This book brings together dance and visual arts scholars to investigate the key methodological and theoretical issues concerning reenactment. Along with becoming an effective and widespread contemporary artistic strategy, reenactment is taking shape as a new anti-positivist approach to the history of dance and art, undermining the notion of linear time and suggesting new temporal encounters between past, present, and future. As such, reenactment has contributed to a move towards different forms of historical thinking and understanding that embrace cultural studies – especially intertwining gender, postcolonial, and environmental issues – in the redefinition of knowledge, historical discourses, and memory. This approach also involves questioning canons and genealogies by destabilising authorship and challenging both institutional and direct forms of transmission. The structure of the book playfully recalls that of a theatrical performance, with both an overture and prelude, to provide space for a series of theoretical and practice-based insights – the solos – and conversations – the duets – by artists, critics, curators, and theorists who have dealt with reenactment. The main purpose of this book is to demonstrate how reenactment as a strategy of appropriation, circulation, translation, and transmission can contribute to understanding history both in its perpetual becoming and as a process of reinvention, renarration, and resignification from an interdisciplinary perspective.

Long dismissed as the domain of hobbyists and obsessives, historical reenactment—the dramatization of past events using costumed actors and historical props—has only in recent years attracted serious attention from scholars. Drawing on examples from around the world, Historical Reenactment offers a fascinating, interdisciplinary exploration of this cultural phenomenon. With particular attention to reenactment’s social and pedagogical dimensions, it develops a robust definition of what the practice constitutes, considers what methodological approaches are most appropriate, and places it alongside museums and memorial sites as an object of analysis.

In Reenactments, poet Hai-Dang Phan explores the history, memory, and legacy of the Vietnam War from his vantage point as a second-generation Vietnamese American. Woven throughout the poems is a narrative of his family’s exodus from Vietnam that beautifully elucidates the American record of immigration, dislocation, inheritance, and ultimately hope. The poems are persuasively varied in their approach. The past and present, the remembered and imagined, all intersect at shifting angles, providing bold new perspectives. And, in a fresh move, Phan widens the lens, interspersing translations of several other contemporary Vietnamese poems to the mix. This subtle and moving debut is an important addition to the literature of immigration.

It's the middle of a heat wave, and Charlie Schroeder is dressed in heavy clothing and struggling to row a replica eighteenth-century bateau down the St. Lawrence River. Why? Months earlier, Schroeder realized he knew almost nothing about history. But he wanted to learn, so the actor spent a year reenacting it. This book is Schroeder's account of the time he spent chasing Celts in Arkansas, raiding a Viet Cong village in Virginia, and flirting with frostbite en route to "Stalingrad" in Colorado. Along the way, he illuminates just how much the past can teach us about the present.--From back cover.

Since the late 1700s new forms of visual entertainment have tried to simulate the details of nature: reenactment has now become the most widely-consumed form of popular history. This book engages with the quest for definition and appropriate delimitation of reenactment as well as questions about the relationship between realism and affect.

'At last, the past has arrived! Performing Remains is Rebecca Schneider's authoritative statement on a major topic of interest to the field of theatre and performance studies. It extends and consolidates her pioneering contributions to the field through its interdisciplinary method, vivid writing, and stimulating polemic. Performing Remains has been eagerly awaited, and will be appreciated now and in the future for its rigorous investigations into the aesthetic and political potential of reenactments.' - Tavia Nyong'o, Tisch School of the Arts, New York University 'I have often wondered where the big, important, paradigm-changing book about re-enactment is: Schneider’s book seems to me to be that book. Her work is challenging, thoughtful and innovative and will set the agenda for study in a number of areas for the next decade.' - Jerome de Groot, University of Manchester Performing Remains is a dazzling new study exploring the role of the fake, the false and the faux in contemporary performance. Rebecca Schneider argues passionately that performance can be engaged as what remains, rather than what disappears. Across seven essays, Schneider presents a forensic and unique examination of both contemporary and historical performance, drawing on a variety of elucidating sources including the "America" plays of Linda Mussmann and Suzan-Lori Parks, performances of Marina Abramovic ́ and Allison Smith, and the continued popular appeal of Civil War reenactments. Performing Remains questions the importance of representation throughout history and today, while boldly reassessing the ritual value of failure to recapture the past and recreate the "original."

D-Day with beach umbrellas in the distance? Troops ordering ice cream? American and German forces celebrating Christmas together in the barracks? This could only be the curious world of 20th-century war reenactors. A relatively recent and rapidly expanding phenomenon, reenactments in the United States of World War I, World War II, the Korean War, and the Vietnam War now draw more than 8,000 participants a year. Mostly men, these reenactors celebrate, remember, and re-create the tiniest details of the Battle of the Bulge in the Maryland Woods, D-Day on a beach in Virginia, and WWI trench warfare in Pennsylvania. Jenny Thompson draws on seven years of fieldwork, personal interviews, and surveys to look into this growing subculture. She looks at how the reenactors' near obsession with owning “authentic” military clothing, guns, paraphernalia, and vehicles often explodes into heated debates. War Games sheds light on the ways people actually make use of history in their daily lives and looks intensely into the meaning of war itself and how wars have become the heart of American history. The author's photographs provide incredible evidence of how “real” these battles can become.