Representing the Civil War

Blight, David.  American Oracle: The Civil War in the Civil Rights Era.  Cambridge: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2011. Print.

        Blight's work utilizes literature of the Civil Rights movement by such authors as James Baldwin and Robert Penn Warren in order to investigate the ways that, 100 years later, Americans grapple with the memory of the Civil War.  The "national epic" that is the stories we tell ourselves about the Civil War is, for Blight, the creation myth of the nation for, "...the United States, to an important degree, is the stories it tells itself about the Civil War and its enduring aftermath" (6).  While an important addition to the literature of Civil War memory and mythology, Blight's prologue is most important for this project for it outlines his understanding of how (literary) performances of remembering and forgetting which can inform how we think about reenactors and reenactments and the (non)fictional stories they tell themselves and the spectators.

 

Horowitz, Tony.  Confederates in the Attic: Dispatches from the Unfinished Civil War.  New York: Vintage Books, 1999. Print.

        Horowitz’s work is one of the most cited, revered books about Civil War reenactors by "civilians" - and one of the most hated by reenactors.  Horowitz travels the Eastern and Southern United States, participating in reenactment events and researching the lingering effects of the Civil War, documenting his experiences in a travelogue-style narrative.  While often cited as one of the reasons for the growth in popularity of Civil War reenacting in the 1990s, most reenactors who I spoke with about the book regarded it with much chagrin as it made reenactors seem extreme in their impressions and outlandish in their beliefs about the Civil War.  While a must-read for anyone researching the hobby or the role of the Civil War in the current popular imagination, those reenactors that Horowitz documents in the most detail also have to be understood in the larger context of the hobby.

 

Ross, Ivan David. "Mediating the Historical Imagination: Visual Media and the U.S. Civil War, 1861-2011." Ph.D. The University of Chicago, 2012. Web.

 

 

(Civil) War through Performance

Calhoun, Lindsay Regan. "Remembering Sand Creek: Nation, Identity and Collective Memory in Narrative and Performance." Ph.D. The University of Utah, 2007. Web.

 

Carruthers, Susan L.  The Media at War.  New York: Pelgrave Macmillian, 2011. Print.

 

Duggan, Patrick.  Trauma-Tragedy: Symptoms of Contemporary Performance.  New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012. Print.

 

Filewod, Alan. “Regiments of the Theatre: Reenactment in Theatre and Military Culture." TR1C/ RTaC·25.1·2 (2004).   Pp 41-66. Web.

             Filewood investigates the reenactment of martial performance by civilians and the professional military outfits of the United States and Canada, including performances that are of "invented tradition[s which] builds on a structure of contradictions: army that isn't army, guards who don't guard, soldiers who aren't soldiers, a history that never was" (45).  His work analyzes the intersection of the military and performance not only by non-military members, but also of performances sanctioned by militaries that are utilized as stagings of commemoration. Filewod notes that, “...military reenactment emerges as both performance and commemoration. While it is clearly theatrical, it is equally grounded in the structures and protocols of legitimation in military culture. In this moment, theatre and military cultures converge, and in that convergence opens the possibility that they are deeply, reciprocally, connected” (45).  Similarly, reenactors tend to shy away from the word "performance," preferring to coin their (en)actions "impressions," denoting the importance of historical accuracy in their commemorative acts as well.  Through "fetishes of authenticity," the performances of the military and reenactors are made manifest and, in effect, product history for both the soldier, reenactor, and audience (56-57).  Crucially for this study, Filewod writes, "Reenactment is neither and both: militarized theatre, theatricalized army, a theatre without playhouses and an army without power;” this construction of reenactment as both war and play grounds my understanding of the spectacle of a reenactment and underscores the martial impotence of reenactments  through the performative (49).

 

Kubiak, Anthony.  Agitated States: Performance in the American Theater of Cruelty.  Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2002. Print.

 

Magelssen, Scott, and Rhona Justice-Malloy. Enacting History. Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2012. Print.

 

McNeill, William.  Keeping Together in Time: Dance and Drill in Human History.  Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1995. Print.

 

Meineck, Peter.  “Combat Trauma and the Tragic Stage: ‘Restoration’ by Cultural Catharsis.”  Intertexts, Vol. 16, No. 1 (2012): 7-24. Web.

        Meineck’s article posits that “Athenian tragedy offered a form of performance-based collective ‘catharsis’ or ‘cultural therapy’ by providing a place where the traumatic experience faced by the spectators was reflected upon the gaze of the masked characters performing before them” (7).  His primary focus is the idea of nostos, “home-coming”, as experienced by combat veterans, veterans’ families and their society and how we can understand this experience through ancient performance texts.  The article connects on the psychological and emotional toll combat imparts on the ancient warriors tragedies as performed on stage and our current service members as a way to understand PTSD and different therapeutic treatments such as catharsis as experienced in performance and public discourse.  This notion works well to explain the motives behind reenacting; using Meineck’s categorization of the “violence-transformation-restoration motif” present in Panhellenic rituals and myths, we can view reenactments using a performative lens that allows for both the reenactors and the spectators to use the experience of the violence and trauma of the Civil War as a way to transform their understandings of the nation, history and war and to help heal the wounds of the war that are still present today. 

 

Potter, George. "Global Politics and (Trans)National Arts: Staging the ‘War on Terror’ in New York, London, and Cairo." Ph.D. University of Cincinnati, 2011. Web.

 

Schechner, RIchard.  Between Theater and Anthropology.  Philidelphia: University of Pennslyvania Press, 1985.  Print.

 

- - Performance Theory.  New York and London: Routledge, 1988. Print

 

Schneider, Rebecca. Performing Remains: Art and War in Times of Theatrical Reenactment. London and New York: Routledge, 2011. Print.

 

Schubart, Rikke, et al, Eds. War isn't Hell, it's Entertainment: Essays on Visual Media and the Representation of Conflict. Jefferson, N.C.: McFarland. 2009. Print.

 

Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky. Between Men: English Literature and Male Homosocial Desire. New York: Columbia University Press, 1985. Print.

 

Striff, Erin, Ed.  Performance Studies.  New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003. Print.

 

Thompson, James.  Performance Affects: Applied Theatre and the End of Effect.  New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009.  Print.

 

Tilmans, Karin, van Vree, Frank and J. M. Winter. Performing the Past: Memory, History, and Identity in Modern Europe. Amsterdam University Press, 2010. Print.

 

 

Reenactment and Reenactors

 Allred, Randal. "Catharsis, Revision, and Re-Enactment: Negotiating the Meaning of the American Civil War." Journal of American Culture (01911813) 19.4 (1996): 1. Web.

        Allred explains and details the hobby, asking the reader to question more deeply the reasons why reenactors do what they do.  He posits that in addition to being “a search for a more meaningful paradigm of conviction and purpose in our time of fragmented self-absorption,” reenacting is also a culture complete with its own language, economy, publications and cottage industries that allow for a catharsis for the reenactor (1,5).  With elements of a “religious ritual, complete with the approach of the sacrifice, the act itself, the resurrection and reconciliation, the prayer the ceremonial exit of the participants, and even a hymn,” the (re)enacted battle, ensuing casualties and the post-battle ritual of the reanimation of the dead and the hymn present at some events, the reenactment presents an opportunity to perform “passion play” in which the “passion is not that of an atoning god, but of a nation in its own birth-in-death throes, atoning for its own sins” (10).  This passion play is “surely a tragedy,” and enables spectators and performers to be “cleansed by the tragedy” (10-11).  In his reading of reenactments, Allred adds the language of religiosity to the performance, noting that, in his experience, reenactors are looking to “revise history, bind up the wounds, and efface the scars of the great slaughter” (11).

 

Bowen, Ashley Elizabeth. "Old Times There are Not Forgotten: Civil War Re-Enactors and the Creation of Heritage." M.A. Georgetown University, 2009. Web.

 

Cash, John. "Borrowed Time: Reenacting the American Civil War in Indiana." Ph.D. Indiana University, 2003. Web.

 

Hadden, Robert Lee.  Reliving the Civil War: A Reenactor's Handbook. Mechanicsburg, PA: Stackpole Books, 1996. Print.

 

Hall, Dennis. "Civil War Reenactors and the Postmodern Sense of History." Journal of American Culture (01911813) 17.3 (1994): 7. Web.

 

Johnson, Steven Kirkham. "Re-Enacting the Civil War: Genre and American Memory." Ph.D. University of Washington, 2006. Web.

 

Jones, Gordon L. “‘Gut History’: Civil War Reenacting and the Making of an American Past." Ph.D. Emory University, 2007. Web.

 

McCalman, Iain and Pickering, Paul A. Historical Reenactment from Realism to the Affective Turn. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010. Print.

 

Thompson, Jenny.  War Games: Inside the World of 20th-Century War Reenactors. Washington D.C.: Smithsonian Books, 2004. Print.

 

 

Commemory: Spaces, Places and Affect

Ahmed, Sara. “Collective Feelings Or, The Impressions Left by Others.” Theory, Culture & Society. Vol 21(2) (2004): 25-42. Print.

 

          ---. “Happy Objects.”  In The Affect Theory Reader, Gregg, Melissa and Seigworth, Gregory J, Eds. Durham, North Carolina: Duke University Press, 29-51. Print.

 

Bell, Michael Mayerfeld. “The Ghosts of Place.” Theory and Society 26 (1997): 813-236. Print.

 

Blom, Thomas. “Morbid Tourism – a postmodern market niche with an example from Althorp.”  Norsk Gergrafisk Tidsskrift – Norwegian Journal of Geography Vol 54 (2000): 29-26. Print.

 

Bloomstrom, Kimber Lee Bowen. "The Arlington Confederate Monument: Examining the Narratives of its Rhetorical History." Ph.D. Regent University, 2008. Web.

 

Briante, Susan Carol. "American Ruins: Nostalgia, Amnesia, and Blitzkrieg Bop." Ph.D. The University of Texas at Austin, 2006. Web.

 

Bridge, Jennifer R. "Tourist Attractions, Souvenirs, and Civil War Memory in Chicago, 1861-1915." Ph.D. Loyola University Chicago, 2009. Web.

 

Butler, Judith. Bodies that Matter. On the Discursive Limits of Sex. London and New York: Routledge, 1993. Print.

 

Cash, John.  “Borrowed time: Reenacting the American Civil War in Indiana.” Diss.  Indiana University, 2003. Print.

 

Davis, Colin.  “Hauntology, Specters and Phantoms.”  French Studies LIX, No. 3 (2005): 373-379. Print.

 

Davis, Fred. Yearning for Yesterday: A Sociology of Nostalgia. New York: Free Press.  Print.

 

Faust, Drew Gilpin.  This Republic of Suffering: Death and the American Civil War. New York: Vintage Books, 2008. Print.

 

Filewod, Alan. “Regiments of the Theater: Reenactment in the Theater and Military Culture.” Theater Research in Canada Volume 25, Numbers 1 and 2 (2004): 41-66. Print.

 

Gordon, Avery F. Ghostly Matters: Haunting and the Sociological Imagination. 2nd Edition. Minnesota: University of Minnesota Press, 2008. Print.

 

Gough, Paul.  “Fault Lines: Four Short Observations on Places of Peace, Trauma and Contested Remembrance.”  Journal of Visual Art Practice, Volume 5 Numbers 1 and 2 (2006): 39-48. Web.

            Gough’s article “explores the site of battle as a place of the imagination, as a site of continued dispute, a ‘debatable land’” in a meditative style that asks the reader to contemplate the intertwining of space, identity and memory.  For the purposes of this project, his third section, “Scissors,” is most potent as he discusses the use of battlefields as pilgrimage sites where “spectacles of memory” are performed in the forms of “choreographed events – re-enactments, last stands, famous victories” (44).  These “hallowed sites of national memory” create a physical space that allows for the maintenance of national memory.  Gough’s summation of Jay Winter’s “three phases in the evolution of commemorative commerce” is of particular note; the creative phase where the form of commemoration is decided upon, followed by the ritualizing of the dates and ceremonies to be performed on the dates and the final transformation of the sites themselves are crucial to the understanding of the performances of reenactments.

 

Graber, Samuel J. "Twice-Divided Nation: The Civil War and National Memory in the Transatlantic World." Ph.D. The University of Iowa, 2008. Web.

 

Hunt, Nigel G. Memory, War and Trauma. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2010. Print.

 

Kirshenblatt-Gimblett, Barbara. "Theorizing Heritage." Ethnomusicology 39.3 (1995): 367-80. Web.

 

Lin, Jiin-Ling. "An Investigation of the Relationships among Destination Image, Place Attachment, and Visitation Intention of Heritage Tourists." Ph.D. Middle Tennessee State University, 2011. Web.

 

 

Leys, Ruth.  “The Turn to Affect: A Critique.”  Critical Inquiry 37 (Spring 2011):  434-472. Print.

 

Maddrell, Avril and James D. Sidaway. “Introduction: Bringing a Spatial Lens to Death, Dying, Mourning and Remembrance,” in Deathscapes: Spaces for Death, Dying, Mourning and Remembrance, Maddrell, Avril and James D. Sidaway, Eds. Burlington, VT: Ashgate Publishing Company, 2010. Print.

 

Murray, Jennifer Marie. “‘On a Great Battlefield’: The Making, Management, and Memory of Gettysburg National Military Park, 1933-2009." Ph.D. Auburn University, 2010. Web.

 

Nora, Pierre. “Between Memory and History: Les Lieux de Memoire.”  Representations No 26, Special Issue: Memory and Counter-Memory (Spring 1989): 7-24. Print.

 

Parr, Adrian.  Deleuze and Memorial Culture: Desire, Singular Memory and the Politics of Trauma. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2008. Print.

 

Postlewait, Thomas, and Charlotte Canning. Representing the Past: Essays in Performance Historiography. Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 2010. Print.

 

Roach, Joseph.  Cities of the Dead: Curium-Atlantic Performance. New York: Columbia University Press, 1996. Print.

 

Sakamoto, Rumi.  “Mobilizing Affect for Collective War Memory: Kamikaze Images in Yushukan.”  Cultural Studies Volume 29, Number 2 (2015): 158-184. Print.

 

Schechner, Richard. Between Theater and Anthropology.  Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1985. Print.

 

Schneider, Rebecca.  Performing Remains: Art and War in Times of Theatrical Reenactment. London and New York: Routledge, 2011. Print.

 

Schwab, Gabriele. Haunting Legacies: Violent Histories and Transgenerational Trauma. New York: Columbia University Press, 2010. Print.

 

Shouse, Eric. “Feeling, Emotion, Affect.”  M/C Journal Vol 8, Issue 6 (2005). Web

 

Spielvogel, J. Christian.  Interpreting Sacred Ground: The Rhetoric of National Civil War Parks and Battlefields.  Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2013.  Print.

 

Stein, Jeannine, Mark Elson, and James Lighthizer. Battlefields of Honor: American Civil War Reenactors. London &  New York: Merrell, 2012. Print.

 

Sterling, Colin.  “Spectral Anatomies: Heritage, Hauntology and the “Ghosts’ of Varosha.”  Present Pasts.  6(1) (2014): 1-15. Print.

 

Winter, Jay.  Sites of Memory, Sites of Mourning: The Great War in European Cultural History. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 1995. Print.

 

Young, Craig and Duncan Light. “Corpses, dead body politics and agency in human geography: following the corpse of Dr Petru Groza.” Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers 38 (2013): 135-148. Print.

 

Gendered Martial Politics

Belkin, Aaron.  Bring me Men: Military Masculinity and the Benign Façade of American Empire, 1898-2001.  New York: Columbia University Press, 2012. Print.

 

Blanton, DeAnne and Cook, Laurence Martin. They Fought Like Demons: Women Soldiers in the American Civil War. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press.  2002. Print.

 

DeGruccio, Michael E. "Unmade: American Manhood in the Civil War Era." Ph.D. University of Notre Dame, 2007. Web.

 

Foote, Lorien.  The Gentlemen and the Roughs Manhood, Honor, and Violence in the Union Army. New York: New York University Press, 2010. Web.

 

Gibson, James William.  Warrior Dreams: Violence and Manhood in Post-Vietnam America.  New York: Hill & Wang, 1994. Print.

 

Hannah, Eleanor L. Manhood, Citizenship, and the National Guard: Illinois, 1870-1917. Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 2007. Print.

 

Robertson, Leslie. "Soldiers, Heroes, Men: Marlborough, Wellington, and the Warrior as Model of Ideal Masculinity." Ph.D. University of Alberta (Canada). Web.

 

Jeffords, Susan. Remasculinization of America: Gender and the Vietnam War.  Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1989. Print.