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29 One “This Is a Drama. You Are Characters” Simming the Fugitive Slave in Conner Prairie’s “Follow the North Star” R Adventure Network International offers extreme outdoor enthusiasts and exploration buffs a skiing expedition to the South Pole to relive the final portions of Roald Amundsen’s and Robert Falcon Scott’s expeditions in the “Heroic Age of Antarctic Exploration.” For an average of $57,000, skiers can be flown in from Chile and dropped off at latitude 89° S, sixty nautical miles from the Pole, to “ski the last degree” over the course of ten to twenty-­ one days.1 Guests staying at the Hotel Cavalieri Hilton in Rome can pay 500 Euros (about $670) a session for a gladiator-­ training program in which they can dress in costume and try their skills in combat.2 Too expensive? Anyone could pay $5 to help reenact the Boston Tea Party for its 234th anniversary in December 2007, but those who wore “traditional colonial attire” could do it for free.3 In the same city in March of the following year, at “Kids Reenact the Massacre,” Adams National Park rangers led young visitors in a reenactment of the Boston Massacre as part of the 238th anniversary celebration sponsored by the Bostonian Historical Society.4 For the past several years now, the tourism industry has been implementing attractions that privilege explicitly performative participation by immersing tourists in scenarios that simulate extraordinary, high-­ impact, or traumatic lived events from the past. A seeming hybrid of adventure tourism and outdoor museum role-­ playing, each of these tourist simmings negotiates between tensions of tourist comfort and historical realism, between tourist agency in the production of narratives and the agenda of the site or institution staging the event, and between the vacationing body and that of the 30 • Simming sometimes abject character it is portraying, for, in addition to simming adventurers , colonial patriots, and gladiators, tourists can find offerings that let them play casualties of Civil War violence—­ or fugitive black slaves. Part I examines this phenomenon within the context of recent shifts in the tourism industry, as well as a theoretical framework informed by performance studies scholars Diana Taylor, Barbara Kirshenblatt-­ Gimblett, and others. I argue that, while these programs can be dismissed as kitschy, sensational , niche tourism for thrill seekers, there is more than a small element of witness going on: by participating bodily in tourist performances that invite visitors to take on the personae of those who have been made abject by violent or oppressive forces, or those who have been subjected to peril in the pursuit of more authentic agency or self-­ authorship, the performers, in Taylor’s terms, engage in embodied ways of knowing and making meaning, of “vital acts of transfer,” which transcend that which is available through print sources.5 At the same time, however, because the visitor-­ performers are, on the face of it, granted much more agency in the making of meaning in these simmings—­ in their ability to make choices in the development of the narrative, in their agendas or the “horizons of expectations” with which they approach the experiences, and in the autonomous readings they might assign the narrative—­ there is considerable slippage to be found between the meanings intended by the producing bodies (the theme park, the museum, etc.) and the bodies that perform them. In this first chapter of part I, I touch on a range of tourist-­ simming phenomena, but, as a way of situating these theoretical discussions within a concrete set of references, I focus specifically on my own experiences with “Follow the North Star,”the Underground Railroad program at the Conner Prairie living history museum, and the ways in which my body and those of my fellow participants bore witness to, and made particular meanings out of, the history of nineteenth-­ century fugitive African American slaves. Simmings that assign an active, participatory role to the tourist are not necessarily all that new, but a brief overview of recent tourism literature suggests that these performative events are presently experiencing a kind of boom, fostered by the particular set of discourses and economic shifts that shape the touristic landscape at the moment. Brian S. Osborne and Jason F. Kovacs report that cultural tourism in general is growing exponentially,fomenting new economies on the global scene as purveyors of destinations labor to package a “different sense of place, a different genre de vie” for retiring baby boomers and the “emerging middle classes...

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