One More Time: Reenactments, Afterlives, and Aesthetics (I)

Session Submission Type: Panel

Abstract

This panel theorizes aesthetic responses to the resurgence of past conflicts today by appropriating the concept of reenactment as a vehicle for reflection on creative works that engage critically with history. We understand reenactment as a broad category across media, operating on multiple levels: historically, politically and aesthetically. The conceptual looseness of reenactment here invites scholars to elaborate interdisciplinary reflections on this timely concept rather than trying to pin it down or force it into disciplinary definitions. This is because reenactment is itself an interdisciplinary and transmedial strategy.

Reenactments might understand history as a process of becoming that unfolds past conflicts and experiences in the present: reviving them under new conditions. We seek to expand the concept of reenactment – originally elaborated within the discipline of performance studies – across media in order to open new and creative ways of theorizing the present and its relation to history. Reenactment may be at once a reflection on the archive, or a tactic for elaborating genealogies of conflict. It may also be an emancipatory practice that challenges institutional limits of representation by allowing historical actors or descendants to perform their memories. In keeping with the conference’s theme, “Nuestra América: Justice and Inclusion”, we collectively examine aesthetic and political interventions that democratize historical narratives by (re)activating the past across literature, photography, performance, installation, and video.

Sub Track

• Literature and Culture: Interdisciplinary Approaches

Session Organizer

• Thomas Matusiak, Princeton University

Chair

• Thomas Matusiak, Princeton University

Individual Presentations

• Doble de cuerpo. Reproducción y reproductibilidad en Nicola Constantino - Paola L Cortes-Rocca, Universidad de Tres de Febrero (UNTREF) CONICET

• Hindsight: Reenacting the Colonial Gaze in Leandro Katz - Thomas Matusiak, Princeton University

• Transmedial Haunting - Erin D Graff-Zivin, University of Southern California

• Rape Scene: Forensic Reenactment and Feminist Witnessing - Gabriela Nouzeilles, Princeton University