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Dissertation
Locating Woodstock
Washington State University
Doctor of Philosophy (PhD), Washington State University
05/2025
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.7273/000007804
Abstract
In the annals of American cultural memory, the music festival that occurred between the 15th and 18th of August, 1969 is referred to as Woodstock. For individuals who access this memory, they understand this event to be Woodstock and the performances and moments that made it a cultural touchstone to be representative of Woodstock, the Woodstock generation, and Woodstock Nation. While Woodstock has percolated as a naturalized element of the American cultural landscape, this project begins by departing from that convention and centering the historical reality that the original name of Woodstock was, in fact, the Aquarian Exposition. By using Walter Benjamin’s method of brushing against the grain of history and Lawrence Grossberg’s radical contextual method, conjunctural analysis, this project locates Woodstock by identifying the process through which the original event, the Aquarian Exposition, became known as Woodstock and investigates the implications of that process. Locating Woodstock using this method occurs along three axes. First, this project examines the history of music festivals in the United States. In paying particular attention to folk music festivals from the middle of the 19th century through the middle of the 20th century, this project argues that music festivals are a crucial site of national, racial, and subject formation. Next, this project assembles a useful history of the Aquarian Exposition to destabilize Woodstock’s position in American cultural memory as a climactic and inevitable moment. The Aquarian Exposition, to varying degrees, came about as the result of a series of accidents, few of which have been processed into Woodstock. Finally, this project provides close readings of three texts, all of which were published between 1969 and 1979, that were crucial to the development of what this project terms the Woodstock archive. In discussing these texts, this project concludes its argument that what is referred to as Woodstock was not actually an event, but an assemblage of visual symbology and memory.
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Details
- Title
- Locating Woodstock
- Creators
- Andre Diehl
- Contributors
- Mary Bloodsworth-Lugo (Chair)Samuel Ginsburg (Committee Member)Robert Williams (Committee Member)
- Awarding Institution
- Washington State University
- Academic Unit
- Graduate Program in American Studies and Culture
- Theses and Dissertations
- Doctor of Philosophy (PhD), Washington State University
- Publisher
- Washington State University
- Number of pages
- 173
- Identifiers
- 99901220326901842
- Language
- English
- Resource Type
- Dissertation