ABSTRACT
Reenactment is often drawn to the cloaca of the past—its slop buckets and sluices, bandages, trenches, and killing fields. Dark tourism typologies have variously distinguished between penal, genocide, disaster, grief, suicide, atrocity, poverty, favela, atomic, conflict, and other species of dark tourism, and proposed gradations of suffering. While the term dark tourism is comparatively new and contested within the scholarly community, the phenomenon has an ancient pedigree. Only by inspecting the sites of destruction and practicing a form of domestic dark tourism would mourning be possible. Indicative of the growing interest in dark tourism are reality TV series like David Farrier’s Dark Tourist, in which the New Zealand journalist visits “places made famous by death and disaster.” If dark tourism encapsulates a desire to engage with the finality of death, the reenacted dark event is about the future as much as the past.
