Staging Difficult Pasts: Transnational Memory, Theatres, and Museums

This collection of essays explores how museums, theaters, and performances create memory for transnational audiences, focusing on narrative, objects, embodied encounters, and comparisons between theater and museum practices. It is underpinned by three research enquiries and is open access under a Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivatives 4.0 license.

Format: Hardback
Length: 282 pages
Publication date: 22 December 2023
Publisher: Taylor & Francis Ltd

This comprehensive collection of original essays explores the unique and interconnected ways in which museums, theaters, and performances create memory for transnational audiences. Through diverse approaches such as narrative, object, embodied encounters, or a combination of these elements, the volume delves into the distinctions and interactions between memory and history, particularly through the lenses of theater and performance studies, visual culture, and museum and curator studies.

At the heart of this book lies three research inquiries: How are contemporary theater makers and museum curators staging historical narratives of challenging pasts? How can comparisons between theater and museum practices shed light on the role objects play in generating and representing difficult pasts? What points of overlap, comparison, and contrast among these constructions of history and memory of authoritarianism, slavery, colonialism, genocide, armed conflict, fascism, and communism can offer a broader understanding of challenging pasts in these transnational cultural contexts?

The collection is meticulously crafted to appeal to scholars across the core disciplines of its focus, as well as to those interested in cultural geography, memory studies, and postcolonial theory. The Open Access version of this book, accessible at http://www.taylorfrancis.com, has been made available under a Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivatives (CC-BY-ND) 4.0 license, ensuring widespread access and dissemination of its valuable insights.

By bringing together a diverse range of perspectives and methodologies, this collection contributes to our understanding of the complex processes through which memory is constructed, shared, and contested in global cultural contexts. It serves as a valuable resource for researchers, educators, and practitioners seeking to explore the intersections of history, performance, and the visual arts in shaping our collective memory and understanding of the past.

Weight: 700g
Dimension: 234 x 156 (mm)
ISBN-13: 9781032326047