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.
About the Author: Vanessa Agnew is Professor of Anglophone Studies at Universität Duisburg-Essen. She directs the Critical Thinking Program of Academy in Exile at Freie Universität Berlin and is Honorary Professor in the Research School of Humanities and the Arts at The Australian National University.
Sabine Stach is a research fellow at the Leibniz Institute for the History and Culture of Eastern Europe in Leipzig. Her research focus is on Czech and Polish contemporary history, public history, and tourism. From 2015 to 2020 she worked at the German Historical Institute in Warsaw.
Juliane Tomann is Assistant Professor for Public History at Regensburg University. Her teaching and research interests focus on practices of doing history in popular culture in Central-Eastern Europe and the USA. Previously she was head of the research unit "History in the public sphere" at Imre Kertész Kolleg in Jena.
