The dramaturgy of digital resurrection

Considerable interest has developed in ‘digital resurrection,' the use of emergent technologies to bring back lost people, communities, and bodies of work. However, scholarship has not investigated how a digital resurrection operates dramaturgically. Foundational in theatre and performance studies, dramaturgical analysis illuminates how multiple choices contribute to a production’s structure and the cultural function it fulfils. Such analysis is vital to an understanding of digital resurrections, because they are theatricalized encounters. By analysing two apps that resurrect Black and Indigenous communities, the article demonstrates how this emergent phenomenon can fulfil the cultural function of restoring autonomy to minoritised communities.