Performing Feeling in Cultures of Memory by Bryoni Trezise (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014)

Abstract

Bryoni Trezise has written a complex book on a difficult topic. Traumatic memory is always culturally fraught: painful, contested and politicised. Like its case studies, the methods of memory studies are also fraught, drawing on multiple disciplines that sometimes have competing methodologies. It is Trezise’s combination of performance studies, memory studies and affect theory that is both the book’s achievement and its challenge. While there may not be many readers with competences across all three fields that match Trezise’s own, the book nevertheless offers compelling insights into how memory sites ‘mobilise various histories of loss through the experiences and re-experiences of affect’ (4).