40 PRODUCTION OF HISTORICAL MEANING

Scott Magelssen

To use the term production of historical meaning is to recognize that the representation of an environment or historical event is not so much a matter ofgetting it right insofar as the criteria for “right” is determined by 19th-century Hegelian or positivist notions of scientifically EViDENCEd truth (authenticity).

Rather, as more recent discourses remind us, the meaning of an event is flexible and informed by any number of factors, including the interpreter, group, or institution’s ideology, values, subject position, and indeed historiographic understanding. In other words, while historical reenactors and heritage sites were concerned mostly with accuracy in their performances and exhibits even as recently as half a century ago—at least outwardly—today’s goals for producing meaning are just as likely to include emotional impact, inclusivity, and an eye toward social justice.

This is not to say, however, that earlier efforts in historical reenactment were not undoubtedly productions of historical meaning: 18th- and 19th-century pageants and mock battles were intended to shore up nationalistic pride or re-narrate a culture’s or society’s past in order to affirm the regime at hand. This was the case with French Revolutionary spectacles, Spanish colonizers’ stagings of the reconquest of the Iberian Peninsula with and for Indigenous peoples of the “New World,” and Buffalo Bill’s wild west shows (memory and commemoration). Mid- 20th-century programming by the US National Parks Service affirmed the politics of America’s founding fathers and offered a nostalgic balm for citizens suffering alienation from the growing technological innovations of the present; Alvin Toffler diagnosed this as “Future Shock” (Toffler, 1970; nostalgia). In each of these cases, the intentions have certainly been aimed at reifying a past which those involved were meant to feel good about.

Nor should we presume that earlier programmers and historical societies were unaware that their production choices were informed by subjectivity and artistic license. Freeman Tilden’s list of principles for historical reenactment (1977) included among its recommendations that National Parks Service reenactors gear their performances to resonate with visitors’ values and experiences, and that reenactments ought to be understood as interpretation and provocation rather than merely neutral windows into a past environment.

Yet for much of the 20th century, reenactments by museums and heritage sites and hobbyist groups tended to frame their goal for historical interpretation as complete historical accuracy, and to emphasize that success would come with sustained historical rigor, attention to archival and archaeological evidence, scientific method, and an attention to emerging historical information as it became available (corroboration). For champions of American living history museums, this would often include first-person character interpretation as an ideal mode of representation (Anderson, 1984; Snow, 1993). J. D. Rockefeller Jr.'s mantra during the restoration ofWilliamsburg, Virginia, as a tourist attraction in the 1930s was that “no scholar must ever be able to come to us and tell us we made a mistake” (Handler and Gable, 1997, p. 34). And members of reenactment groups devoted to “impressions” of military campaigns and battles or of fur trading expeditions have perennially policed each other's practices to guarantee fidelity in detail, from the stitch or button on a uniform to the gender or race of the performer (Thompson, 2004; Tyson, 2011).

The second half of the 20th-century brought significant challenges to the assumption that archivally corroborated historical accuracy was only a matter of time and labor. These challenges were leveled, on the one hand, by social historians. This new generation of left-leaning scholars, who cut their teeth on the Civil Rights debates of the 1960s and understood that the historical operation was always about class, insisted that the majority of past lives, especially those of women, children, minorities, and the poor, could never be remembered properly if reenactments relied solely on written documents, since such documents tended, with few exceptions, to be about wealthy white men (see Handler and Gable, 1997; Wallace, 1996).

On the other hand, the challenges came from discursive shifts in historiographical theory coming out of continental Europe led by thinkers like Jacques Derrida and Michel Foucault. Michel de Certeau maintained, for example, that historical meaning is a fictive product of a historian's selection of remembered events and the imprimatur of the institution or state which that historian serves (1988). Roland Barthes identified a tendency for historians to beguile their readers with a “reality effect” that substituted detail surmised or conjectured out of presumed common sense rather than documented evidence (1986). And, on the extreme end, Jean Baudrillards work suggested that any attempt at historical reconstruction would result in a simulacrum that simply obviated and substituted for the real (1994).

For the most part, the particulars of these debates were limited to back-and-forth discussion in scholarship, and had difficulty being put into practice in actual historical reenactment. Richard Handler and Eric Gable found that even when Colonial Williamsburg programmers in the 1980s were filled with a zeal for social history, their ideals dissipated when their new protocols for interpretation were bucked by more conservative costumed hosts on the “front lines” in the Historic Area (1997). It may be the case that many living history museums adjusted their mission to represent historically underrepresented groups such as People of Color, women, and those otherwise politically and economically disenfranchised. Examples include Native American programming at Plimoth Plantation and African American programming at Williamsburg. These efforts, though, have often faced shortages of staff and resources and have struggled to fit organically into the historiographical templates of the rest of the institution, which still largely hinge on reproducing meaning in-line with traditional, evidence-based pictures of the past featuring high-profile white protagonists (George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, The Pilgrims, and so forth) (Peers, 2007; Lawson, 1995; Magelssen, 2007; Indigeneity; living history)

By the same token, hobbyist reenactment groups came under scrutiny in popular and legal arenas because critics felt their outward insistence on rigor and fidelity masked a more insidious production of meaning that served at best as a kind of in-group gatekeeping and, more soberingly, as a means for sustaining a smoldering, racially motivated counterculture (battle). While there are hundreds of documented instances of women who disguised themselves as men to fight in the American Civil War, for instance, reenactment groups have often frowned upon anyone other than men participating in battle reenactments, and one instance of a woman

Production of historical meaning

claiming gender discrimination on the part of the National Parks Service at the Antietam National Battlefield made it to Federal Court, where the judge found the barring of participants on the basis of gender unconstitutional (Young 1996; gender).

Journalist Tony Horwitz spent a year embedded with Confederate reenactors in the American South to find rather immediately that for a large percentage of these hobbyists, reenacting a battle is more about white pride and bearing witness to the “unfinished war” of continued “northern aggression” against good white southerners than it is about historical accuracy (1999). In cases like this, reenactors have often been able to shrug off more complicated considerations of the production of historical meaning by hewing to a rubric of historical fidelity, i.e., of barring all obstacles to participants’ right to a so-called period rush, even when evidence is readily available to consider alternative historical meanings.

Much work has been done in recent years to trouble and nuance the idea of producing historical meaning as a new generation of scholars has addressed the question equipped with emerging discourses in, for instance, performance for social change, affect studies, and cognitive neuroscience. Anthony Jackson and Jenny Kidd find that museum and heritage site programmers are “more reflexive and less defensive” about the argument that heritage performance can be both educational and authentic for visitors regardless of the criterion for accuracy (2011; authenticity). This more liberating approach allows programming to be more creative in paying due diligence to stories of the underrepresented. Tourism and performance scholars like Laurajane Smith and Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett are comfortable acknowledging that heritage is produced in the moment and not an objectively stable quality to be achieved with the right amount of science. As such, they find that the concept can be usefully leveraged to bear witness to past lives, traumas, and experiences (Smith, 2011; Kirshenblatt-Gimblett, 1998; trauma; experience). Drawing on theories of cognition by Gilles Fauconnier and Mark Turner (2002), Catherine Hughes argues that meaning in historical reenactment or demonstration is always a coproduction—a “conceptual blend”—between the choices of the reenactor and the cognitive concepts and categories already emergent in the visitor (2011; emotion).

At the same time, new paradigms in museum education have privileged experiential and participatory learning in reenactment programming as both pedagogically promising and as a way to compete in the age of user-generated content and individually curated entertainment platforms. While reenactment as hobbyism has ostensibly always been about producing individual meaning within a larger special-interest community (Erisman, 1998), curators and programmers are adjusting to the advent of Museums 2.0 by pivoting from historical meaning grounded in fidelity and accuracy to meaning produced by the visitor’s affective or emotional connection between the past and her or his own life (Wood and Latham, 2013). Participatory programming at museums and heritage sites has expanded in the last decade to not only immerse visitors in a historical reenactment, but to give them roles and the perception of free choice that will help determine the outcome of the story, whether these roles be fugitive slaves at Conner Prairie Interactive History Park in Indiana, or undocumented migrants trying to cross the US border at Parque Eco Alberto in central Mexico (Magelssen, 2014; narrative; suffering).

Finally, performance artists and groups not affiliated with educational institutions or hobbyist societies have embraced the conventions of historical reenactment to critique past productions of historical meaning and to create new meaning intended to foment present-day awareness of social and political issues or even to invoke a desired futurity for the participants. Chicago’s Pocket Guide to Hell organizes participatory spectacles that both reenact notorious events in Chicago’s history (the Lager Beer Riot of 1855, the Haymarket Affair of 1886) and celebrate the continuing efforts of the 99 percent (Figure 40.1). Allison Smith’s 2005 reenactment installation

Figure 40.1 Participants in The 1855 Lager Beer Riot Dodgeball Reenactment and Beer Tasting, Pocket Guide to Hell.

25 April 2015, Benton House, Chicago. Source: Roslyn Cohen.

The Muster amassed queer-identified artists and intellectuals and their allies to create a pink and campy parody of a Confederate military encampment. Both of these examples imbue their representational practices with a winking camp sensibility, which Rebecca Schneider describes as “that which is gotten slightly wrong in the effort to get something right” (2012, p. 112). That is, each recognizes the familiar tropes of historical reenactments if only to flip them upside down in a carnivalesque commitment to the production of meaning in the present.

40 PRODUCTION OF HISTORICAL MEANING

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