In a first phase of this research, I address reenactment as a memorial and activist practice as it has been used in relation with the Sharpeville and Soweto massacres in South Africa, based on the concept of critical reenactment as developed by the American professor of philosophy Stephen Esquith. I attempt to give indications about reenactment’s potential as a tool to engage with, and mobilise, an audience who did not live through the massacres, and examine how these reenactments fit in, and contribute to, the complex processes of memorialisation of apartheid in South Africa.
In the second phase, I examine how reenactment is used to disseminate LGBTQ history, as well as as a tool to reframe and reclaim history, in the context of the 50th anniversary of the 1967 Sexual Offences Act, which partly decriminalised male homosexuality in England and Wales.