Abstract
War reenactors and “living history” groups (who perform for the public only while reenactors perform both publicly and privately) have grown from a small phenomenon to a startling array of contemporary groups and events. In the United States alone, war reenactments draw thousands of participants and spectators each year; in 1998 as many as 25,000 “troops” took part in a huge recreation of the 1863 Battle of Gettysburg. Reenactment is not focused on the Civil War alone, however; it has grown to encompass nearly every war that has ever been prosecuted. Is the drive to reenact a passion to make history “visible” or a desire to personally participate in a grand imagined narrative? How does historical reenactment intersect with contemporary culture, politics, and society?
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Notes
This chapter is excerpted and revised from Chapter 2 in Dora Apel’s War Culture and the Contest of Images (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2012).
Jenny Thompson, War Games: Inside the World of 20th-Century War Reenactment (Washington, DC: Smithsonian Books, 2004), 79, 82.
James O. Farmer, “Playing Rebels: Reenactment as Nostalgia and Defense of the Confederacy in the Battle of Aiken,” Southern Cultures 11:1 (2005), 65–67.
Rory Turner, “Bloodless Battles: The Civil War Reenacted,” TDR 34:4 (1990), 124.
Robert Blackson, “Once More … With Feeling: Reenactment in Contemporary Art and Culture,” Art Journal 66:1 (2007), 30.
Kevin Walsh, The Representation of the Past: Museums and Heritage in the Post-Modern World (London: Routledge, 1992), 1, 102–103.
Quoted in Matthew Eddy, “Nations Have the Right to Kill: Hitler, the Holocaust, and War by Richard A. Koenigsberg,” Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion 48:4 (2009), 840.
Tony Horwitz, Confederates in the Attic. Dispatches from the Unfinished Civil War (New York: Pantheon, 1998).
Ibid.; Vanessa Agnew, “Introduction: What Is Reenactment?” Criticism 46:3 (2004), 327–339.
Quoted in Richard Handler, “Overpowered by Realism: Living History and the Simulation of the Past,” The Journal of American Folklore 100:397 (1987), 340.
Alexander Cook, “The Use and Abuse of Reenactment: Thoughts on Recent Trends in Public History,” Criticism 46:3 (2004), 490.
Sven Lütticken, “An Arena in Which to Reenact,” in Life, Once More: Forms of Reenactment in Contemporary Art, ed. Sven Lütticken (Rotterdam: Witte de With, Center for Contemporary Art, 2005), 55.
See “Lynching Reenactment in Georgia Dramatizes Call for Indictments in 59-year-old Case,” July 28, 2005, available at www.democracynow.org; AP report “Georgia Lynchings Reenacted,” July 25, 2005, available at www.msnbc.msn.com. For a detailed history of the lynching see Laura Wexler, Fire in a Canebrake: The Last Mass Lynching in America (New York: Scribner, 2003). Videos of the later reenactments are available on YouTube.
Eric Lott, Love and Theft: Blackface Minstrelsy and the American Working Class (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995).
Giorgio Agamben, Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1998).
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© 2013 Jürgen Martschukat and Silvan Niedermeier
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Apel, D. (2013). Violence and Historical Reenactment: From the American Civil War to the Moore’s Ford Lynching. In: Martschukat, J., Niedermeier, S. (eds) Violence and Visibility in Modern History. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137378699_13
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137378699_13
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