Reenactment is a global phenomenon.
Though imbricated with national historiography and the national imaginary, reenactment has, since its early flowering in the 1970s, emerged as a transnational phenomenon. As a vernacular practice, it transcends national boundaries and individual interests as well as place-based forms of identity politics.
Networks of hobby reenactors frequently extend across state borders and even continents, while large-scale events are embedded in global tourism and bring together individual participants and groups from disparate places. Further, the practice of reenactment may, in and of itself, involve a form of “reenactive mobility,” with reenactors following in the footsteps of earlier travelers as part of internationally organized teams. By retracing cross-border journeys across vast topographies or by reenacting violent conflicts, intercul- tural encounters may constitute the explicit aim of such undertakings. Not infrequently, such practices seek a shift in intellectual perspective: both researchers and cultural practitioners use reenactment and the notion of experiential knowledge to gain insights into the past lives of individual travelers, indigenous groups, regional collectivities, and postcolonial or post-dictatorial societies yet do so without the reenactors themselves necessarily belonging to such groups. Participants in battle reenactments, for example, may choose the side they seek to represent according to considerations other than simply their own native affiliation. Finally, in computer games and other digital historical simulations, physical barriers to mobility are removed. No matter the form of reenactment—whether game, film, play, novel, exhibition, display, or event—the reenactor is at liberty to seek out his or her own form of allegiance and temporality. Literally or imaginatively, the reenactor can engage in an affective manner with material objects and spaces and put propositions about the past to the experiential test (Breyer and Creutz, 2010).The transnational dimension raises the question as to whether it is possible to identify a form of “global reenactment” within the broader field of reenactment studies.
To what extent and in what ways ought reenactive historical knowledge-making, representation, and commemoration be discussed within a global historical context? And following this, what theoretical andDOI: 10.4324/9780429445668-1 2 Vanessa Agnew, Sabine Stach, and Juliane Tomann methodological challenges might hereby be implied? Conceived as a companion volume to the Routledge Handbook of Reenactment Studies: Key Terms in the Field (2020), edited by Vanessa Agnew, Jonathan Lamb, and Juliane Tomann, Reenactment Case Studies: Global Perspectives on Experiential History addresses these questions through case studies from various countries and world regions—the United States, Brazil, Argentina, the United Kingdom, Germany, Poland, the former Yugoslavia, the Ottoman Empire/Turkey, Israel, Japan, China, Indonesia, and Cambodia. Rather than aiming for comprehensive global coverage, the volume focuses on representative examples to show reenactment in all its medial multifariousness as a worldwide practice with common features as well as local inflections.
Reflecting on reenactment within a transnational context, it might be asked to what extent reenactment studies are coterminous with inquiries within global history. The field of global history is often taken to be a form of historical investigation that encompasses the entire world and that elaborates the interconnectedness between a wide range of actors and regions (Conrad, 2016, pp. 6-9; Wenzlhuemer, 2017, p. 29). However, global history can also be defined more narrowly in terms of a set of globally shared conditions: it is not cross-border exchanges alone that concern such a global history but rather their operation and impact, which, in turn, depend “on the degree of systemic integration on a global scale” (Conrad, 2016, p. 9). In this sense, then, the question of reenactment arises in the context of domestic practices through which it is possible to derive knowledge about the past and the growing popularity of such experiential modes on a global scale.
What are the global conditions shaping these local—or, rather, glocal— activities? How do domestic practices of experience-based historical knowledge-making relate to globally observable processes of memory-making and politics, including the spread of new populisms and postcolonial and decolonizing movements?In recent decades, public history, as a subfield of history, has become more global in its approach and focus. With its aspiration to decentralize history and empower hitherto-marginalized voices, its practitioners are committed to an increasingly internationalized practice that shares many of the aims of reenactment (Ashton and Trapeznik, 2019; Noiret, 2014; Noiret and Cauvin, 2017). To a considerable extent, this commitment relies on the existence of a participatory Web 2.0 that allows for connecting, networking, and crowdsourcing across national borders. But to what extent does reenactment, which is often based on physical co-presence and experiences in situ, manifest such a comparable “global condition”? Serge Noiret and Thomas Cauvin argue that all reenactors’ engagement with the past is driven by emotion: reenactors “operate in the same way worldwide and answer the same needs reusing or recreating the past” (2017, p. 28). They conclude that this global approach renders reenactment a kind of “metamethodology” that is comparable to a transnational form of public history (Noiret and Cauvin 2017, 28).
The contributions to this volume show how reenactors in their local settings employ surprisingly similar modes of engaging with the past. Even if local practitioners are unaware of the international dimensions to their activities, these case studies signal the extent to which reenactment can be seen as a “glocal” practice. By the same token, the impact of events serving as global reference points becomes apparent. For instance, James Chandler, in this volume, turns to the events of September 11, 2001, as just such a “global moment” using the example of Paul Greengrass’s cinematic reenactment, United 93 (2006), to demonstrate the confrontation “with the magnitude of what we don’t know, in any given moment, about the epoch to come, about the ground assumptions of the epoch we inhabit”—something that comes to constitute a global horizon of experience.
If this is true for the events of 9/11, the COVID-19 pandemic and the ever more palpably felt effects of climate change mark new and farther-reaching epochal turning points that may yet become fodder for future reenactment.Reenactment may be thought of as an instantiation of global history, also insofar as both reenactment and global history interrogate established modes of dealing with time. Albeit with different intentions and in different ways, they challenge the idea of history as genealogy or even teleology (Agnew, 2009, pp. 296-297). Whereas global history’s spatial focus questions the privileging of temporal metaphors and proposes that we look beyond progressivist narratives (Conrad, 2016, p. 141), reenactment provides a fundamentally new approach to temporality itself (Agnew, 2009; Schneider, 2011). Both global history and reenactment thus break with more traditional forms of historiography with regard to the interpretation of processes and structures. Precisely because they do so with quite different objectives—here to strengthen the contours of other connections and global integration, there to create an affective and experientially derived form of historical knowledge-making that is hardly interested in structures at all (Agnew, 2007)—the question arises as to how both approaches might be mutually enriching.