Re-Enacting the Past

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Re-Enacting the Past

Heritage, Materiality and Performance

Pageants, parades, festivals Museology and heritage studies Material culture

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Language: English

Published by: Routledge

Published on: 2nd October 2017

Format: LCP-protected ePub

Size: 3 Mb

ISBN: 9781317376149


What is re-enactment and how does it relate to heritage?

Re-enactments are a ubiquitous part of popular and memory culture and are of growing importance to heritage studies. As concept and practice, re-enactments encompass a wide range of forms: from the annual Viking Moot festival in Denmark drawing thousands of participants and spectators, to the (re)staged war photography of An-My Lê, to the Titanic Memorial Cruise commemorating the centennial of the ill-fated voyage, to the symbolic retracing of the Berlin Wall across the city on 9 November 2014 to mark the 25th anniversary of its toppling.

Re-enactments and their significance

Re-enactments involve the sensuousness of bodily experience and engagement, the exhilarating yet precarious combination of imagination with historical fact, in-the-moment negotiations between and within temporalities, and the compelling drive to re-make, or re-presence, the past. As such, re-enactments present a number of challenges to traditional understandings of heritage, including taken-for-granted assumptions regarding fixity, conservation, originality, ownership and authenticity. Using a variety of international, cross-disciplinary case studies, this volume explores re-enactment as practice, problem, and/or potential, in order to widen the scope of heritage thinking and analysis toward impermanence, performance, flux, innovation and creativity.

Publication information

This book was originally published as a special issue of the International Journal of Heritage Studies.

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