Thesis Supervisor: Dr. Amit S. Rai

Thesis: Scripted Memory: At The Border, Boundary, And Edge

July 2025

Abstract

This thesis proposes “scripted memory mapping” as a methodology for navigating diasporic, queer, and racialized experiences at the borders of nation, relation, and body. Drawing from lived memory, embodied dissonance, and migrations both chosen and imposed, I interweave narrative, performance, and spatial scripting to trace how memory moves across time and geography. Grounded in theoretical insights from Zhuangzi, José Esteban Muñoz, Gloria Anzaldúa, Trinh T. Minh-ha, and Saidiya Hartman, the work explores how memory resists linearity and coherence under conditions of censorship, erasure, and displacement. Through four scenes located at the Chinese-Laos borderlands, a locked room during Shanghai Lockdown, a virtual shelter shaped by collective imagination, and diasporic life in Berlin, the thesis maps a constellation of memory that is nonlinear, affective, and cross-temporal. Scripted memory becomes a practice of staying with fragmentation, reinhabiting layered sensation, and generating space for survival, contradiction, and desire at the edges of being.

Author: Echo Guo