Historical Reenactment Research Articles

Contested Empire: Rethinking the Texas Revolution ed. by Sam W. Haynes and Gerald D. Saxon

Reviewed by: Contested Empire: Rethinking the Texas Revolution ed. by Sam W. Haynes and Gerald D. Saxon Graham B. Cox Contested Empire: Rethinking the Texas Revolution. Edited by Sam W. Haynes and Gerald D. Saxon. Introduction by Gregg Cantrel. College Station: Texas a&m University Press, 2015. vii + 169 pp. Illustrations, maps, index. $30.00 cloth. For students of Texas history, Contested Empire offers a look into some of the newest scholarship on the revolutionary period. Edited by Sam Haynes and Gerald Saxon, accomplished Texas historians in their own right, this book contains five unique assessments of the revolution. Greg Cantrell’s introduction deserves special mention as well for its excellent discussion on the ways in which historians have treated Texas history and the revolution in particular. Eric Schlereth, in his “Voluntary Mexicans: Allegiance and the Origins of the Texas Revolution,” examines the apparent ease with which Mexicans and Anglo-Americans changed allegiances in leaving their country of origin, joining Mexico and shifting their support to the rebellion and the new republic. Using this concept of “voluntary allegiance,” Schlereth reveals that “patriotism was transferrable” and, therefore, the revolution and its outcome was a “deeply contingent” event. These ideas, of course, are quite resonant today. In his “‘Imitating the Example of our Forefathers’: The Texas Revolution as Historical Reenactment,” Sam W. Haynes focuses on the revolutionary motives of Anglo-Texans and reveals the degree to which collective memory of the American revolutionary experience guided actions. Particularly helpful in understanding the intellectual connectivity of the Texas experience with that of American history, Haynes delivers an excellent (if all too brief by necessity) recitation of America’s “creation narrative.” Haynes succeeds in not only demonstrating how Texans connected to the American experience but also how rapidly they disassociated themselves almost immediately by fashioning a unique “Texas creation narrative,” which has tended to obscure, as Haynes put it, the degree to which Anglo-Texans “had once been, in a very real sense, re-enactors of the American Revolution.” Miguel Soto reveals the importance of land speculation, particularly that of Mexican speculators, in bringing about the Texas Revolution in his “Politics and Profits: Mexican Officials and Land Speculation in Texas, 1824–1835.” The course and character of land grants after the Mexican Revolution from Spain had produced a minority of Spanish and Mexicans in Texas; according to Soto, this was “a decisive factor in the outcome,” suggesting that “Mexican sovereignty over Texas” may have “already been compromised long before” what happened at San Jacinto. Will Fowler in his “The Texan Revolution of 1835–1836 and Early Mexican Nationalism,” like Soto, evaluates the revolution from a Mexican perspective. By examining period writings, Fowler argues that the Mexican national consciousness that grew in the post-1848 period owed its underpinnings to the earlier revolutionary period. This “early vision of Mexicanidad,” according to Fowler, emphasized a collective Hispanic heritage, Catholicism, abolitionism, spiritualism over materialism, and distrust of the United States (and land-grabbing Americans). As Fowler shows, although Mexican national identity took time to grow, it did not appear out of whole cloth during the Mexican-American War era; it was already present, at least among Mexican intellectuals in the Texas revolutionary period. While acknowledging the importance of slavery in the debate over American annexation [End Page 70] of Texas, Amy Greenburg in her “‘Time’s Noblest Empires Is the Last’: Texas Annexation in the Presumed Course of American Empire” takes a broader view and submits that some Americans were concerned “that annexation of Texas would lead to the internal collapse of the United States.” Using Thomas Cole’s series of 1836 allegorical paintings of the five stages of empire, Greenburg certainly succeeds in what she proposed for her essay, letting Cole’s The Course of Empire “weave the web of the story.” By doing so, Greenburg reminds us that the debate over annexation of Texas was part of a larger discourse on American empire. This book represents the printed version of the forty-eighth annual Prescott Webb Memorial Lectures held at the University of Texas at Arlington in 2013. Each chapter examines Texas history from more modern perspectives, which reflect recent trends in history—transnational, cultural, and...

The Talbot Remains: Historical Drama and the Performative Archive

This essay engages recent developments in performance theory to rethink dominant literary-critical claims about the frustrated nostalgia of Shakespeare's history plays. Rebecca Schneider's work on the temporality of historical reenactment and Barbara Hodgdon's recent study of the performative nature of theatre archives have challenged long-held truisms about historical and performative loss. Drawing on their insights and on discussions of the archive and repertoire by Diana Taylor and Jacques Derrida, the essay explores how the real, original, or living referent of a history play is inextricable from its performative production. It concentrates on two incidents from Shakespeare's 1 Henry VI : Talbot's scene before the Countess of Auvergne (2.3) and the exchange between Lucy and Joan over Talbot's dead body (4.7). Phyllis Rackin's seminal reading of 1 Henry VI in Stages of History describes a true, original Talbot who resides in the historical record and cannot be satisfyingly reproduced by theatrical simulacra. This essay challenges such influential readings by describing the mutual imbrication of performative and archival history. Revisiting conventional assumptions about the relationship between history and performance complicates the very distinction between an authoritative, archived notion of the past and its performative reiteration via live bodies. Disruptions to the binary distinction between history and performance precede any individual stage production or imagined audience. They are embedded in the history play itself, a form that exposes the cooperation of archival and performative evidence to construct the past in the dramatic present.

Brown v. Board and the Transformation of American Culture: Education and the South in the Age of Desegregation by Ben Keppel

Reviewed by: Brown v. Board and the Transformation of American Culture: Education and the South in the Age of Desegregation by Ben Keppel Dara R. Walker Brown v. Board and the Transformation of American Culture: Education and the South in the Age of Desegregation. By Ben Keppel. Baton Rouge, LA: Louisiana State University Press, 2016. vii + 225 pp. Paper $45. In historical memory and scholarship, Brown vs. Board of Education looms large as one of the central legal challenges to political and social inequality in the United States. Reflecting on this vast literature in 2004, just fifty years after the landmark case, Waldo E. Martin issued a call to his fellow historians to consider the social and culture history of the monumental campaign.* In many ways, Ben Keppel’s Brown v. Board and the Transformation of American Culture: Education and the South in the Age of Desegregation is a response to this charge. In a history of the years following the US Supreme Court’s decision, or what the author calls the Age of Brown, Keppel examines how Americans responded to cultural changes that were products of calls for desegregation. At the center of this history are three “cultural first responders”: Harvard-trained psychiatrist Robert Coles, comedian Bill Cosby, and television producer Joan Ganz Cooney. In tandem, these individuals used the tools of their trades to help answer one [End Page 285] essential question: “what does the phrase ‘public education’ require of the rest of us?” (13) The first chapter characterizes the Age of Brown as a historical reenactment of the Reconstruction era. Although the Thirteenth, Fourteenth, and Fifteenth Amendments represented an opening for African Americans to lay claim to citizenship after emancipation, the American polity had failed to fully embrace its new citizens. It would take the work of abolitionist Fredrick Douglass and others to transform a culture that had relied on racial inequality for centuries. Keppel argues that by the 1950s, public education had become a site of this struggle, or a twentieth-century Civil War. The second chapter examines the trajectory of public schooling in the United States during the 1960s, when Americans from all stripes wrestled with the cultural transformations Brown imbued in American schooling. Using Septima Clark and Marcus Foster as key examples, Keppel suggests that the pedagogical practices and school-centered approaches of Clark and Foster illustrate the cultural impact of Brown. These “new abolitionists,” which included the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) activists and their work with Freedom Schools, reshaped meanings of public education. Clark approached learning as a reciprocal process at the Highlander Folk School, while Foster worked with students and parents to lobby Sacramento legislators for increased school funding. In chapters 3, 4, and 5, Keppel takes the reader on a journey outside of the schools and into the world of social scientists and popular cultural figures. Each of these “cultural first responders” used their platform to push the country to reconsider the purpose of public education at a moment when federal programs like the War on Poverty pushed for greater citizen participation. Robert Coles, the author of the Children of Crisis series, used his fieldwork in Mississippi to support efforts to bring the Head Start Project to the state. Cosby, who saw himself as a teacher, created the Fat Albert and the Cosby Kids cartoon to raise racial awareness and to provide positive images for black children during the 1970s, when representations of African Americans were largely limited to news coverage of social unrest and protest. Cosby sought to provide an alternative to these depictions and the children’s shows that portrayed white children’s lives as normative. And of course, he brought the same agenda to his primetime show, the Cosby Show in 1984. Like Cosby, Joan Ganz Cooney, the creator of the Children’s Television Workshop and a producer for the popular children’s show Sesame Street, used her platform to transform the meaning of public education. Established in 1970 and set in New York City, the show represented a form of educational television that tried to imagine the world as it could be. It allowed American children the opportunity to integrate virtually without [End Page 286...

Shattering Hamlet's Mirror: Theatre and Reality by Marvin Carlson

Shattering Hamlet's Mirror: Theatre and Reality by Marvin Carlson Elizabeth E. Tavares Shattering Hamlet's Mirror: Theatre and Reality. By Marvin Carlson. U of Michigan P, 2016. Cloth $60.00, 145 pages. In his recent monograph, Marvin Carlson develops the premise first established in The Haunted Stage: Theatre as Memory Machine (2003): that theatre capitalizes [End Page 144] on the memories of audiences to provide opportunities for meaning. The past lives of objects and the previous roles of actors ghost performances that follow. In this new monograph, Carlson argues that this hauntological feature is crucial when examining the tension between reality and imitation—a primary concern of modern and postmodern theatre. Using Hamlet's allusion to Socrates as an organizing conceit, each chapter considers the theatre's turn away from mimesis to the appropriation of the "real," including borrowing words, the body of the actor, the affordances of physical surroundings, the prop, and, eventually, the audience itself. While at first blush a study of "utilizing real words from the real world" may seem too all-encompassing, the first chapter effectively traces the evolution of documentary theatre from the living newspapers of the Russian Revolution to twentieth-century testimonial dramas (21). Citing examples from an international range of directors, special attention is paid to the Wooster Group and Tectonic Theatre. The initial intent of borrowing "real" words was overtly political: Utilizing found materials, troupes shifted their interest to structures of power (27). Carlson deftly traces the historical expanse of this tendency toward social justice themes from survivor testimony plays to the current fashion for reproducing literal slices of banal speech. Through two especially compelling examples, the second chapter considers how the body of the actor produces multiple levels of mediation between the "real" and stage worlds. Carlson argues that the nineteenth-century fascination with the celebrity female actor, particularly Sarah Bernhardt and Adelaide Ristori, was partly driven by a contrast between their stage and domestic lives. Contending that the on- and offstage actor produces a "feedback loop between life and theatre" (56), Carlson turns to the Wild West show where attendees were given to understand that "during the summer months [Wild Bill] Cody would return to the West to pursue his scouting to fight the Indians…and during the winter he would tour," which "provided a kind of authentication" (47). As in the borrowing of words, the borrowing of bodies was challenged by 1990s cultural theorists who argued it was impossible to present an uncompromised self if all identity was already a product of an acculturated set of codes. In response, a penchant for using nonactors has arisen and, by extension, so have concerns about exploitation. In order to think about the history and connotations of non-traditional performance spaces that have been co-opted, chapter 3 draws on pre-modern performance traditions, such as the Easter liturgy, to demonstrate the ways in which postmodern "realist" strategies frequently seem to return to un-realist earlier ones. Like the testimony drama's borrowing of words, the borrowing of places produced a cross-cultural trope of the passion play, evident in Vienna, across Egypt, Jerusalem, and even contemporary religious re-enactments by the Mormon Church. Where these early performances attempted to capitalize on the religious connotations of a man-made site, by the eighteenth century, experiments by Goethe and Marie Antoinette desired to make contact with the "real" by moving into ostensibly untouched, pastoral locales. This gave way to nineteenth-century stagings, especially of William Shakespeare's plays, that attempted to reflect "with greater and greater realistic accuracy the locations indicated in the dramatic text"—live rabbits and mossy stage included (66). These strategies anticipated what the [End Page 145] 1980s would eventually label site-specific theatre, not to be confused with the "part hobby, part recreation" amateur tradition of historical re-enactment prevalent in the United States (74). In his transhistorical and transcultural exploration, Carlson demonstrates that popular site-specific performances, returning to theatricalizing man-made spaces such as the factory and warehouse, are strategies for co-opting the "real," rather than revealing a certain objective truth (77). Chapter 4, on borrowing the pre-histories of props, is indebted to a...

Henry Lives! Learning from Lawson Fandom

In an age when many fan activities are undertaken via online networks, devotees of long-dead Australian author Henry Lawson are predominantly bound by face-to-face participation in shared commemorative events. Traditionally seen by fans and readers as 'the Mate of Australia', Lawson is a figure who has inspired a constellation of transformative fan practices ranging from impersonation to extreme outback pilgrimages. Based on interviews with fans and participant observation, this article will show Henry Lawson Society events are intrinsically interactive, encouraging all members to participate in a variety of modes, through visual art, music, poetry and theatre. I argue that Henry Lawson fans are productive rather than critical, circulating their homages within a well-defined community of interest. I argue that Henry Lawson fans re-deploy texts in creative ways in order to make sense of their own social experience. Through a study the fan activities of passionate amateurs - such as Henry Lawson Literary and Memorial Society members - 'nonauthorised' ways of interpreting texts may be discerned, providing alternatives to the 'suspicious reading' of critics.

Событийный туризм и ивент-менеджмент по материалам исторической реконструкции в Испании

The article analyzes the experience of the organization of event tourism and event management in the framework of the historical reconstruction in Spain. For consideration of the involved material of historical reenactment at Castillo Conde de Alfaz and Villajoyosa, which is part of the popular tourist centre of Spain. These tourist destinations are located in the area of Benidorm, attracting a large number of Spanish and foreign
 tourists, not only due to the unique natural conditions (combination of sea beaches, mountains and numerous cultural and commercial centre of Benidorm), but also due to the possibility to dive into one of the most striking historical eras of Spain – ​middle Ages, thanks to well-organized historical reconstruction. The article considers the main forms and methods of historical reconstruction, contributing to the successful promotion of tourism products. The material can serve as a guide for organizers of tourism and potential tourists interested in the history and culture of Spain.

Between Entertainment and Elegy: The Unexpected Success of R. C. Sherriff's Journey's End (1928)

AbstractDespite West End producers' and critics' expectations that it would never turn a profit, R. C. Sherriff's Journey's End (1928) became the most commercially successful First World stage drama of the interwar period, celebrated as an authentic depiction of the Great War in Britain and around the world. This article explains why. Departing from existing scholarship, which centers on Sherriff's autobiographical influences on his play, I focus instead on the marketing and reception of this production. Several processes specific to the interwar era blurred the play's ontology as a commercial entertainment and catapulted it to international success. These include its conspicuous engagement with and endorsement by veterans of the war, which transformed the play into historical reenactment; the multisensory spectatorial encounter, which allowed audiences to approach Journey's End as a means of accessing vicarious knowledge about the war; and a marketing campaign that addressed anxieties about the British theatrical industry. Finally, I trace the reception of this play into the Second World War, when British soldiers and prisoners of war spontaneously revived it around the world. The afterlives of Journey's End, I demonstrate, suggest new ways of conceiving of the cultural legacy of the First World War across the generations.

Re-enacting Historical Slavic Rites in Contemporary Poland

The article aims to show how ethnographic data concerning religious rites, both Catholic and pagan, circulate in culture and thus become a kind of historical source for re-enacting other, invented religious rites. In the example of the Rękawka fair in Cracow, it is demonstrated how religious content present in nineteenth-century ethnographic descriptions, originally ascribed to pre-Christian paganism but incorporated into a Catholic fair, was separated from it and used in recreating and performing a neopagan rite. Investigating an Early Middle Ages re-enactment movement, the author focuses on the process of transforming ethnographic data into historical ones. Analysing the problem of authenticity of such sources, she points out the particularities of achieving authenticity in a re-enactment movement: to some, the contemporary Rękawka fair remains only a kind of historical re-enactment, while according to others it is a true neopagan rite.

«Живая история» в туристских маршрутах

The study focuses on such lines of modern understanding of history as the creation of “living history” in the modern
 museum complexes, recreation of past historical events in documentary maximum proximity to the time of their
 occurrence. This way of understanding history was inspired by many unresolved problems of the past interpretations
 and the author’s opinions, and devoid of the human factor documents of the archives, which failed to rise
 to objective conclusions. Time raised the question about the basis of psychological factor for the interpretation of
 historical events. The object of the research was the study of local history, ethnographic museums, which stimulate
 visitors in special units or in museum complexes and, of course, researchers to model the life of the historical past
 [4]. The doors of the museums open; the story goes into the current life, but certainly in a confined space. They
 develop new research areas as historical tourism that supports political culture, on the one hand, and historical
 psychology, working directly on the quality of historical research, and the penetration into the human factor in the
 historical process on the other hand. The difference between historical tourism from the traditional Ethnography
 is that Ethnography adheres to the locality of the historical information, which is specific to the region. Moreover,
 historic tourism builds ties that are committed to the integrity of national history. Of course, along with the tourist
 places of historical content there is historical re-enactment animation and drama, that are increasingly popular
 nowadays; “bridge” to the reconstruction of historical events is panoramic complexes, which are also included in
 tourist routes. The relevance of the stated themes of the study is that the political culture of the Russians (and it is
 based primarily on historical knowledge) must not be focused only on bookish knowledge of history, but also on the
 history in action – here is tourism of the historical themes and dramatization of historical events.

Rekonstrukcja historyczna wydarzeń pierwszej wojny światowej. Refleksje naukowo-dydaktyczne

The authors of the article present the phenomenon of the historical reenactment on the basis of the First World War reenactment, mainly on Polish territory. In the first part of the article, J. A. Daszyńska focuses on the origins of the mentioned reenactment in the world as well as in Poland in the 90’s. The additional attention will be paid to explain the popularity of reenactment groups which deal with the First and the Second World War. In the second part of the article, J. Chańko describes and grades the educational value of reenactment and so-called lessons of the living history concerning the First World War as well as the possibilities of the media usage while performing. Additionally, the author present the pedagogical profits and dangers connected with reenactments.

Historical science fiction: from television memory to transmedia memory in El Ministerio del Tiempo

ABSTRACTThis article examines the first season of the Spanish television series El Ministerio del Tiempo (The Ministry of Time), broadcast by the public network Televisión Española in the first trimester of 2015. First we consider a number of interpretive problems arising from the representation of history on television. Then, through a qualitative analysis of the series’ content, we review its main narrative features and explore its combination of historical reenactment, science fiction and memory discourse. We end by analyzing the representations of history generated by interpretive or creative communities of followers of the program through linked transmedia practices. We will argue that El Ministerio del Tiempo is a hybrid product that, while novel, also evidences the persistence of certain traditional representational modes. Its innovative and appealing focus is based on genre hybridization and strategies for representing the past that are potentially open to the introduction of uchronias. It has additionally been able to mobilize a significant, active and creative fan community. The series has offered the contemporary Spanish television drama scene a model for renewal; however, its plotlines suggest a simplified, conservative vision of the past, as well as a banal, essentialist view of the nation. The article holds that the transmedia practices generated around El Ministerio del Tiempo have also been influenced by this nationalist framework, and that responses from the fan community have not disputed the hegemonic meanings proposed by the original story.

Contested Empire: Rethinking the Texas Revolution ed. by Sam W. Haynes and Gerald D. Saxon

Contested Empire: Rethinking the Texas Revolution. Edited by Sam W. Haynes and Gerald D. Saxon. Walter Prescott Webb Memorial Lectures. (College Station: Texas A&M University Press, 2015. Pp. x, 173. $30.00, ISBN 978-1-62349-309-7.) In his introduction to Contested Empire: Rethinking the Texas Gregg Cantrell claims that provincialism has so plagued the study of the rebellion of 1835-1836 that serious scholars must tread carefully into the subject. The eminent Texas historian further praises trailblazing revisionists and calls for new perspectives in the study of the Texas War of Independence. Answering this appeal are five respected scholars who took part in the University of Texas at Arlington's forty-eighth annual Walter Prescott Webb Memorial Lecture Series. Distinguished in fields broader than the borders of the Lone Star State, the authors bring their unique viewpoints and expertise to analyze and understand the erstwhile republic's inciting moment (p. 4). This volume, built upon these lectures, offers new insights into the contentious subject. In Voluntary Mexicans: Allegiance and the Origins of the Texas Revolution, Eric R. Schlereth, a scholar of the American Revolutionary era from the University of Texas at Dallas, explores eighteenth-century notions of perpetual allegiance versus voluntary allegiance (p. 12). According to Schlereth, the Founders challenged the belief that citizens were bound to national loyalty by birth. Instead, they embraced a more fluid idea of fidelity. Many of the thousands of Anglo-Americans who immigrated to Mexican Texas internalized this concept, allowing them to adopt a new homeland and allegiance. As they grew dissatisfied with Mexican rule, however, they recast themselves as citizens of yet another nation--the Texas Republic. Sam W. Haynes from the University of Texas at Arlington's Center for Greater Southwestern Studies also situates the Texas Revolution in an early American context. 'Imitating the Example of Our Forefathers': The Texas Revolution as Historical Reenactment examines the collective memory of the American War of Independence and how it shaped the behaviors of Anglo-Americans living west of the Sabine River (p. 45). Texians, as diverse as empresario Stephen F. Austin and filibuster Haden Edwards, evoked the American Revolution's pliant memory to inspire a variety of actions from the armed defense of Mexico to outright rebellion against it. Miguel Soto of the Universidad Nacional Autonoma de Mexico places the Texas Revolution within the context of Mexico's independence from Spain in his chapter, Politics and Profits: Mexican Officials and Land Speculation in Texas, 1824-1835. Soto demonstrates how Mexico's land policy during its early formative years put the nation on a dangerous path toward territorial dismemberment. …

Humanitarian Meaning of University Professional Education

In the 20th century, the university faced a principally new type of cultural development and there was a necessity of transformation to get adapted to new conditions. Change of cultural epochs lead to a change in criteria and principles conditioning the university education system. Largely it affected “externally invisible and inaudible” factor, “the fluid of spiritual life” of the university, “human immaterial sub-basis” of its existence (Jaspers, 2006) - its humanitarian meaning. This can nowadays indicate that existence of the university is challenged.The methodological basis of the research is presented by the comparative method which allows comparing scientific and humanitarian education by the criterion of correlation of professional activity in any field with a humanitarian constituent. The method of historic reenactment is also used in the article.The problem of historical transformation of higher professional education was analyzed. Cultural-humanitarian bases in conditions of the contemporary type of cultural development in globalized world were found out. The contribution of philosophical education to the conservation of humanitarian traditions in the university was defined. The university was considered on the basis of different cultures and epochs. Special attention was paid to characteristics of contemporary culture. It can be concluded that humanitarization is one of the main criterial characteristics of the university.

Center for Historical Reenactments: Is The Tale Chasing Its Own Tail?

Khwezi Gule surveys the work of the Center for Historical Reenactments, studying their twofold impulse to revive the past and stage their own death.

The masculinization of dressing-up

Abstract ‘Dressing-up’ has often been seen as a gendered activity. In particular, costuming – the design and creation of costumes – has been viewed as a female pursuit. However, contemporary events and artefacts, particularly those related to fandom, frame dressing-up in contexts that are more acceptable to male audiences. Via cosplay, historical re-enactment, and the personalization of characters in online games such as World of Warcraft, a new generation of men are becoming more engaged with costume. This article will identify contemporary influences on the perception of the wearing and construction of costume, particularly with regards to costume as an expression of masculine ideals. It will discuss the costume as a marker of hypermasculinity, authority or preparedness, and identify how traditionally feminine domestic spaces and activities have been coopted by a new generation of males. It will present domestic activities such as sewing as rights-of-passage on the path towards masculinity.

The 2nd Lawrence R. Schehr Memorial Award Winning Essay

The Videotheque de Paris, a moving image archive of the French capital, opened in 1988 in the Forum des Halles, site of the city’s former central food markets. This article analyzes the institution’s placement in this new development, its adoption of new technologies, and its engagement with discussions of history and memory. It argues that the Videotheque’s formation and first years epitomized the play with historical time that defined Paris in the 1970s and 1980s: a simultaneous investment in the past as the bedrock of the capital’s identity and a self-conscious futurism. When the city tore down the Baltard pavilions, it made way for a proliferation of historical reenactments at the city’s heart that culminated in the opening of the Videotheque. Promoted as the city’s “living memory,” the institution placed 2,500 documents from almost a century of Parisian film, television, and advertising at visitors’ disposal at high-tech viewing stations. Videotheque staff employed the most up-to-date audiovisual and...

Rethinking (re)doing: historical re-enactment and/as historiography

Re-enactment is a highly popular mode of public history, not only amongst hobbyists, but also in museums, official festivals, documentaries, movies and even school education programmes. It is also emerging in numerous academic fields as a salient (albeit problematic) topic of analysis. Particularly amongst historians, however, it remains on the fringe, held at arm's length, the charismatic, but troubled (and troubling) distant relative. This article questions some of the academic preconceptions regarding re-enactment, reinterpreting the participatory, embodied aspects of the practice as areas of significant potential. I do so by first briefly examining the (potentially productive) tensions between archival, academic history and other modes of historical inquiry, considering what traditions of the discipline may be affecting our attitudes towards other, less “scholarly” modes. The increasingly interdisciplinary nature of academia encourages us to utilise other theoretical and methodological approaches in this endeavour. Bringing historiography, anthropology, philosophy and performance studies theory into communication, I then examine the Jane Austen Festival Australia as an ethnographic case study. In so doing, I assess the potential of re-enactment as an embodied, performative methodology; one that challenges us to readdress what we consider to be history – and who we acknowledge as historians.

Make-Believing White Civility: Historical Re-enactments at Fort Langley, British Columbia

In 1858 Governor James Douglas proclaimed British Columbia a colony at Fort Langley before an audience of Hudson’s Bay Company officials, workers, and Indigenous leaders. The Proclamation dissolved the Hudson’s Bay Company trading monopoly and, while claiming to protect Indigenous lands, actually asserted British ownership of their territory. In the present, Fort Langley National Historic Site holds regular re-enactments of the Proclamation through their educational programs targeting local schools. The script for these re-enactments, authored by Parks Canada staff, allows schoolchildren to role-play a scenario in which James Douglas proclaims British Columbia a colony to protect Indigenous lands, without explicitly staging the negative consequences for Indigenous peoples that the claiming of those lands caused. I link these two events, the 1858 Proclamation and the present-day re-enactments, by comparing the script’s content to its historical and contemporary context. I conclude that the Proclamation re-enactments become performances of recolonization when Parks Canada deceptively presents its own wry civility (Daniel Coleman). The 1858 Proclamation’s embedded civility, and its repetition and reformation in the contemporary script, the production process, and the surrounding social structure, allows colonial ideology to be physicalized, invested, and passed on to and through children at the Fort Langley National Historic Site.

Performing Remains: Art and War in Times of Theatrical Reenactment by Rebecca Schneider (review)

Reviewed by: Performing Remains: Art and War in Times of Theatrical Reenactment by Rebecca Schneider Julia Fawcett Performing Remains: Art and War in Times of Theatrical Reenactment. By Rebecca Schneider. London: Routledge, 2011. pp. 260. $34.95 paper. As an epigraph to the first chapter of her dazzling—and sometimes dizzying— book, Rebecca Schneider takes the motto of the Association of Lincoln Presenters: “Now he belongs to the stages” (32). It’s the kind of pun that Schneider delights in, not only because it collapses into a clever quip on one of the book’s [End Page 115] main claims—that the goal of history, like the goal of performance, should not be to recover some pure past but rather to understand an event through reen-acting it as part of a continuous present—but also because it plays on the coincidental and yet uncannily appropriate conjunctions between ideas that seem worlds apart in space and time. This is a book that makes much of seemingly impossible juxtapositions: medieval tableaux vivants with Abu Ghraib, John Wilkes Booth with Gertrude Stein, Civil War reenactment with feminist performance art. As disparate as these subjects seem, Schneider’s wide-ranging analyses and perceptive close-readings expose their striking similarities. Yet the real point of Schneider’s book is to dismantle the binaries on which performance studies has come to depend: live versus archive, authentic versus mimetic, present versus past. Performing Remains promises not only to rewrite where performance studies is going but also to rethink what it’s been. But this book is not for the faint of heart, and readers hoping to peruse a chapter or two will balk at its theoretical density and deliberately circular prose. Illustrating her nonlinear approach to history, Schneider often drops names only to loop back, pages later, making her point less through articulation than through accretion. Characteristic is a foreword “which is not one” (1), in that it does less to explain than to touch upon the pairings that the book will develop and dissolve. Focusing on Marina Abramović’s 2010 installation The Artist Is Present, queer artist-activist Allison Smith’s 2005 performance The Muster, and interviews with Civil War reenactors, Schneider argues that “elite” artists and Civil War hobbyists share the assumption that history gains more in the reen-acting—that the errors and revisions that reenactment entails have as much to teach us about the past as an exacting examination of its archive. Chapter 1 develops this assertion by pairing Civil War reenactments with the queer performance art of Miranda July. These performances share the assumption that all present events or performances are citations of the past. Thus the idea of the theater as mimesis—the imitation of an action—is both false (because it depends on an impossible distinction between imitation and action, citation and original) and antitheatrical (because it regards the imitation as an always-imperfect attempt to recover the original). If there is no such thing as an original act—no such thing as an unsullied present—perhaps the best way to practice history is to reenact it. Reenactment therefore becomes a critical act and its errors productive differences that prevent history from repeating itself uncritically, an assertion Schneider takes up in chapter 2. She focuses on Suzan-Lori Parks’s The America Play, in which an African American character impersonates Lincoln in a theme [End Page 116] park, and Linda Mussman’s Cross Way Cross, in which a blond woman impersonates Lincoln on a solo road trip. Parks’s commentary on race and Mussman’s on gender, Schneider observes, depend on their characters’ deviation from the exact replication of a past event or person. In this way, it is the error of historical reenactment that “does things” (69). Conversely, it is the reenactment that makes us aware of the error: “If the ‘familiar’ was not in some way induced, it could not be essentially disturbed” (78). Chapter 3 is the heart of Performing Remains, and the moment (which we’ve all been waiting for) when Schneider wrestles most articulately with the ghosts of performance theorists past. In addition to continuing the dismantling of “liveness” that she began in chapter...

Feasibility study of Historic Reenactment tourism

Feasibility study of Historic Reenactment tourism