1st Edition
Staging Difficult Pasts Transnational Memory, Theatres, and Museums
This collection of original essays brings together museum, theatre, and performance case studies with a focus on their distinctive and overlapping modes of producing memory for transnational audiences.
Whether this is through narrative, object, embodied encounter or a combination of the three, this volume considers distinctions and interactions between memory and history specifically through the lenses of theatre and performance studies, visual culture, and museum and curator studies. This book is underpinned by three areas of research enquiry: How are contemporary theatre makers and museum curators staging historical narratives of difficult pasts? How might comparisons between theatre and museum practices offer new insights into 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 might offer an expanded understanding of difficult pasts in these transnational cultural contexts?
This collection is designed for any scholar of its central disciplines, as well as for those interested in cultural geography, memory studies, and postcolonial theory.
The Open Access version of this book, available at http://www.taylorfrancis.com, has been made available under a Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivatives (CC-BY-ND) 4.0 license.
1. Staging the Story of a People: The Politics of Co-Performance at the National Museum of African American History and Culture
Jordan Ealey and Leticia Ridley
2. Theatricality & Spectacle: The Museum as Object
Bryce Lease
3. Curating the Experiential: The Imperial War Museum’s Revised Holocaust Galleries.
James Bulgin in conversation with Bryce Lease
4. The Meaning of Working Through the Past: Of Awkward Objects and Collateral Memories
Michal Kobialka
5. On Crying Perpetrators and Subversive Laughter: Trans-Affiliative Encounters inside ESMA Memory Museum
Cecilia Sosa
6. Refracting Difficult Pasts: Temporal Answers and the In-Between.
Rabih Mroué in conversation with Michal Kobialka
7. Listening to the museum, hearing the mine: Mapa Teatro’s live réplica to modernity
Giulia Palladini
8. Showcasing Anti-colonial Nationalist Struggles: Museums and Theatre in Contestation
Bishnupriya Dutt
9. ‘It’s art, all it can do is bear witness’: Remembering Histories of Enslavement in Black British Women’s Plays and at the International Slavery Museum
Lynette Goddard
10. Chile’s Museum of Memory and Human Rights: Long Life to the Theatre!
Milena Grass Kleiner and Mariana Hausdorf Andrade
11. On the Making of the Oratorio for the Disappeared
Erika Diettes in conversation with Vikki Bell
12. Enforced Disappearance and Silenced Histories: Pedro Almodóvar’s Madres paralelas/Parallel Mothers (2021)
Maria M. Delgado
13. What Remains: Staging Memory of Enslavement in the Western Cape
Nadia Davids and Jay Pather in conversation with Bryce Lease
14. Marketing a Massacre: When Outdoor Dramas Become Dark Tourism
Katrina Phillips
15. Epilogue - 10 Strategies for Exhibiting Absence & Loss: Objects, Narratives and Trauma on Display
Joanne Rosenthal
Biography
Maria M. Delgado is Professor and Vice Principal (Research and Knowledge Exchange) at The Royal Central School of Speech and Drama, University of London, UK.
Michal Kobialka is Paul W. Frenzel Professor in Liberal Arts and Professor of Theatre Arts at the University of Minnesota, USA.
Bryce Lease is Professor and Head of Knowledge Exchange at The Royal Central School of Speech and Drama, University of London, UK.
