Introduction

Working on memory in an open-ended, non-totalising, or evaluative manner, corroborates a political subject's agency and relies on intellectual curiosity, emotional vulnerability, and shared determination. In conversations and collaborations with museum curators, the authors have noted an anxiety over the theatrical experience in the display or approach to difficult pasts that relies on showy or overblown spectacle that produces unmerited or ethically dubious emotional responses or unethical forms of historical attachment or nostalgia. Their understanding of the transnational, as opposed to the global or international, is grounded in a focus on the ways in which memory cultures, artistic and curatorial strategies, and critical discourses circulate and recur across different geographical spaces. Through transnational comparisons, we examine how the narratives theatre makers and curators construct are participating in or rejecting global memory discourses.