ABSTRACT
This chapter explores the stakes and issues of historiography that performance scholars navigate when theorising and historicising performances of memory about violence. It considers various memory-focused activities surrounding the 1954 uprising and massacre on Jeju Island (South Korea), which resulted in great loss of life. Son discusses a few tendencies in memory-focused theatre and performance studies scholarship: the fixation on transferral, yearning for potentiality, evidentiary obsession, and the preoccupation with trauma studies. Historiographic concerns not only foreground questions around how memory is represented, whose memory is represented, and what is interpreted by whom, they also invite deeper consideration of the values, ideologies, and principles undergirding these inquiries.
