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Review: Engaging the Past. Mass Culture and the Production of Historical KnowledgeAlison LandsbergNew York: Columbia University Press213 pagesISBN: 978-0-231-16575-4Published in 2015 by Columbia University Press,Alison Landsberg’s Engaging the Past isa slim, well-designed and useful book. Landsberg attempts to chart the ways inwhich mass cultural artifacts, such as Hollywood movies and major TV showsallow their viewers to discover and process history, in ways which differ fromwritten accounts by historians, but that she refuses to dismiss as merelysuperficial or romanticized. Though she does ask the question: “Can [theseobjects] produce a deeper understanding of the complexity of the past, or do they simply turn the past into acharade?” (118), she clearly thinks the first option is more convincing.The following review will seek to account forthe intent and content of the book but also to apply some of its findings andpronouncements to historical comics and to comics as scholarship in the fieldof history (to the best of my knowledge, and perhaps surprisingly, comics hasbeen used extensively for outreach by historians, but not in the context ofcomics as scholarship). Landsberg opens her discussion by quoting fromR.G. Collinwood’s The Idea of History(1943), who called for historians to “re-enact the past in his own mind” (qtd.4), to “see for himself” how historical situations unfolded (qtd. 5). Landsbergsums up this outlook by describing it as an “experiential” approach to history, noting that for Collingwood, thereenactments provide historical knowledge only inasmuch as they remainreflexive and conscious (4-5). This theoretical framework undergirds the restof this short book, as it allows her to argue that popular representations ofhistory can provide forms of historical knowledge much different fromtraditional written accounts, precisely because they are experiential andsensual. Landsberg seeks “to explore the complexity of being touched by history” (10). Though sheagrees that historical fictions which rely on identification, “obscur[e] the inevitably mediated nature of thepresent’s relationship to the past” (8) but argues that self-reflexive moments inthese fictions help dispel this illusion of proximity. This caveat functions asa retort to historians who worry that the emphasis on affect may provide a formof knowledge in which systemic issues and mechanisms are downplayed or madeinvisible.This theoretical framework allows her toreflect on the specific types of experience afforded by mass cultural objects. Sincethese objects invite what Walter Benjamin called a “distracted” form ofreception, they resist identification or absorption and never fully erase thedistance between the viewer and the work. The self-awareness required toproduce historical knowledge is thus a function of this mode of reception,which individual works may or may not choose to emphasize. The case studiesthat follow analyze more closely the formal and narrative devices which mayfoster this historical knowledge, and the book deals in turn with film (Milk, Hotel Rwanda, Good Night andGood Luck), TV series (Deadwood, Mad Men, Rome) then, more unusually, with reality history TV and virtualhistorical exhibits.Each of these chapters is accompanied by asubstantial introduction which expands and refine the theoretical framework toapply it to objects under study. In particular, they allow Landsberg to drawfrom contemporary cinema scholarship in making the case that the reception ofcinema is an embodied and multisensorial one – a useful corrective to a moreabstract view of the process – and in detailing the type of historical knowledge to be gained in these films. Sheconvincingly describes the process as an “encounter” (36-38), in which film’s“excess narrative” provides a reconstructed material history and locates itscharacters within that history.The case studies themselves are unsurprising.The film and tv shows Landsberg select are all big-budget, critically acclaimedpieces (HBO’s Rome, the lowest-ratedof the six on Metacritic, stillstands at 71/100 among critics, 93/100 among viewers), and they provide a widerange of examples of the push and pull between identification and self-awarenesswhich is of interest to Landsberg: from the ostensible mediation of the Rwandamassacre within the diegesis in HotelRwanda to the use of potentially jarring language in Deadwood. Landsberg does a very convincing job of guiding thereader through these examples, with clear and precise summaries, which do notfeel redundant if one is not familiar with the example and remain strikinglyintelligible if one is; more broadly, her writing in Engaging the Past is controlled, well-structured and admirablyclear at all times. Taken together, the film and tv series chapters provide aconvincing exploration of the potential but also the limits of historical investigationthrough audiovisual fiction. This feels all the more useful since the temptationof reading popular fiction as historyis a compelling one, however conscious one might be of the tension betweenentertainment and scholarship.Landsberg’s third series of case studies isbound to be unfamiliar to European readers, as she delves into the genre of realityhistory TV, in which contestants roleplay for weeks in historically-accurateenvironments, in shows such as FrontierHouse (Montana, 1883) or ColonialHouse (New England, 17th century). The format is of courseperfect for her study, as it calls for identification with the contestantswhile constantly reminding the viewers that he or she is watching a stagedevent. Landsberg is even more interested, however, in the way the contestantsthemselves articulate the simulated past with their present condition.Providing once again precise summaries of the narrative arcs of the tv shows, shefocuses on the way the game provides an embodied and affective knowledge ofhitherto abstract socio-political conditions, and highlights the way in whichthe contestants themselves articulate this discovery and their occasionalresistance to history (historical race relations proved impossible toreplicate, for instance).The final set of case studies, focusing ondigital historical exhibits, provides interesting insights into these objects,but feels somewhat removed from the rest of the book, since these exhibitsentail a very different mode of consumption than the other objects under study,and since they are not given as fiction, a crucial difference.Engaging the Past thus present a coherent andwell-supported argument, with a few important caveats. The first has to do withthe phrase “mass culture”. Landsbserg uses it in connection with WalterBenjamin, whose description of the “distracted” audience is key to herargument. However, this choice becomes problematic when dealing with experiencessuch as Witnessing History:Kristallnacht, the November 1938 Pogroms, a virtual exhibit hosted on Second Life, which in all likelihood neverhad anything like a mass audience. Landsberg also briefly gestures towards thepolitical implication of that phrase (“even in capitalist mass culture it ispossible to locate instances of complicated and potentially progressiveengagement with the past”, 147), but she never really engages with the idea.More broadly, outside of the HBO series, she is surprisingly unconcerned withwhat happens outside the texts. Reflexivity might be fostered by textualmarkers, but it can also be encouraged by reviews, by specific marketingstrategies or by the very genre to which a given film or series belong; thereputation of biopics for embellishments make them prime candidates for thistype of engagement, for instance. A systemic engagement with the texts framingthe cultural experience would have been challenging, but appears absolutelynecessary at a time when it is not uncommon to watch historical fiction whilechecking for inaccuracies on a second screen.The book also surprisingly fails to justify theway the studied works were selected, beyond their usefulness to Landsberg’sdemonstration. Her case studies are sufficient to disprove the idea thatfiction is incompatible with historical knowledge – but any viewer of Mad Men or Rome probably already knew that. None of the examples chosen amongfilms and tv shows are especially ambiguous, and none lies squarely within apopular genre. What about such films such as Gladiator (or any other sword-and-sandal movie) then, what aboutany classical western, what about X-Men FirstClass, to name but a few examples of movies in which the type of historicalknowledge to be gained is bound to be more problematic? In other words, are theexamples Landsbserg chose typical or exceptional, is there a threshold afterwhich the search for entertainment compromises the historical experience beyondrepair? Even academics skeptical of the use of fiction as history wouldprobably grand the existence of a few worthy exceptions, but to what extent canher insights be generalized? None of this invalidates the findings of thebooks, of course, but it leaves their scope undefined, which is truly regrettableconsidering the clarity of Landsberg’s prose and purpose.To conclude, I would like to offer somereflections on the way her findings could be applied to comics, a field whichshe does not include among her mass cultural objects. Most of her developments,starting with Benjamin’s observations, apply equally well to comics. Inparticular, the idea that the embodiedand affective experience of watchingfilm is key to producing historical knowledge is easily transposable. As arguednotably by Patrick Grant, Ian Hague and Simon Grennan (Grant 2014; Hague 2014; Grennan 2017), the graphic traces of drawings resultfrom and produce intense bodily engagements. While I have argued elsewhere thatcomics do not have access to proper “body genres” described by Linda Williams,they nevertheless offer an embodied and affective experience. More strikingly,perhaps, Landsberg’s argument posits that historical knowledge is only possibleif the works fosters not identification but “a new vantage point” (127) byforegrounding their constructedness in the present. Since comics neverunderwent the development of a consensual “transparent” style, reading comics alwaysinvolve being aware of the code, of the construction of the narrative. Muna AlJawad, in her investigation of research comics, has argued that thisreflexivity is precisely what makes the form of comics valuable for scholarlypurposes (Al-Jawad 2013), and by extension, it makes themuseful to produce historical narratives which stop short of identification. Again, the abundantscholarship on Maus alone demonstratesthat the form of comics is compatible with historical knowledge, butSpiegelman’s work is arguably not meant or read as a fiction. Landsberg’sapproach provides a fertile theoretical ground to understand the complexoperations at work in comics such as &#160;Blueberry or From Hell, to choose but two examples of well-document history framedwithin a fiction.Works citedAl-Jawad, Muna. 2013. “Comics Are Research: Graphic Narratives as a NewWay of Seeing Clinical Practice.” Journal of Medical Humanities 36 (4):369–74. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10912-013-9205-0.Grant, Patrick. 2014. “Bodieson the Board. Materiality and Movement in the Production of Comics and GraphicNovels.” Sydney: Macquarie University.Grennan, Simon. 2017. ATheory of Narrative Drawing: Simon Grennan. Palgrave Studies in Comics andGraphic Novels. New York: Palgrave Macmillan.Hague, Ian. 2014. Comicsand the Senses: A Multisensory Approach to Comics and Graphic Novels.Routledge Research in Cultural and Media Studies 57. New York: Routledge.Williams, Linda. 1991.“Film Bodies: Gender, Genre, and Excess.” Film Quarterly 44 (4):2–13. https://doi.org/10.2307/1212758.