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theses

Newark Remembers explores the relationship between public forms of commemoration and transformations in civic engagement in Newark, New Jersey, over the course of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. From 1916 to 2013, civic engagement in Newark remained a highly contested process as boosters, reformers, urban planners, and community leaders battled over competing political and ideological visions for the city’s progress and development. In these same decades, commemorative practices took on varied shapes in order to suit the various goals and priorities of elites and organizers. My dissertation investigates the ways in which processes of public commemoration both shaped civic engagement as well as how such processes were shaped by civic engagement, a dynamic which took different forms in different eras of Newark’s history. I argue that studying commemoration provides us with fresh insights into the economic, social, and cultural changes that occurred in post-industrial American cities by uncovering both conflict and consensus, which propelled the organization and execution of these public projects. By analyzing whose memories dominated public celebrations during three commemorative episodes—Newark’s celebration of its founding in 1916, its 40th anniversary commemorations of the 1967 civil disturbances, the 1969 student takeover of Rutgers University, and the 2013 remembrance of the deadliest fire in its history—as well as why such memories shaped the development of the city, my dissertation engages with and interprets commemoration and civic engagement as complex processes that have evolved over time in historically specific ways. For example, the organizers of the 1916 celebrations sought to market and brand Newark as a “city safe for investment,” using commemoration as both a marketing tool and a political strategy meant to legitimatize consumer-based notions of citizenship and civic participation. In contrast, during Newark’s twenty-first century commemorative boom, individual and collective civic needs of residents led to uses of memory that promoted reconciliation and community building. By tracing both changes and continuities in such commemorative practices, we can see how this interaction between public memory and civic engagement produced, at times, messages of reconciliation while, at other times, created specific narratives of dominance or resistance. In each of these cases, we also see how civic memory was manifested through modes of remembering and forgetting, and through the exclusion or inclusion of various segments of Newark’s diverse citizenry. One particular focus of this argument is on how civic memory frames local dialogue regarding the legacy of civil disturbances, urban renewal, and demographic transformation. Another focus is on the temporal fluidity uncovered when we re-visit these commemorative events: while these anniversary celebrations were intrinsically a look backward into the past, they also necessarily marked their particular presents by contesting and articulating contemporary citizens’ visions and plans for the future. Using oral history interviews with both the organizers and participants of these commemorative episodes and previously unused archival materials, this project constructs a history of these processes and practices in order to find out not only how participants constructed memory but, more importantly, how they sought to define the city’s present and shape the city’s future through those constructions of memory.

ETD_6413

Ph.D.

Includes bibliographical references

by Rosie Jayde Uyola

doi:10.7282/T3CJ8GCS

ETD doctoral

The author owns the copyright to this work.