Asian American literature has always focused not only on arrival, immigration, and assimilation, but also on return, transpacific crossings, and transnational connections. Asian American return narratives have described America (Fukuzawa); promoted intercultural understanding (Yung); critiqued repatriate return and rescue (Rizal, Bulosan); revisited the wartime and Cold War conduct of authors' ancestral countries; and addressed the wounds of historical erasure. Japanese American return narratives include immigrant returns (Sugimoto, Reischauer), nisei narratives in which returning to Japan complements accounts of Japanese North American internment or forced removal (Kogawa), wartime returns (Yoshida, Tomita), and sansei scholars' sojourns (Kondo, Minatoya, Mura). Chinese diasporic return narratives describe the PRC when it first reopened to Americans (1971) (Wong, Chiang); a repatriate's persecution (Wu); US sojourns, transpacific family connections, and separation (Kingston, See, Chong). By mythologizing return as a means for second-generation self-discovery and resolution of immigrant loss and mourning (racial melancholia), Amy Tan made Chinese wartime suffering memorable.

This chapter addresses the ways through which performance can highlight the body as a site of memory, history and forgetting. Mary Devenport O’Neill’s Bluebeard (1933), Eva Gore-Booth’s The Buried Life of Deirdre (published 1930) and Marina Carr’s Portia Coughlan (1996), all offer ghostly performances which stage the unsettling effects of the past as it resurfaces in the present. The plays address both individual memory and the cultural memory of female experience as defined by limiting myths of an idealized and domesticated passive Irish femininity. The haunted body offers the means for an examination of the processes of memory and history as layers of somatic memories which are exposed and reperformed. The chapter draws on Joseph Roach’s concepts of surrogation and genealogies of performance to explore how the haunted bodies in these plays offer a genealogy of performance that exposes the body as the site which bears the consequences of the disavowal of violent pasts. The performing body engages with the resurfacing of that which has been repressed and forgotten, and this offers the means to address the potentially destabilizing and uncanny effects of performing elided pasts.