ABSTRACT
Reenactment is often drawn to the cloaca of the past—its slop buckets and sluices, bandages, trenches, and killing fields. In simulating people’s pinched lives and untimely deaths, it foregrounds dirty materiality in order to affect an understanding of the past that casts the present in a light that is at once brighter and dimmer. Yet the phenomenon referred to as “dark tourism” since the 1990s (Lennon and Foley, 1996; Seaton, 1996) pursues the investigation of past calamities and suffering to new levels. Concerned with more than the merely base, the dark tourist seeks sites associated with death, slaughter, genocide, tragedy, crime, and environmental disaster (Hohenhaus, 2019). The medialized nature of the catastrophe affords the site itself a special status in the public imagination (Cottle, 2012). At Auschwitz-Birkenau, Chernobyl, and Ground Zero, the dark tourist is exposed to a frisson of danger and depravity. This both allows for contemplating individual mortality and contributes to a sense of collective identity. Dark tourism wrangles with the conflictual present while forging narratives about the past.
