Intramuros Of Memory

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Download or read book Walled Memoria written by and published by . This book was released on 2014 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: As a memory site, Intramuros, the ancient walled city of old Manila, has largely been imagined as a Spanish heritage site of Filipino nationhood by the Intramuros Administration (IA), the government agency responsible for its restoration and promotion. However, several memory spaces and practices within its walls question and complicate the dominant discourse that IA continues to perpetuate. Moving from the concrete, physical space of a museum to the peripatetic space of a walking tour to the ephemeral spaces of websites and blogs, this dissertation traces how presence informs the public memory-making practices located within each site and considers what and how meaning is made from such presencings. Memoria, the fifth canon of rhetoric, has seen a resurgence in rhetoric and communication studies in recent years, liberally applied to rhetorical studies of public memory and monuments. Yet very few scholars have used the concepts devised by Chai̇m Perelman and Lucie Olbrechts-Tyteca in their landmark book, The New Rhetoric, to apply them to questions of memory. In this dissertation, I bring memory and presence together. As a quality of "standing-out-ness" or "emphasis" in a discourse, Perelman and Olbrechts-Tyteca examine presence in figures of speech. Using metaphor or onomatopeia or repetition, for example, makes a speech or line of argument stand out more, gives it presence and, more importantly for my purposes, memorability. In this dissertation, I argue that public memory work doesn't just exude this quality of presence but that memory work itself is an act of presencing. In short, presence needs to be seen not just as noun but as verb. And because of this, rhetoric scholars need to think of presence as occurring beyond the textual, more than just discursive, to include the material, the spatial, and even the performative. Ultimately, presence can serve as a useful tool for scholars to help delineate the contours of memoria's partiality and can become an invaluable resource for marginal and marginalized publics to mobilize power against a dominantly imposed representation.