Negotiating Justice
While the case studies in this volume show persuasively that reenactment can serve discrete individual, local, and national interests, reenactment often emerges as an explicitly globalized form of historical representation when it is applied to the past’s unfinished business and employed as a means of unsilencing the silenced and attending to neglected stories.
Genocide is a case in point. In its wicked aspiration to the total annihilation of an entire genos—nation or group—genocide was once regarded not only as verging on the unrepresentable but as an event whereafter representation itself might cease to be possible—to wit, Theodor W. Adorno’s aphorism about the impossibility of poetry after Auschwitz. Yet, during the past decade or more, genocide has emerged as a surprisingly common subject for reenactment, whether it be the anniversary restaging of the 1994 Rwandan genocide in Kigali or the retracing of flight from the 1995 Srebrenica massacre via a latter-day March of Peace. Ongoing efforts to gain international recognition of such crimes and to bring the perpetrators to account make reenactment a potentially powerful tool for transitional justice.Other cultural producers adopt a more aestheticized approach to the reen- active treatment of genocide. Filmmaker Joshua Oppenheimer, for instance, invokes the ugly specter of mass violence in Indonesia in the mid-1960s in his Act of Killing (2012), a documentary that has perpetrators restage their murderous acts in a costumed, musical melodrama. If Oppenheimer’s explicit aim is to extend a form of Holocaust discourse to Indonesia’s genocidal past so as to redress past injustices, this attempt at coming to terms with the past reveals the ways in which, as Ann Rigney points out, memory and commemoration discourses have long been transnational (Agnew, 2022b; Rigney, 2021). In its aestheticized, globally recognizable forms, genocide reenactment might be thought of as an important instantiation of this trend.
For volume contributors Charley Boerman and Boris Noordenbos, who also discuss reenactment in documentary films like Folman’s Waltz with Bashir (2008) and Panh’s The Missing Picture (2013), Oppenheimer’s work foregoes a realist documentarian approach for one in which performativity helps generate a sense of audience investment. The identificatory gesture overlays present interests and past events. Boerman and Noordenbos stress that such overlaying offers emancipatory potential: warranted attention is drawn to instances of historical violence. By the same token, historical suffering is easily superseded by simulated experiences and by the affective responses of present-day audiences. Paradoxically, victimhood recedes into the background even as it is thrust to the fore.Thus, we might say, reenacting genocide—under the mantle of a transnationalized set of memory and commemorative practices—comes at a potential cost. Historical reckoning and the implementation of transitional justice do not necessarily follow when genocide and other acts of mass violence are restaged. Ella Pugliese’s film We Want [u] to Know (2009) about the Cambodian genocide—discussed in Stephanie Benzaquen-Gautier’s contribution to this volume—attempts to foster the preconditions for transitional justice by involving local people in the restaging of massacres that occurred under the Khmer Rouge. In this undertaking, underwritten by German funding and supported by an international, interdisciplinary team, local participation renders autochthonous what might otherwise be considered transnational commemorative practices and Western judicial principles. This has a significance that extends beyond processes of decolonization and attempts to dismantle power inequities between the developed and developing worlds. Benzaquen-Gautier observes that reenactment belongs to indigenous post-genocide memory culture in Cambodia and has long offered possibilities for reinterpreting past events in ways that may be cathartic as well as politically motivated.
The example serves as a reminder that historical and commemorative discourses are not necessarily, or not only, Western impositions; they may be informed by long-standing indigenous modes of grappling with the past that accommodate the non-secular, irrational, heterogeneous, and relativistic. This would bear out Dipesh Chakrabarty’s (2000) argument about the need to shuck Eurocentric his- toricizing in favor of, as he puts it, provincializing Europe. Lise Zurne’s contribution based on ethnographic research conducted in Indonesia might be taken as an example. Zurne shows that transitional justice and commemorative gestures do not inevitably underpin reenactments of the violent past. Rather, in some instances, reenactment might help constitute a kind of Andersonian imagined community writ small. On display in her study is a struggle over competing versions of the past in which ordinary people lay claim to a historical rendering that elevates them, rather than the nationstate, to the role of historical protagonist.