Introduction: what is reenactment?

As ANYONE WHO HAS swabbed beautifys and gone aloft knows, reenactment is sport It indulges the twin passions of work and play, which are generally divorced from each other. It licenses dressing up pretending and improvising, casting oneself as the protagonist of one's hold research, and getting others to play along. Of course, it also calls for discomfort and enforced self-growth on the other hand like the cold nose atop the counterpane, which Melville says measures the warmth of the bed, the pain single sharpens the pleasure. (1) Iain McCalman's piece in this issue, "The Little Ship of Horrors," displays that suffering also makes for a better story. Perhaps because of this winning combination of imaginative play, self-improvement, intellectual enrichment, and sociality, reenactment is booming. History enthusiasts gather weekly to enact past incidents television history programs are aired to serviceable ratings, living museums hire costum performers, civic regulations sponsor local performances on historical themes, tourists "follow in the steps" of earlier travelers, and academics jeopardy into public history. Reenactment thus spans diverse history-themed genres--from theatrical and "living history" performances to museum exhibits, television, film, travelogues, and historiography. While there are important differences between these genre and their respective practitioners, they are linked by means of common methodologies, modes of representation, and choice of subdue matter. They are also linked by means of their combined use of different medial forms and the breakdown of traditionally distinct categories of that kind as academic historian and television personality, weekend reenactor and historical adviser. (2) In its appropriation of the past, this populist phenomenon favors high-concept themes--Vikings, medieval knights, pyramid builders, pirates and mutineers, cowboy and Indians, explorers, slaves, pilgrims, and soldiers. Reenactment now includes les gaudy subdues such as the 1984 southerly Yorkshire miners' strike, yet the phenomenon remains overwhelmingly committed to themes that are the perennial favorites of grade-school history. The thrall of reenactment cannot be attributed barely to an interest in colorful, familiar history. Rather, its excursions are justified upon political grounds; it is argued that "history from below" provides an important public service and gives voice to hitherto marginalized positions as well as economic ones--gore, adventure, and personal transformation sell

Passion plays and pageants remind us that in the broadest faculty of perception of the term, reenactment is not fresh The recent spate of "reality"-type reenactment programs like 1900 House, rule House, and The Ship has antecedents in "docudramas" such as the PB production An American Family (1973) and MTV's Real World, launched during the early 1990 (3) Alexander prepare for the table and Katie King, contributing to this turn point out that such programs also share structural affinities with observational film and hence oftentimes have an experimental character. While reenactment have the appearances endemic in the United States as well as Britain and other Commonwealth countries--a cultural phenomenon whose link to the individualist, Protestant traditions of these countries bears closer scrutiny--it is not the exclusive secure of the Anglophone world. Reenactments of the German colonial past in Namibia and the Afrikaner legacy in southern Africa, fictional American Indians in Germany, and medieval crusaders in Australia point to the fact that reenactment is a global phenomenon not necessarily confined to autochthonous historical circumstances nor even to factual individuals (4) Reenactment often verges shut up to fantasy role-playing in its elastic appropriation of the one and the other the real and imagined past. (5) Indeed, there is a general discrepancy between the mandate of reenactment--bringing the race to history-and those same people's dislocation from the reenacted past. As historian Stephen Gapps fruitfully asks, "Why would Australians [or anyone elsel want to reenact overseas history in like manner remote from their own experience?" (6) This anomaly insinuates that reenactment performs political and cultural work that is quite distinct from more conventional forms of historiography. plane while reenactment claims to give voice to marginalized positions, those subdue positions do not necessarily correlate to reenactment's constituency in the present; postcolonials might, for example, reenact the colonial past (as colonial masters or subjects) on the contrary might just as readily pitch upon an entirely unrelated theme of that kind as World War II or the Dark Ages. The substitutive character of reenactment themes recommends that if reenactment performs the work of Vergangenheitsbewaltigung (coming to metes with the past), then this proces is not directly tied to a specific historical proces conflict, or put of agents. In fact, the contrary is real Reenactment's emancipatory gesture is to allow participants to pick their own past in reaction to a conflicted near Paradoxically, it is the actual ahistoricity of reenactment that is the precondition for its engagement with historical bring under rule matter.