Bryony Trezise and Caroline Wake introduce their edited volume by identifying the hidden investments that memory studies and trauma studies share in performance praxis, paying particular attention to seminal texts of trauma studies written during the mid-1990s. The book represents a series of interventions into different sites of trauma located in ‘Australia, South Africa, the former Soviet Union, Lebanon and Thailand’ (p. 26), which call into question the tautologies, aporias and other troubling effects presented by acts of memory culture. Contributing authors respond to the detention centres in Australia, slavery and apartheid in the United States, the Hellfire Pass in Thailand, the occupation of Gaza, and Dachau Memorial Concentration Camp, among other things. Using a measured approach, it suggests that performance and theatre studies’ perspectives have the potential to re-envision trauma, sighted and sited in twentieth- and early twenty-first-century contexts.

Christine Stoddard discusses the ‘refracted suffering in the work of Australian performance artist Mike Parr’, arguing that his self-harming performances make the ‘unrepresentable’ of refugee torture and pain emerge an embodied reality (p. 57). From the white, male body of Parr we move to Petra Kuppers's feminist and intersectional reading of the media and performance works of Kara Walker and Berni Searle, ‘two contemporary artists of colour’ (p. 82). Kuppers argues that histories of apartheid and slavery are lifted out of the archive and re-presenced in their works (p. 82). Helena Grehan highlights the controversy erupting in the wake of Caryl Churchill's play Seven Jewish Children. She offers a reappraisal of the play, reading it through the Levinasian formula of the ‘call of the other’ (p. 99). From here we move to an appraisal of popular genre and ethics. Geraldine Harris turns her attention to Whoopi Goldberg's popular Broadway show Whoopi: Back to Broadway, and asks, why is it that performance studies rarely looks at popular genres when discussing ethics and acts of witness? She makes a salient point; the exclusion of popular genres from theories of witnessing risks overlooking important political subjectivities, such as Goldberg's.

Part Two of the book opens with Laurie Beth Clark's research on trauma tourism, where the author arrives at a transnational framing for memory culture. Clarke's formula of trauma tourism segues neatly into Chris Hudson's chapter, which looks at the ways in which affect figures in the construction of Australian national identity at the Hellfire Pass memorial in Thailand. Bryoni Trezise discusses the online controversy surrounding a dance film by Australian artist Jane Korman, which was uploaded to YouTube in 2010. Korman filmed her father Adolek Kohn, a Holocaust survivor, playfully dancing with other family members at the Dachau Memorial site. Trezise suggests that the dance provides a welcomed interval in an otherwise ‘hegemonic’ Holocaust memorial practice (p. 181). Adrian Lahoud and Sam Spurr propose an architectural model of the ‘post-traumatic city’, adopting a virtual lens through which they reimagine Beirut and recover it from its overwhelming history of conflict (p. 200). From Lebanon we move to the Soviet context, with Maria Tumarkin's chapter recasting silence as a productive and resistant agent in the arts, recalling the work of ‘Cage, Beckett, Cunningham, Bergman, Malevich’ and others to support her argument (p. 225). On the whole, the volume strikes a good balance by offering a nuanced reappraisal of witness and trauma studies’ arguments, while deploying and interrogating the grammar of performance as memory.