Who are the creators? Tyson's book is centered around the push and pull between front-line workers and management, how it informs the cultural product. But she skirts the question of the consumer, neglecting to identify the audience when it matters most. Chapter 5 begins with two attempts to interpret the history of slavery at Colonial Williamsburg – "the country's most well-known living museum" (145). Tyson describes how, in the 1960s, Black maintenance staff members covered a tape recording about "the life of a slave cook" to prevent visitors from hearing it. She interprets their reaction as "embarrassment," stemming from a supposed lack of racial consciousness, pre-Black Power. If Tyson were to interrogate the content of the tape itself, the positionality of the interpreter on that tape, and visitor demographics – in tandem with the Black staff members' discomfort – she could have more substantively analyzed the situation. Picture this: a white interpreter working at a historic colonial site in the 1960s records a script about "the life of a slave cook" for a white audience. The tape is likely paternalistic in tone; at best, it is a sanitized account of atrocity that is both romanticized and dehumanizing. Black staff members are forced to listen to this tape – a white interpreter speaking to a white audience about nameless Black bodies bustling about a kitchen in service to some long-dead white people. These Black maintenance staff members themselves likely clean up after these white interpreters, these white audience members – performing more services and emotional labor than any of the "front-line" workers Tyson writes about. Their smothering of this tape recording did not come from a place of embarrassment, but one of defiance – an obstruction of the white historical gaze, rather than "censorship."
Given my own suppositions, one can understand how easily Tyson's vague account could be misconstrued. The same is true of her discussion of Williamsburg's short-lived African American Interpretation Program (AAIP) and their controversial 1994 "Estate Sale" program. Tyson only goes so far as to locate the problem in terms of the medium of presentation (i.e., reenactment), constraining it to a supposedly universal "emotional and intellectual discomfort" (146). She pays no mind to the white onlookers at this reenactment of a slave auction. Which begs the real question, not of whether living history does justice to painful subject matter, but of why? For whom do we perform history, write history, interpret history? Indeed, assuming public history hasn't been completely overtaken by the sensationalist, money-making schemes of neoliberalism, where do the well-intended set their sights? On educating the masses? Put another way, who benefits from witnessing enslavement? Assuming living history is a medium of empathy, who here needs to be taught empathy? White people. Even comical renditions of historical reenactment speak to this dynamic. In Azie Dungey's "Ask A Slave," emotional labor, white ignorance, and the white gaze are all glaringly apparent. Meanwhile, Key and Peele's "Civil War Reenactment" intrudes upon the insularity of white people reenacting history, their erasure of POC from those narratives out of guilt and fragility. Historic interpretation – history itself – is an enterprise, portioned as mass produced experiences of nostalgia and nationalism.
2 Comments
Hilary Iris Lowe
11/2/2017 06:22:05 am
Can you parse some of the differences between re-enactment and living histort?
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GVGK Tang
11/2/2017 08:50:51 am
Great question! Historical reenactment in itself strikes me as much more scripted, usually reserved for retracing the steps of significant figures and events (e.g., a Civil War battle). It also tends to be more of a spectacle; you've got actors on one side and an audience on the other. Meanwhile, living history is more participatory and immersive (e.g., colonial villages where tourists can converse with actors or go chop some wood). Living history utilizes historical reenactment as an educational, two-sided exchange; it's about narrating through dialoguing. Pure historical reenactment is staged without breaking that fourth wall.
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