Peter Ehrenhaus

... NY: Harper & Brothers. (Reprinted from Vital Speeches of the Day, 1936, 2, 327-328). Eagleton, T. (1983). Literary theory.Oxford: Basil Blackwell. ... Paper presented at the meeting of the International Communication Association, Dublin, Ireland. Monaghan, P. (1991, February 20). ...

Encountering each other’s scholarship brought us together to work on this special issue with the theme of “Memory, Culture, and Difference.” While Jola was working on an essay about the representation of Polish Jews in contemporary Poland (Drzewiecka, 2014), she found resonance in Peter and Susan’s work on the conflicting readings offered by different communities of memory in cinematic representations of racial violence (Owen & Ehrenhaus, 2010). Each of us has had the experience of working at the intersections of memory, culture and difference. Each has felt the need to look beyond the established paradigms of media studies, rhetorical studies and intercultural studies to frame and explicate the complexities we encountered in our case studies of communicative practices. For example, we have written about the politics of memory in the struggle to erase Jews from the master narrative of Polish national identity (Drzewiecka, 2014), and in the contested performance of memory resistance in Monroe, GA, site of the last mass lynching in the United States (Owen & Ehrenhaus, 2014). In these projects, we were assisted by journal editors and reviewers who helped us explore relationships across paradigms of knowledge production. From these experiences, we have come to recognize the value in memory studies of transcending conventional disciplinary boundaries, and of highlighting the discursive, visual, and performative construction of memory as a consequential focus of communication study. Ours is not the first call to transcend conventional boundaries of inquiry in intercultural communication. In their 1999 essay, “Thinking Dialectically about Intercultural Communication,” Judith Martin and Thomas Nakayama (1999) invited intercultural scholars to consider the relationships between the assumptions that guided their own scholarly endeavors, and the production of knowledge in other paradigms. They proposed “a dialectic approach that... offers new ways to conceptualize and study intercultural communication” (p. 1) as a corrective to the shortcomings that they noted in intercultural communication research. Two of their dialectics are especially germane to incorporating “memory” into studies of “culture” and “difference.” Their “past/history–present/future” dialectic draws our attention to the importance of a community’s lived and inherited history, and to the rhetorical and ideological framing of the past, as shared memory. Their “privilege–disadvantage” dialectic draws our attention to parties’ differential access to power in intercultural relations—that is, to the ability to control both material and symbolic resources.

... This essay locates the performance of ritual lynching within the white Christian Evangelical worldview that predominated among members of the white supremacist community responsible for lynching African-Americans. ... Ritual Lynching as Christian Evangelical Performance ...

This essay offers a close reading of the 2008 reenactment of the 1946 Moore's Ford Lynching of four African Americans in Walton County, Georgia. Throughout this fieldwork, we were ethnographically positioned as co-performative witnesses, both “a part of” and “apart from,” mirroring the tensions between the intellectual remove of much rhetorical scholarship and the embodied engagement and understanding of performance studies. A complex and sophisticated repertoire of invention shared by the coalition of activists who planned and staged the performance enabled reenactors to mobilize their bodies to construct the ineffability of traumatic memory, challenge official accounts of the lynching, and advocate hope and healing for the future. Through the “cross-temporal slippage” of reenactment, all in attendance were invited to occupy the subject location of moral witness. A fracture in the coalition along lines of racial privilege/subordination and gender politics revealed the differential reliance upon archival and embodied knowledge, again mirroring the tensions that bind rhetoric and performance.

This essay examines published reviews of Frank Darabont's 1999 film, The Green Mile, as a lens for reading the legacies of American race trauma upon contemporary sensibilities. Close analysis reveals three communities of memory, each defined through a distinct relationship to slavery, Jim Crow, and white supremacy. Through a close analysis of the relationship between each community's readings of the film and preferred meanings anchored in the film's semiotic structure, we locate the key interpretive strategy used by each of these communities: One strategy is structured through melancholia and guilt for the sins of white supremacy; another is structured through mourning and moving beyond victimization; and a third is structured through the “negative sublimity” of transcendent Christian salvation. We then explicate historic and ideological entanglements among these three communities of memory. Points of intersection reveal internal contradictions that call for critical self-reflexive conversation within each community, and resources for communities to live productively with each other in relation to the past.

... prowess. Victorious warriors ritually humiliate their conquered enemies; feminizing the enemy signifies victory and strength (See Jeffords, 1989). ... destruction. These pleasures, says Benjamin (1969), are the ultimate fascist impulses. ...

... Wood argues that the act of witnessing a spectacle lynching worked rhetorically to unite white southerners across class and gender. ... His treatment of popular film as a site of racialized memory and counter-memory construction offers a synoptic view from Griffith's Birth of a Nation ...

... NY: Harper & Brothers. (Reprinted from Vital Speeches of the Day, 1936, 2, 327-328). Eagleton, T. (1983). Literary theory.Oxford: Basil Blackwell. ... Paper presented at the meeting of the International Communication Association, Dublin, Ireland. Monaghan, P. (1991, February 20). ...

... The magazine presents what can be called "cosmopolitan anticom-munism" in stories and photo essays span-ning the world ... "Camouflage" normally means clothing or paint schemes or special devices that help a soldier, vehicle, plane, or ship blend into the natural environment ...

This essay develops a phenomenological perspective of silence and illustrates its principles through a study of the Vietnam Veterans Memorial. Traditionally viewed as the absence of speech, silence is discussed as a potential human response to all forms of symbolic expression. Encounters experienced as silent present a challenge; they also provide the opportunity for authentic self‐discovery, which has implications for