Re-Enacting the Past

<p>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.</p><p>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.</p><p>This book was originally published as a special issue of the <i>International Journal of Heritage Studies.</i> </p>