عنوان

The Legacies of the Civil Rights Movement and the Paradoxical Politics of Inclusion: Collective Memory in Contentious Politics

TL49432

انگلیسی

The Legacies of the Civil Rights Movement and the Paradoxical Politics of Inclusion: Collective Memory in Contentious Politics

[Thesis]

Hajar Yazdiha

Kurzman, Charles

The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill

2017

220

Committee members: Andrews, Kenneth; Bail, Christopher; Caren, Neal; Perrin, Andrew

Place of publication: United States, Ann Arbor; ISBN=978-1-369-87537-9

Ph.D.

Sociology

The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill

2017

This dissertation examines the political uses of the collective memory of the Civil Rights Movement. In Chapter 1, I sketch the making of the collective memory of the Civil Rights Movement, as a cultural structure that is taken up and deployed by all sorts of political actors. In Chapter 2, I engage in an analysis of the political uses of the Civil Rights Movement among 110 social movement organizations representing 11 different social movements from 1980-2016. I find that as different groups make strategic linkages between their group's identity and the collective memory of the Civil Rights Movement, the interaction between identity and memory produces new sets of meanings, transforming the meaning of the collective memory. Chapter 3 examines the processes of "strategy in interaction" more closely analyzing archival data from two paired-cases of rival movements over two presidential eras, the LGBT Movement and Family Values coalitions and the Immigrant Rights Movement and Nativist coalitions. I identify a pattern of processes that elucidate how the perceived relationship between a group's identity and a collective memory shapes the construction and contestation of cultural resonance. Chapter 4 examines the growing Muslim Rights Movement as a group whose social location explicitly shifts after 9/11. Drawing on archival data and focus groups with Muslim community leaders and organizers, this chapter shows that Muslim activists' perceptions of group identity recalibrate with changing political-cultural contexts, reshaping strategies for seeking inclusion. These identity shifts reflect a process of racialization of collective identity in which post-9/11 policies and discourses stigmatize Muslims, shaping contexts in which Muslims generate perceptions of social location analogous to African Americans. What results is a new strategic focus on coalition-building with people of color through strategies aimed at establishing common oppression. Through this volume, by examining how a single cultural structure is taken up by a landscape of social movements, I develop a new approach to understanding cultural processes in contentious politics. As groups strategically deploy collective memory in different ways, the proliferation of meanings of memory, over time, changes the collective memory itself and the way we collectively recall our shared history.

American studies; Social research

Social sciences;Civil rights;Collective identity;Collective memory;Culture;Race;Social movements

Cuellar, Katherine

Kurzman, Charles

Sociology

The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill

1918102674; 10268947

p

[Thesis]

276903

a

Y