Historical Reenactment From Realism to the Affective Turn
Since the late 1700s new forms of visual entertainment have tried to simulate the details of nature: reenactment has now become the most widely-consumed form of popular history. This book engages with the quest for definition and appropriate delimitation
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Historical Reenactment
10.1057/9780230277090preview - Historical Reenactment, Edited by Iain McCalman and Paul A. Pickering
Reenactment History
Reenactment has been generally associated with cultural heritage events and living history performances and was seen mainly as the preserve of history buffs and fantasy role players. During the past decade, however, reenactment has emerged as a vital trend in popular as well as scholarly forms of historical representation. It has begun to make its way into historiography as a new concept in the understanding of the past. The Palgrave Reenactment History addresses this new interest and embraces ways of understanding diverse experiments in simulative and affective forms of historical representation. It is hospitable to the study of any practical engagement with the past in which the empirical outcome is determined not by what is known in advance, but by the experience of making it. Common to all these forms of historical representation is an attention to the details of physical, emotional, and psychological experience rather than the sweep of large-scale historical processes, or structures. In one respect reenactment returns the specific historical moment to the discipline of scientific experiment, where what was known once may be known again by means of replicating the original circumstances of the discovery. In another respect it introduces history to passions generated when an individual dwelling in a present moment of time achieves a sympathetic identification with another inhabiting an earlier one. A hypothetical structure becomes a real position. Conjecturalism of this exact and yet powerfully dramatic kind lends reenactment a great emancipatory potential, perhaps in some respects a dangerous one. In ways that other forms of historical representation cannot, reenactment binds the circumstances of the original event to its repetition in order to release energies not usually associated with the garnering of knowledge, and powerful enough to prevent the outcome being predictable. If reenactment is an inquiry whose success depends on the mutuality of cognitive and affective impulses of the mind, implying a new understanding of the task of the reenactor-historian and the very purpose of historical representation, then a critique apt for its novel blend of epistemology and aesthetics is an urgent challenge. The series aims then to survey new kinds of histories by breaking with traditional approaches. Its volumes treat various historical periods, sites, and disciplinary approaches to historical representation—colonialism, realism, affective cognition, literature, music, art, architecture, drama, performance, agriculture and the sea. With its comprehensive scope and its theoretical edge, the series will interrogate different disciplinary approaches to reanimating and representing the past. In so doing, the editors expect that it will cause us to not only examine what we know a
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