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 The Vulnerable Self and Loss of Agency: Trauma Theory and the Challenge to a Rahnerian Theology of Freedom and Grace

Jennifer Erin Beste

in God and the Victim: Traumatic Intrusions on Grace, and Freedom

This chapter examines the impact of severe trauma on persons' selfhood, capacity for relationality, and freedom for self‐determination. To address the complex effects of trauma on the sense of self ... More

This chapter examines the impact of severe trauma on persons' selfhood, capacity for relationality, and freedom for self‐determination. To address the complex effects of trauma on the sense of self and capacity for freedom, this book focuses on women survivors who experienced severe incestuous trauma as young girls. It examines incest survivors’ posttraumatic stress systems, focusing in particular on how their behavior attempts to reenact the trauma severely compromises their sense of self and their agency. Incestuous abuse also damages survivors' ability to develop trusting, intimate relationships with others and God. Many incest victims frequently report, in comparison to nonabused women, experiencing more anger, shame, and feelings of distance toward God. While more research is needed, it is reasonable to take seriously the possibility that severe trauma such as incestuous abuse can negatively impede and perhaps destroy a person's ability to relate to God and neighbor with faith, trust, and love.Less

The Ghost Dance and Realism’s Techno-Spiritual Frontier

Lindsay V. Reckson

in Realist Ecstasy: Religion, Race, and Performance in American Literature

This chapter examines the mediated life of the Ghost Dance, a pan-tribal religious movement that emerged in the 1880s in the context of U.S. colonial expansion, genocide, and dispossession. ... More

This chapter examines the mediated life of the Ghost Dance, a pan-tribal religious movement that emerged in the 1880s in the context of U.S. colonial expansion, genocide, and dispossession. Spectacularly suppressed at the Wounded Knee massacre of 1890, the Ghost Dance proliferated in turn-of-the-century ethnographic realism, a project that included literary, photographic, filmic, and sonic texts. Focusing on efforts to record and reenact the dance, this chapter argues that such reenactments signal the reiterative life of colonial violence in the supposed afterlife of the frontier. Yet they also point to realist media as a temporally and affectively dense terrain of performance. In the aftermath of Wounded Knee, realist ethnography drew its authority from the very visionary practices it aimed to reproduce, insisting on realism’s capacity to adequately record spiritual performance while channeling the power of media to resurrect and reanimate the dead. Such performances signal a tight fit between the cultural logic of Indian vanishing and modernity’s dreams of high-fidelity preservation. At the same time, reenactment’s contingencies of performance and reperformance offer a way to rethink the historical nexus between recording and vanishing.Less

Touching a Button

Lindsay V. Reckson

in Realist Ecstasy: Religion, Race, and Performance in American Literature

This chapter examines turn-of-the-century electrification as a site of ecstatic possibility and violent materialization, analyzing little-known photographs by William Van der Weyde of the electric ... More

This chapter examines turn-of-the-century electrification as a site of ecstatic possibility and violent materialization, analyzing little-known photographs by William Van der Weyde of the electric chair at Sing Sing Prison to describe how the electric chair mobilized electricity’s spiritual potential for the mass reproduction of death. Exploring how William Dean Howells and other opponents of the chair linked its technological effects to the mass popularity of the push-button photograph, the chapter examines photography’s collusion with the electric chair’s production of stillness as a form of racial terror, while analyzing Van der Weyde’s photographs as realist reenactments of an electrified touch. The chapter reads these photographs alongside James Weldon Johnson’s The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man (1912), a text that mobilizes “electric affects” to theorize the circulations of religious feeling and racial terror at the nadir of American race relations, even as the novel itself becomes an electrifying performance circulating in and through the shock of spectacular violence. Yoking the “electrifying climax” of the camp meeting to the “electric current” of the lynch mob, Johnson channels the language of circuitry to suggest the centrality of both practices in defining and disfiguring the “real” of secular modernity.Less

Simulation, Situated Conceptualization, and Prediction

Lawrence W. Barsalou

in Predictions in the Brain: Using Our Past to Generate a Future

Simulation constitutes a central form of computation via diverse forms of cognition, where simulation is the reenactment of perceptual, motor, and introspective states acquired during experience with ... More

Simulation constitutes a central form of computation via diverse forms of cognition, where simulation is the reenactment of perceptual, motor, and introspective states acquired during experience with the world, body, and mind. This chapter describes the reenactment process, which has two phases: firstly, storage in long-term memory of multimodal states that arise across the brain's systems for perception, action, and introspection (where “introspection” refers to internal states that include affect, motivation, intentions, meta-cognition, etc.); and secondly, partial reenactment of these multimodal states for later representational use, including prediction. Each phase is addressed in turn.Less

History’s Muse: The Spectacle of Poetic Improvisation

Melina Esse

in Singing Sappho: Improvisation and Authority in Nineteenth-Century Italian Opera

Chapter One explores how an aesthetics of reenactment and repetition characterized Italian improvisation. The author describes how women improvisors occasioned a large volume of literary description ... More

Chapter One explores how an aesthetics of reenactment and repetition characterized Italian improvisation. The author describes how women improvisors occasioned a large volume of literary description that often relied upon ethnic stereotypes that depicted Italians as spontaneous, natural, and rooted in Greco-Roman history. The author argues that the poetic improvisor’s reenactment of history and memory allowed the improvvisatrice to personify creative genius and Italy’s cultured past. The author discusses accounts of the improvisor Rosa Taddei, which were informed by Madame de Staël’s novel Corrine and the Sapphic model of artistic suffering, that emphasized both her spontaneity and her extensive learning. As the roles of composer and performer became more distinct, the poetic improvisor thus embodied a shifting set of oppositions—spontaneous creation and rote memorization, author and muse, present and past—that illuminated changes in Romantic performance towards an aesthetic of repetition and reenactment.Less

Trial Stages: Rithy Panh’s Parajuridical Cinema

Ivone Margulies

in In Person: Reenactment in Postwar and Contemporary Cinema

This chapter examines Rithy Pahn’s S21: The Khmer Rouge Killing Machine and its disturbing tableaus featuring the ex-guards of S21 reenacting acts of torture and reciting documents extracted under ... More

This chapter examines Rithy Pahn’s S21: The Khmer Rouge Killing Machine and its disturbing tableaus featuring the ex-guards of S21 reenacting acts of torture and reciting documents extracted under duress at the very site where these atrocities were committed. Following an interest in the dissonant effects of spare, empty sites, this chapter explores the affinity between contemporary reenactment film and juridical and psychoanalytic discourse; it considers the theatrical effects of the perpetrators’ affectless behavior in relation to notions of traumatic reenactment, and it posits, through close readings of a number of scenes, a parajuridical aesthetics based on a triangulation between performance, recitation, and a narrating figure that serves as judge/professor. Panh’s articulation of an indicting, evidentiary structure and of a disturbing witnessing position for the viewer are analyzed in contrast to documentaries made around and about the International Court of Cambodjian Crimes, including juridical reconstructions at the site.Less

Conclusion: ‘Presentness Is Grace’

Kevin A. Morrison

in Victorian Liberalism and Material Culture: Synergies of Thought and Place

The conclusion reflects on questions of evidence in writing about historical interiors that either no longer exist or have been fundamentally altered.

Introduction

Seeta Chaganti

in Strange Footing: Poetic Form and Dance in the Late Middle Ages

This book argues that in bringing dance-based perceptual practices to their encounter with poetry, medieval audiences experience a poem’s form as strange footing, virtual forces that hover askew of ... More

This book argues that in bringing dance-based perceptual practices to their encounter with poetry, medieval audiences experience a poem’s form as strange footing, virtual forces that hover askew of worldly measures of time and space, existing between the real and the unreal. To make this case, Strange Footing reenacts prevalent traditions of performing and representing dance, such as carole and danse macabre.Less

“Vanysshed Was This Daunce”: Reenactment, Experience, Virtuality

Seeta Chaganti

in Strange Footing: Poetic Form and Dance in the Late Middle Ages

This chapter defines the terms reenactment, experience, and virtuality. It elucidates Strange Footing's reenactment method, which juxtaposes medieval and contemporary dance.

The Carole’s Virtual Circles

Seeta Chaganti

in Strange Footing: Poetic Form and Dance in the Late Middle Ages

This chapter reenacts the round dance often called carole by juxtaposing it with Mark Morris’s L’Allegro, il Penseroso ed il Moderato (1988). In this reenactment, the carole reveals its virtual ... More

This chapter reenacts the round dance often called carole by juxtaposing it with Mark Morris’s L’Allegro, il Penseroso ed il Moderato (1988). In this reenactment, the carole reveals its virtual circles and arcs of force. These virtual supplements to the dance, untimely and spatially estranging, complicate the carole's superficial appearance of symmetry and periodicity.Less

Growth and Change: Isn’t This the Whole Point?

Sandra L. Bloom and Brian Farragher

in Restoring Sanctuary: A New Operating System for Trauma-Informed Systems of Care

This chapter begins with a vision of what things might look like if we all truly embraced the Sanctuary Commitments in our personal and organizational lives. It then explains the key barrier to ... More

This chapter begins with a vision of what things might look like if we all truly embraced the Sanctuary Commitments in our personal and organizational lives. It then explains the key barrier to change, which is reenactment—the compulsive tendency to repeat patterns of the past. Understanding and working with reenactment is the key to individual and group change. The chapter explores the normal context in which our tendency to reenact the past occurs, and what happens as a result of disrupted attachment and traumatic experience. The underlying resistance to change seen in individuals and institutions, and therefore the likelihood of repetition, results from resistance to loss. The organizational tendency to reenact past failed strategies is considered and some of the implications of growth and change for leadership are explored. The chapter concludes by offering some strategies for facilitating growth and change in caregiving organizations.Less

Performing “Frontier in the Attic”

Daniel R. Maher

in Mythic Frontiers: Remembering, Forgetting, and Profiting with Cultural Heritage Tourism

This chapter uses performance theory to examine the specific manner in which Fort Smith constituted the frontier complex for the specific audience of tourists. In 1955 the city exhumed its frontier ... More

This chapter uses performance theory to examine the specific manner in which Fort Smith constituted the frontier complex for the specific audience of tourists. In 1955 the city exhumed its frontier past to resurrect the “Hanging Judge’s” gallows and courtroom, not sixty years after an embarrassed town had burned down the original gallows. The Fort Smith Museum of History, the Fort Smith National Historic Site, Miss Laura’s Visitor Center, the Bass Reeves monument, and frontier reenactment groups collectively operate to fashion the frontier complex. Though ostensibly representing nineteenth century frontier history, this chapter details how these various constituents create a mythic past that reinforces contemporary ideologies. Numerous groups and individuals compete for space to perform the frontier complex into being. While some purport their authenticity to be sanctioned by the Reenactment Guild of America, it is argued here that it is not the fine art of splitting hairs over authenticity of buttons and threads that distinguishes these groups, but rather the amount of room on the theatrical stage upon which these skits are performed. Following Richard Slotkin, it is argued that the frontier complex is a space and place in America where mimed public violence is permissible and whiteness reinforced.Less

The Walter Scott Experience: Living American History after Waverley

Mike Goode

in Constellations of a Contemporary Romanticism

Goode explores how Scott’s “potent historical fictions,” their “historically resigned but elegiac narrative of the Jacobite rebellions,” are deployed by Jefferson Davis, former President of the ... More

Goode explores how Scott’s “potent historical fictions,” their “historically resigned but elegiac narrative of the Jacobite rebellions,” are deployed by Jefferson Davis, former President of the Southern Confederacy, to make sense of the “noble lost cause” of the American Civil War. For Goode, Scott’s own narrative “revivification” is best understood as an “ontological project of historical reenactment,” one that not only found resonance with apologists of the vanquished Confederacy but that is literalized in the long-running fantasy spectacle of the “living history museum” at “colonial” Williamsburg, Virginia.Less

Possession Play: On Cinema, Reenactment, and Trance in the Cologne Tribes

Anja Dreschke

in Trance Mediums and New Media: Spirit Possession in the Age of Technical Reproduction

The Cologne Tribes are an association of around 80 clubs from Cologne whose members re-enact the lifeworlds of ‘foreign’ cultures and/or ancient epochs as a leisure time activity. The chapter ... More

The Cologne Tribes are an association of around 80 clubs from Cologne whose members re-enact the lifeworlds of ‘foreign’ cultures and/or ancient epochs as a leisure time activity. The chapter approaches the mutual constitution of media and trance in a twofold way. It takes the enthusiasm for Hollywood historical dramas of the members of the Cologne Tribes, as a starting point for investigating forms of the performative appropriation of media, exploring the entanglement and interactions of fascination with films and mimetic practices of alterity that she observed among the Cologne Tribes. Embodiment for them becomes a means to experience otherness, which is described by the locals of Cologne in terms of possession. Dreschke also examines how ecstatic practices associated with the cultures emulated by the Cologne Tribes are appropriated and transformed in reenactments. Through training in these practices, club members learn how to relate to things in a new way and gradually change their perception of the world. However, the sensual experience of estrangement and trance in film perception seems to interact with altered states of (un)consciousness familiar to the members of the Cologne Tribes from the local Carnival traditions.Less

Race, Reenactment, and the “Natural-Born Citizen”

Tavia Nyong’o

in Unsettled States: Nineteenth-Century American Literary Studies

This chapter focuses on the “historical” claims of the Tea Party movement as it reorients and reinvents the Revolutionary War archive. The temporal bend that loops the Tea Party to this revolutionary ... More

This chapter focuses on the “historical” claims of the Tea Party movement as it reorients and reinvents the Revolutionary War archive. The temporal bend that loops the Tea Party to this revolutionary event camouflages its stronger historical investment in the 14th Amendment's post-Civil War reversal of the foundational terms of citizenship. Tracing the “queasiness” of this time-shifting alliance with white racial innocence, the chapter sets a contemporary performance of archival reenactment against the creative engagement with citizenship portrayed in David Walker's 1829 Appeal to the Coloured Citizens of the World. Its analysis of the Tea-Party inspired reading of the Constitution is shaped by two books, Rebecca Schneider's Performing Remains (2011) and Jill Lepore's The Whites of Their Eyes (2010), both of which engage aspects of historical reenactment culture in America.Less

Head Candy/Gut Connection: How Reenacting a Historic Event Changes the Present in Hawai‘i

Lynette Hi‘ilani Cruz

in At Home and in the Field: Ethnographic Encounters in Asia and the Pacific Islands

This chapter illustrates how theatrical performance artists teach Hawaiian genealogy and kinship in public culture in Hawai‘i. It tells a story of “indigenous anthropology” on Hawaiian performance ... More

This chapter illustrates how theatrical performance artists teach Hawaiian genealogy and kinship in public culture in Hawai‘i. It tells a story of “indigenous anthropology” on Hawaiian performance arts on O‘ahu that provides cultural education through dramatic reenactments of Hawaiian history, showing the roles these performances play in understanding Hawaiian culture and identity. More than just history, the reenactment illustrates a real and present injury situated in the present time. Drama makes space for emotion, for the Hawaiian sense of na‘au (feeling settled in the gut, akin to emotional intelligence that allows us to feel calm and satisfied) to surface in acceptable ways.Less