How do the stories we tell ourselves about the past inform what we think about the present? What role do performances of history play in shaping those narratives? How might these performances become more "real" than the history itself? My paper is part of a larger project about the fluid processes of remembering and forgetting, and the nebulous spaces in which performances of history can shape, revise, erase, or overwrite cultural memory. The past few decades have seen a barrage of scholarship on memory studies, matched only by the onslaught of memorials, reenactments, and living histories. By reimagining such events as performances of history, audiences witness performed events-a sort-of-history-once-removed-as not history, but as performed approximations that are also not quite not history. In other words, when catalogued as memory, these performances of history can supersede other knowledge and experiences.
This paper will focus on a case study in which I look at two performances of history that reimagined or romanticized history for a contemporary audience: Thomas Dixon, Jr.'s infamous novel, The Clansman: A Romantic History of the Ku Klux Klan (1905), which became the play, The Clansman (1905), and later, D.W. Griffith's film, The Birth of a Nation (1915), and Lin-Manuel Miranda's Pulitzer Prize-winning hip-hop musical, Hamilton (2015). Separated by a century of race relations, Civil Rights, Jim Crow, and #BlackLivesMatter, these case studies clearly have very different goals. Birth of Nation's social legacy is most tied to its perpetuation of racist stereotypes of African Americans and its role as a recruiting device for the KKK. Miranda famously describes Hamilton as "a story about America then, told by America now," designed to integrate racial diversity into the tale of the nation's founding.
Both case studies are performances of history that were popular phenomena. Both drew from a historical moment, recreated powerful historical figures onstage and screen, romanticized characters and story arcs, and made it possible for large swaths of audience members to connect emotionally to their performed versions of history. In this paper, I explore how these performances of history shaped both their community's identity and its memory. How might a community allow, or even encourage, such romanticized inaccuracies when they are in service of a cause that the community supports (ie – racial equality or racial superiority)? Moreover, how might the willingness to embrace romanticized performances of history influence cultural memory as the historical moment the performance represents become more remote?
What is particularly powerful-and even insidious-about the performance of history is its ability to be manipulated by those creating it, and to manipulate cultural memory in the process. As historian Matthew Dennis provocatively writes, "purposeful remembering requires purposeful forgetting" (Red, White, and Blue Letter Days). To remember one history is to forget, replace, or erase others, particularly those that conflict with it. These case studies, and the romanticizing of history, demonstrate one way that performances of history can be leveraged to shape cultural memory.
