CEU Electronic Theses and Dissertations, 2023
| Author | Mendez, Jefferson |
|---|---|
| Title | Monumentalizing Memories, Memorializing Monuments: Rizal Park and American Colonial Philippines, 1898-1946 |
| Summary | Recent scholarship on American colonization in the Philippines has focused mostly on the conformities and disruptions that occurred during the period (Balance 2016, McCoy 2009, Abinales 2017). A scarcity of studies, on the other hand, has been done on the reconfigurations of new forms of cultural expression in the spatial realm to remember the past, such as the manipulation of the natural and built environments for cultural purposes and the re-ordering of existing spaces or architectural forms in the context of occupation, to name a few. Aiming to understand the relationship between monumentalizing memories and memorializing monuments, this thesis will examine the disparate images of the past generated by the material manifestations of Philippine society's framing of Philippine history on the urban landscape particularly by looking on the Rizal monument and Rizal Park, and in particular the processes of memory in the country. Currently, there is a heated dispute in contemporary Philippine history and politics about the manner in which the colonial past should be remembered and treated, as well as how it should be transmitted. However, while acknowledging that various acts of commemoration are shaped and developed by debates on identity, I argue that the manner in which the Philippines' past is presented and 'packaged' for Philippine society has an impact on which historical narratives the population prefers to visually consume. For the purpose of this study, I will examine the material dimensions' of the past by adopting a perspective that considers both the exterior and interior forms of various visual representations of the past, as well as interrogating how people monumentalized their memories as is traditionally done by historians and how people memorialized monuments nowadays in order to discover the identity of a Filipino Public historian. My study will rely heavily on archival and secondary data collection techniques. Principally, I collected various commentaries and publications from both foreign and Filipino authors. The gathered data were interpreted through historical and discourse analysis. The Rizal monument will be discussed, scrutinized, and assessed in this study. |
| Supervisor | Trencsenyi, Balzs |
| Department | History MA |
| Full text | https://www.etd.ceu.edu/2023/mendez_jefferson.pdf |
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