ABSTRACT
For the visitor engaging with penal tourist sites, techniques of embodied performance are a method by which the carceral past is understood by contemporary audiences. Attending to the example of the Galleries of Justice – a museum in a former courthouse and jail in Nottingham, UK – this chapter explores how such performances rely on a boundary crossing as the visitor experiences a spatial dislocation from the “world” outside, to a performative re-creation of life “inside.” By allowing visitors to touch, see, feel, and enact versions of penal life in the museum, individuals are able to traverse the temporal divide between then and now. However, we contend that this “time-travel” produces versions of penal life that render the contemporary prison as something abstract and disjointed in time.
