Mediating history and trauma: <i>White Storyteller</i> and Taiwanese glove puppetry

This essay examines White Storyteller, a contemporary Taiwanese play that mobilizes Taiwanese glove puppetry to mediate the traumatic memory of the White Terror. Rather than conceiving history as a linear chronology, the play advances a bottom-up historiography where multiple temporalities overlap, interrelate, and problematize one another. Central to this process is its dual mode of mediation through glove puppetry, between muti-layerd narratives and the manipulactor as an onstage spectator, which foregrounds continual self-reflexive interference in history and trauma, both inherent to glove puppetry itself and Taiwanese colonial history. This essay argues that glove puppetry functions not merely as an aesthetic medium but as a performative act of repetition, rehearsal, and embodied practice that simultaneously recalls and reconfigures traumatic events. Ultimately, this essay contends that White Storyteller demonstrates how traditional performance forms can articulate an alternative epistemology of trauma, one that intertwines familial intimacy, collective memory, and cultural resilience.