Engaging the Past by Alison Landsberg

Author:Alison Landsberg [Landsberg, Alison]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: HIS036000, HISTORY / United States / General, SOC022000, SOCIAL SCIENCE / Popular Culture
Publisher: Columbia University Press
Published: 2015-06-08T16:00:00+00:00

3

Encountering Contradiction

Reality History TV

It suddenly sunk in in a way that it hadn’t until then that I was going along and being an imperialist. . . . I am reenacting a whole system that I don’t believe in and that I disapprove of, and yet it’s the roots of our own nation.

—Carolyn Heinz, Participant in Colonial House

AT THE END of his introduction to a special issue of the journal History and Theory titled “Unconventional History,” Brian Fay asks, “Don’t unconventional practices of historical representation, analysis and assessment—unconventional relative to those present in academe—provide an opportunity to see the weaknesses (as well as the strengths!) of conventional historiography?”1 Many of the weaknesses that unconventional forms make visible result from conventional history’s privileging of a cold, clinical, detached gaze on the past, its categorical refusal to breathe life into the situations, events, and individuals depicted, its rejection of any modes of engagement that lie outside the cerebral, and its inability to make the past seem relevant, important, or useful to people in the present.

One would be hard-pressed to imagine a form of historical representation more unconventional than the genre “reality history TV.” In the shows I consider in this chapter—Frontier House (PBS, 2002), Colonial House (PBS, 2004), and Texas Ranch House (PBS, 2006)—individuals from the present are cast into the past: they are made to abandon all aspects of their contemporary lives, from clothing and personal effects to values and dispositions, and are then placed in a setting that is meant to simulate life in a particular historical place at a specific historical moment. Participants are made to confront the material, ideological, political, and economic conditions that would have shaped existence at a given historical moment. Because this “unconventional historical practice” breaks virtually every rule of academic history, it is easy to dismiss the genre as mere entertainment, as many historians have done. Indeed, one would be remiss not to take account of the way in which the generic conventions of reality TV have shaped these products, making their entertainment value part of the equation. Nevertheless, these shows’ unconventional form raises some significant epistemological questions about how historical knowledge is both produced and acquired. In other words, following Brian Fay’s lead, I ask what a profoundly unconventional practice of historical representation—perhaps more accurately called a historical experiment—can make visible both in terms of a specific historical understanding of the period depicted and in terms of the larger project of history itself. What are the differences between the kinds of knowledge produced by traditional written academic history and the kinds produced by the more experiential history experiments of reality history TV that rely on an embodied form of reenactment? In her insightful and important book on historical reenactments, Rebecca Schneider has sought to articulate the complex temporality of reenactment; furthermore, her research reveals that at least some reenactors, contrary to their “common depiction,” are well aware of the “problems of ambivalence, simultaneous temporal registers, anachronism, and the everywhere of error” and that “many

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