Staging Difficult Pasts

This series aims to examine how contemporary theatre, performance, museum, and visual art practices engage with public memory, particularly in relation to difficult pasts, and how these practices contribute to shaping identity on both national and transnational levels. Building on the edited collection Staging Difficult Pasts (Delgado, Kobialka, Lease, 2024) as a foundation for a series of thought-provoking inquiries, this book series breaks with national boundaries to examine how theatre makers, museum curators, and artists deploy narrative and objects to depict historical events such as authoritarianism, slavery, colonialism, genocide, fascism, bureaucratic socialism, and beyond. The overarching goal is to understand how these constructions of memory offer expanded perspectives on difficult pasts in a global context.