Undoing history: Authenticity, tourism, and the precise and vulgar continuum. The staging of the past through performance and display as historiographic operation at living history museums in the United States.

摘要

This dissertation examines living history museums' use of historical reenactment to represent historical periods for tourists. It articulates the performance practices, philosophies, and curatorial methods these museums have used to "stage" the past, and how such "stagings" are historiographic operations which both contribute to our understanding of theatre and performance as well as construct authenticity through institutional authority.;I position my own discourse in relation to the living history scholarship of Jay Anderson, Stephen Eddy Snow, Richard Handler, and Eric Gable with Post-Modern and New Historiography theories. Using the conceptions of time, space, and history formulated by de Certeau, Agamben, and Deleuze, I wish to problematize the notions of performance and historiography for theatre/performance studies, and suggest that living history museums default to what Agamben calls a "vulgar representation of time as a precise and homogeneous continuum." The material is grounded in primary research and interviews at major U.S. living history museums: Plimoth Plantation, Colonial Williamsburg and Old Sturbridge Village.;The first chapter resituates living history museums into a genealogy of performance which departs from Jay Anderson's model of the linear development of museum display. The second chapter focuses on the notions of time and space upon which living history museums ground their historiographic procedures. The third and fourth chapters treat the political, cultural, and economic shifts which allowed for the emergence of living history museums as tourist attractions in the twentieth century. I then reconfigure an understanding of current living history museum practices within shifts in the understanding of time, space, history, and performance.