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through the community’s ‘stratigraphic landscape’, that ‘conceives historical understanding as an after-life of that which is understood, whose pulse can still be felt in the present’. 4 Through these acts of retrieval, Sayles’ film can be seen as in dialogue with the ‘culture wars’ debates of the 1980s–90s in which issues of identity politics, multiculturalism and the
collective memory and national identity has perhaps been most intensely debated in the historian’s own country, the US. In the last two decades of the twentieth century, as identity politics gained increasing validity, ‘minorities’ such as African-Americans and Asian-Americans pressed claims to an ‘authentic’ self-representation in the country’s influential signifying systems (the media, the schools
/right positions and standards of moral value. On issues ranging from the emergence of academic theory and the strategic import of identity politics, to campus speech codes and anti-pornographic censorship, discursive territories of left and right were subject to frequent clouding and conflation. In media terms, however, that axis of left and right was fairly well maintained. If, as Jim Nielson suggests, the ‘most
she wrote: Call it ‘Homo Pomo’: there are traces in all of them of appropriation and pastiche, irony, as well as a reworking of history with social constructionism very much in mind. Definitively breaking with older humanist approaches and the films and tapes that accompanied identity politics, these