 40 Kenneth Burke and Identification ............................................................................. 40 Sites of Rhetorical Education and Identification ...................................................... 45 Material Rhetoric ...................................................................................................... 48 Rhetorics of Display ................................................................................................. 49 Rhetoric of Space and Place ..................................................................................... 52 Theories of Identity ....................................................................................................... 55 Memory and Identity................................................................................................. 58 Strategies of Identity Construction ........................................................................... 60 Southern Identity ....................................................................................................... 62 Performance Studies ..................................................................................................... 67 Conclusion .................................................................................................................... 68 Chapter Three: The Rhetoric of Identity Using British Heritage, Pedigree, and Prestige in Charles Towne Landing .................................................................................................... 73 Chapter Outline ............................................................................................................. 75 The Shaftesbury Papers, Proprietary History, and British Identification and the Conflict with American Nationalism .........................................................................................