| Craw was a small neighborhood in north Frankfort, Kentucky, located on fifty acres of swampy, low-lying land along the Kentucky River. To neighborhood outsiders, Craw was the bad part of town carrying a long list of deeply imbedded historical associations: violence, poverty, corruption, dirt, saloons, pool halls, whiskey, cockfights, murder, gambling, bootlegging, whores, slums, and crime. However, neighborhood residents saw Craw from a different perspective. By 1950, every building within the fifty acres once known as "Craw," "the Bottom," or "Crawfish Bottom" was destroyed at the hand of urban renewal. In 1991, James Wallace conducted approximately 25 interviews with former residents of Craw. In the course of each interview, Wallace made his intentions very clear: to document the history of this community from the perspective of its residents, to overturn exoteric perceptions of this community, and to uncover the tragic consequences and injustices of urban renewal.; This dissertation uses archived oral history interviews to examine the social construction of oral history narratives and the role of these narratives in the life of one particular community. I concurrently investigate the role of James Wallace in the reshaping of the public memories of this community. This is accomplished by exploring the relationship between the way these former residents re-imagine and frame their community's history and the way in which this process impacts their sense of place, when the "place" so crucial to their personal identities is gone. I explore the process of constructing social memories and the process of authorship regarding those memories. I study the relationship between folklore and oral history in the context of constructing individual and community memories and the subsequent function of those memories in exploring the social and symbolic aspects of physical space within the oral history performance event. |
