Sign of the Times

The notion of history is one we generally associate with a linear timeline. But what happens when the worn-out, the defunct, the historical, is reincarnated in altered form? The manufactured authenticity of the festival marketplace raises questions concerning its placement within an existing context, both historically and physically. In either case, it is necessary to assimilate the object into an already existing framework – but does the newly-historical supplant the existing historic, or are both skewed?
It is useful to distinguish between this construction’s place both in context and in situ. The “fetishized authenticity” of the festival marketplace described by Goss might characterize a recreation of a model of the past in which, as described in Barbara Kirshenblatt Gimblett’s Destination Culture, “the object is a part that stands in a contiguous relation to an absent whole that may or may not be recreated.” In this case, the boundaries of the marketplace are called into question, because in essence the entire city and its history could become a backdrop for a single space, and hence be assigned a new meaning. In context, however, the festival marketplace, regardless of form, seems to feed on nostalgia gleaned from a multitude of sighs and “Oh, this brings me back [to way before I was born].”
And although I’m ashamed to admit it, Faneuil Hall is always the first place I go when showing visitors around Boston, and I almost can’t imagine a visit to the city without a trip to, or at least through, the “historical” space. While the marketplace may rely on a “sense of historic public life,” I think it serves a greater purpose in reinvigorating an area left by the historical wayside. History, in my opinion, is not what we remember, but what we choose not to forget.