Community Heritage Activism in the American South: Black Counter-reenactments as Mnemonic Restitution

This article explores the use of counter-reenactment by Black community heritage organisations in the Deep South. By counter-reenactment, we refer to the creation and dissemination of a Black living history that challenges the white master-narrative of the regional past. In Sadiya Hartman’s (p. 85) terms, counter-reenactments ‘redress’ the suffering of historical Black bodies by ‘counterinvesting in the [contemporary] body as a site of possibility’. These performances are commonly staged at sites of historic violence where tangible Black heritage has been erased. Using Miss Lou Heritage Group & Tours from Natchez, Mississippi, as a case study, we suggest that counter-reenactments rematerialise African American history in a memorial landscape where Black experience is structurally invisibilised, enacting a form of ‘mnemonic restitution’ that resists the depleting effects of everyday racism, past and present.