ABSTRACT
Reenactment is among a series of performative practices that treat history as an experience and thus as something that can be (re)created. Corporeal experience, empathy, sensory immersion, traveling through time—these are central motifs of popular history writing and its reception in a performative way. Suspense, enjoyment, and entertainment are seen as things that might spark laypeople’s interest, curiosity, and enthusiasm for the past. These performative practices are based on an appeal to “authentic” feelings, which promise that the reenactor will be able to approximate the actions, thoughts, and emotions of historical actors (authenticity). As such, reenactors ascribe greater authenticity to non-linguistic phenomena such as feelings and perceptions than to the kinds of linguistic narrative practices traditionally associated with historical representation.
