Reenactment Case Studies: Global Perspectives on Experiential History examines reenactment's challenge to traditional modes of understanding the past, asking how experience-based historical knowledge-making relates to memory-making and politics. Reenactment is a global phenomenon that ncompasses living history, historical reality television, performance art, theater, historically-informed music performance, experimental archeology, pilgrimage, battle reenactment, live-action role play, and other forms. These share a concern with simulating the past via authenticity, embodiment, affect, the performative and subjective. As such, reenactment constitutes a global form of popular historical knowledge-making, representation, and commemoration. Yet, in terms of its historical subject matter, styles, and subcultures, reenactment is often nationally or locally inflected. he book thus asks how domestic reenactment practices relate to global ones, as well as to the spread of new populisms, and postcolonial and decolonizing movements. he book is the first to address these questions through reenactment case studies drawn from various world regions. Forming a companion volume to the Reenactment Studies Handbook: Key Terms in the Field (2020), Reenactment Case Studies s aimed at a wide academic readership, especially in the fields of istory, film studies, memory studies, performance studies, museum and heritage studies, cultural and literary studies, and anthropology.

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.

The Routledge Handbook of Reenactment Studies provides the first overview of significant concepts within reenactment studies. The volume includes a co-authored critical introduction and a comprehensive compilation of key term entries contributed by leading reenactment scholars from Europe, North America, and Australia. Well into the future, this wide-ranging reference work will inform and shape the thinking of researchers, teachers, and students of history and heritage and memory studies, as well as cultural studies, film, theater and performance studies, dance, art history, museum studies, literary criticism, musicology, and anthropology.

During the first decades of the 21st century, a critical re-assessment of the reenactment as a form of historical representation has taken place in the disciplines of history, art history and performance studies. Engagement with the reenactment in film and media studies has come almost entirely from the field of documentary studies and has focused almost exclusively on non-fiction, even though reenactments are being employed across fiction and non-fiction film and television genres. Working with an eclectic collection of case studies from Milk, Monster, Boys Don't Cry, and The Battle of Orgreave to CSI and the video of police assaulting Rodney King, this book examines the relationship between the status of theatricality in the reenactment and the ways in which its relationships to reference are performed. Carrigy shows that while the practice of reenactment predates technically reproducible media, and continues to exist in both live and mediated forms, it has been thoroughly transformed through its incorporation within forms of technical media.

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.

The Vikings Reimagined explores the changing perception of Norse and Viking cultures across different cultural forms, and the complex legacy of the Vikings in the present day. Bringing together experts in literature, history and heritage engagement, this highly interdisciplinary collection aims to reconsider the impact of the discipline of Old Norse Viking Studies outside the academy and to broaden our understanding of the ways in which the material and textual remains of the Viking Age are given new meanings in the present. The diverse collection draws attention to the many roles that the Vikings play across contemporary culture: from the importance of Viking tourism, to the role of Norse sub-cultures in the formation of local and international identities. Together these collected essays challenge the academy to rethink its engagement with popular reiterations of the Vikings and to reassess the position afforded to ‘reception’ within the discipline.

What is re-enactment and how does it relate to heritage? Re-enactments are a ubiquitous part of popular and memory culture and are of growing importance to heritage studies. As concept and practice, re-enactments encompass a wide range of forms: from the annual ‘Viking Moot’ festival in Denmark drawing thousands of participants and spectators, to the (re)staged war photography of An-My Lê, to the Titanic Memorial Cruise commemorating the centennial of the ill-fated voyage, to the symbolic retracing of the Berlin Wall across the city on 9 November 2014 to mark the 25th anniversary of its toppling. Re-enactments involve the sensuousness of bodily experience and engagement, the exhilarating yet precarious combination of imagination with ‘historical fact’, in-the-moment negotiations between and within temporalities, and the compelling drive to re-make, or re-presence, the past. As such, re-enactments present a number of challenges to traditional understandings of heritage, including taken-for-granted assumptions regarding fixity, conservation, originality, ownership and authenticity. Using a variety of international, cross-disciplinary case studies, this volume explores re-enactment as practice, problem, and/or potential, in order to widen the scope of heritage thinking and analysis toward impermanence, performance, flux, innovation and creativity. This book was originally published as a special issue of the International Journal of Heritage Studies.