Abstract
This chapter reads anthropologist Laura Peers’ Playing Ourselves (2007) through the lens of Homi Bhabha’s theory of cultural performance. Playing Ourselves showcases First Nations interpreters playing their historic ancestors in living history sites run by North American state-owned heritage agencies. This focus on First Nations performers highlights the ‘toured’ rather than the tourist, inverting our theme of the traveller to elsewhere seeking authenticity. In the cultural tourism scholarship, Aboriginal performers are generally interpreted as passive victims, forced to stereotype themselves as primitive ‘Indians’ to satisfy the tourist gaze. Through Bhabha, I follow Peers in arguing against this assumption. These performers speak as creative subjects constructing identity within the constraints of the ‘Wild West’ frontier myth, reshaping the colonial imaginary through the subterfuge of ‘play’ performances.
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Notes
- 1.
This is accompanied by on-site training in which interpreters learn how to make moccasins in the traditional way, and recover other arts of Aboriginal craft-making (Peers 2007, 83).
- 2.
Though, of course, the space of hybridity is always asymmetrically and multiply powered.
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Lee, P. (2016). Journey Through the Third Space: Performing Aboriginal Identity Through Historic Re-Enactment Sites. In: Beaman, L., Sikka, S. (eds) Constructions of Self and Other in Yoga, Travel, and Tourism. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-32512-5_3
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