Performing Pasts for Present Purposes: Reenactment as Embodied, Performative History

Abstract

As both a historian and a performance studies scholar, my theoretical leanings reflect a merging of two disciplines, developed in response to an avid interest in sometimes competing, yet often complementary, facets of both. Most intriguing to me is the gap between these two fields, a fertile ground rich with possibilities, yet to be fully explored. This liminal landscape appears inherently bilateral, occupied by the past and the present, the traditional and the avant-garde, the archive and the repertoire; but what of the messy grey patches in between? Aging fences constructed around disciplinary territories are being eroded by recent turns in scholarship, allowing tentative but rapidly expanding strands of connection to emerge. If further attended, these seeds of academic inquiry could form a flourishing thoroughfare, allowing us to better elucidate the interconnected relationships between temporality, embodiment, culture, performance, and history, and the ways through which we know them.