Reenactment Case Studies: Global Perspectives on Experiential History examines reenactment's challenge to traditional modes of understanding the past, asking how experience-based historical knowledge-making relates to memory-making and politics. Reenactment is a global phenomenon that ncompasses living history, historical reality television, performance art, theater, historically-informed music performance, experimental archeology, pilgrimage, battle reenactment, live-action role play, and other forms. These share a concern with simulating the past via authenticity, embodiment, affect, the performative and subjective. As such, reenactment constitutes a global form of popular historical knowledge-making, representation, and commemoration. Yet, in terms of its historical subject matter, styles, and subcultures, reenactment is often nationally or locally inflected. he book thus asks how domestic reenactment practices relate to global ones, as well as to the spread of new populisms, and postcolonial and decolonizing movements. he book is the first to address these questions through reenactment case studies drawn from various world regions. Forming a companion volume to the Reenactment Studies Handbook: Key Terms in the Field (2020), Reenactment Case Studies s aimed at a wide academic readership, especially in the fields of istory, film studies, memory studies, performance studies, museum and heritage studies, cultural and literary studies, and anthropology.

The Routledge Handbook of Reenactment Studies provides the first overview of significant concepts within reenactment studies. The volume includes a co-authored critical introduction and a comprehensive compilation of key term entries contributed by leading reenactment scholars from Europe, North America, and Australia. Well into the future, this wide-ranging reference work will inform and shape the thinking of researchers, teachers, and students of history and heritage and memory studies, as well as cultural studies, film, theater and performance studies, dance, art history, museum studies, literary criticism, musicology, and anthropology.

Long dismissed as the domain of hobbyists and obsessives, historical reenactment—the dramatization of past events using costumed actors and historical props—has only in recent years attracted serious attention from scholars. Drawing on examples from around the world, Historical Reenactment offers a fascinating, interdisciplinary exploration of this cultural phenomenon. With particular attention to reenactment’s social and pedagogical dimensions, it develops a robust definition of what the practice constitutes, considers what methodological approaches are most appropriate, and places it alongside museums and memorial sites as an object of analysis.

In History and Imagination, elementary school social studies teachers will learn how to help their students break down the walls of their schools, more personally engage with history, and define democratic citizenship. By collaborating together in meaningful investigations into the past and reenacting history, students will become experts who interpret their findings, teach their peers, and relate their experiences to those of older students, neighbors, parents, and grandparents. The byproduct of this collaborative, intergenerational learning is that schools become community learning centers, just like museums and libraries, where families can go together in order to find out more about the topics that interest them. There is an incredible value in the shared and lived experiences of reenacting the past, of meeting people from different places and times: an authority and reality that textbooks cannot rival. By engaging elementary social studies students in living history, whether in the classroom, after school, or in partnership with local historical institutions, teachers are guaranteed to impress upon the students a special, desired understanding of place and time.

During the first decades of the 21st century, a critical re-assessment of the reenactment as a form of historical representation has taken place in the disciplines of history, art history and performance studies. Engagement with the reenactment in film and media studies has come almost entirely from the field of documentary studies and has focused almost exclusively on non-fiction, even though reenactments are being employed across fiction and non-fiction film and television genres. Working with an eclectic collection of case studies from Milk, Monster, Boys Don't Cry, and The Battle of Orgreave to CSI and the video of police assaulting Rodney King, this book examines the relationship between the status of theatricality in the reenactment and the ways in which its relationships to reference are performed. Carrigy shows that while the practice of reenactment predates technically reproducible media, and continues to exist in both live and mediated forms, it has been thoroughly transformed through its incorporation within forms of technical media.

In exile and migration, the things that forcibly displaced people take with them become mobile testimonies of defiance, mourning, creativity, and rejuvenation. Through a series of scholarly essays and autobiographical vignettes, this richly illustrated volume draws on such observations to examine the meanings that possessions assume when they are wrenched from their original contexts. The contributors to this collection shine an intimate spotlight on those who are driven from their homes by conflict and forced into exile by authoritarian regimes. In so doing, the contributors underscore the necessity for civil societies to support academic freedom and the work done by critical thinkers worldwide.

"The Racial Railroad argues the train has been a persistent and crucial site for racial meaning-making in American culture for the past 150 years. This book examines the complex intertwining of race and railroad in literary works, films, visual media, and songs from a variety of cultural traditions in order to highlight the surprisingly central role that the railroad has played - and continues to play - in the formation and perception of racial identity and difference in the United States. Despite the fact that the train has often been an instrument of violence and exclusion, this book shows that it is also ingrained in the imaginings of racialized communities, often appearing as a sign of resistance. The significance of this book is threefold. First, it is the only book that I'm aware of that examines the train multivalently: as a technology, as a mode of transportation, as a space that blurs the line between public and private, as a form of labor, and as a sign. Second, it takes a multiracial approach to cultural narratives concerning the railroad and racial identity, which bolsters my claim about the pervasiveness of the railroad in narratives of race. It signifies across all racial groups. The meaning of that signification may be radically different depending upon the community's own history, but it nevertheless means something. Finally, The Racial Railroad reveals the importance of place in discussions of race and racism. Focusing on the experiences of racialized bodies in relation to the train - which both creates and destroys places - secures a presence for those marginalized subjects. These authors use the train to reveal how race defines the spatial logics of the nation even as their bodies are often deliberately hidden or obscured from public view"--

Forced to contend with unprecedented levels of psychological trauma during World War II, the United States military began sponsoring a series of nontheatrical films designed to educate and even rehabilitate soldiers and civilians alike. Traumatic Imprints traces the development of psychiatric and psychotherapeutic approaches to wartime trauma by the United States military, along with links to formal and narrative developments in military and civilian filmmaking. Offering close readings of a series of films alongside analysis of period scholarship in psychiatry and bolstered by research in trauma theory and documentary studies, Noah Tsika argues that trauma was foundational in postwar American culture. Examining wartime and postwar debates about the use of cinema as a vehicle for studying, publicizing, and even what has been termed “working through” war trauma, this book is an original contribution to scholarship on the military-industrial complex.

"What mental and physical distress do actors, camerapersons, and reporters experience when working on reenactments of traumatic moments in history? In Political Camerawork, D. Andy Rice theorizes that the intense feelings produced while creating these performed scenarios, called "simulation documentaries," connect difficult pasts to the present. Building on his background as a nonfiction film director, producer, editor, and cinematographer, Rice analyzes performance techniques to gain insight into the emotional toll of simulation documentaries, including those reliving the Vietnam War, the US military's embodied training in California during the Iraq War, and an annual quadruple lynching reenactment organized by Black civil rights activists in Georgia. Investigating the lasting impact of these productions, Political Camerawork reveals that, by performing a simulation of a traumatic event they didn't directly experience, those involved become carriers of the trauma"--

Commemorative practices are revised and rebuilt based on the spirit of the time in which they are re/created. Historians sometimes imagine that commemoration captures history, but actually commemoration creates new narratives about history that allow people to interact with the past in a way that they find meaningful. As our social values change (race, gender, religion, sexuality, class), our commemorations do, too. We Are What We Remember: The American Past Through Commemoration, analyzes current trends in the study of historical memory that are particularly relevant to our own present – our biases, our politics, our contextual moment – and strive to name forgotten, overlooked, and denied pasts in traditional histories. Race, gender, and sexuality, for example, raise questions about our most treasured myths: where were the slaves at Jamestowne? How do women or lesbians protect and preserve their own histories, when no one else wants to write them? Our current social climate allows us to question authority, and especially the authoritative definitions of nation, patriotism, and heroism, and belonging. How do we “un-commemorate” things that were “mis-commemorated” in the past? How do we repair the damage done by past commemorations? The chapters in this book, contributed by eighteen emerging and established scholars, examine these modern questions that entirely reimagine the landscape of commemoration as it has been practiced, and studied, before.