Challenging Narratives about the Past
Reenactive practices aim at copying the past using strategies of citation, repetition, mimesis, and performative approaches. Exploring the potential of reenactive practices thus raises questions about the boundaries of repeated acts.
Can repetition provide an alternative—or even counternarrative—to official representations of the past? And how is it possible to renegotiate established versions of the past when, by definition, reenactment upholds a relationship with the original through its very attempt to copy the past? If mimesis lies at the heart of reenactment (Konuk, 2020), wherein exists its potential to go beyond the affirmative rehearsal of official narratives and mainstream historiography? From an epistemological point of view, the past is irrecoverable, and every restaging of prior events or dispositions is inevitably an interpretation rooted in present-day values and norms. Thus, notwithstanding reenactors’ efforts to collapse temporalities and evoke the past in the present, a repetition is always a renewed, reinterpreted, and revisited version of the past. Nonetheless, it is important to stress that reenactment has the potential to challenge master narratives. For the individual, reenactment might be accompanied by a sense of pleasurable immersion, or “period rush,” that produces unexpected insights. It might also impact entire collectivities, including the communities, audiences, visitors, and spectators at reenactment events and displays. Watching a reenactment might confirm prior assumptions about the past or yet prompt a sense of critical inquiry as a result of the immediacy of the experience.Various contributions to this volume seize on the subversive potential of reenactment and its capacity to destabilize dominant narratives, whether standard historical views or stock historiographic scholarship. Donna Landry and Gerald MacLean’s retracing of an early modern equestrian journey, for example, aimed at recovering traces of the Ottoman Empire in modern-day Turkey.
Taking the Ottoman traveler Evliya Celebi (1611-c. 1687) as their model, the travelers came to “expect the unexpected,” uncovering hidden histories of migration and rural equestrian subcultures and putting traditional hospitality practices to the test. The quest to trace continuities between the Ottoman past and the Turkish present through a reenactment of Celebi’s journey also produced some stark insights. The conservative neo-Ottomanism of Turkey’s ruling party provides an example of how a glossy vision of the past can be invoked for contemporary authoritarian ends. Considering reenactment as a gendered practice, Juliane Tomann’s contribution, in turn, sheds light on the world of female reenactors engaged in restaging the American Revolutionary War. The contribution sets out the women’s strategies for contesting and challenging masculinist versions of the past, as well as their mode of practicing reenactment in a male- dominated environment. Finally, Lise Zurne takes readers to Indonesia to show how a reenactment club challenges the official historical account concerning the 1949 General Offensive against the Dutch occupation of the country. This wide range of examples demonstrates reenactment’s potential not only for reading history “against the grain” but also for performing highly appealing counternarratives that have the potential to shape viewers’ and reenactors’ historical consciousness.
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