The scholarship on South African performance gained two vital new additions this year, both from the University of Michigan Press, that examine the complexities, contradictions, and disruptions of performance and culture in the afterlife of colonialism and apartheid. South Africa offers a potent example of a culture in transition, formed in a crucible of colonialism and still in-the-making, where diverse subjects vie to narrate and perform the nation.

In her deftly argued study on dance and live art in apartheid’s wake, Catherine Cole makes three very important interventions: she refuses facile assessments of the contemporary performing arts landscape in favor of considering nuanced complexities and multiple truths; she bridges the disciplines of theatre and dance in her embodied, kinesthetic analyses; and she focuses on the work of dance artists of color who have long deserved such scholarly attention.

Framing her book with the idea of afterlives, the ghosts of systems of power that haunt the present, Cole draws on Susan Leigh Foster’s concept of corporeal epistemes and Alexander G. Weheliye’s enfleshment: “Performance artists whose medium is the body, those who make performances about unresolved embodied histories in and through living bodies,” she writes, “may help us inhabit spaces shot through with the noxious remains of the afterlives of injustice” (xvii). These performing bodies, operating between stasis and movement, offer us ways of seeing otherwise, conjuring, anticipating, and dreaming a world that, as Ashon Crawley suggests, “names plurality as its core operation” (4).

Cole begins with an embodied analysis of Athol Fugard’s 1972 Statements after an Arrest under the Immorality Act, a play about an interracial couple arrested by the police in apartheid South Africa, which she argues is a dramatization of the “vastly different impact the law’s racialized interpellation has on each character according to race” (54). This opening chapter establishes the apartheid logic of, and obsession with, the body as a site of fixed racialized discourse.

Cole dedicates the rest of the book to examining the work of some of the most potent artists working in South Africa today: Jay Pather, Mamela Nyamza, Sello Pesa, Robyn Orlin, Brett Bailey, Gregory Maqoma, and Congolese artist Faustin Linyekula. These artists refute and refuse fixed body logic, instead offering postmortems that show the past as active and alive and capable of fracturing present identities (Pather’s Body of Evidence in 2008); disrupt linear framing of time and notions of reconciliation and cure (Nyamza’s oeuvre); refuse the colonial gaze and simultaneously boomerang back at white artists making postcolonial work (Bailey’s Exhibit B); and practice the tricky art of interculturalism in the afterlife of colonialism and apartheid’s history of racialized inequality and violence (Orlin’s 1999 Daddy, I’ve seen this piece six times before and I still don’t know why they’re hurting each other; and the work of Maqoma and Linyekula).

In her epilogue, Cole explores William Kentridge’s The Head & the Load (2018) and returns to the image of herself swimming in the Phoebe Hearst pool at UC Berkeley, under which, she discovers, are buried the remains of Native Americans. Her brilliant study asks as to consider the question: “As we swim above the afterlives of injustice, how might we intervene?” (218).

April Sizemore-Barber’s long-awaited study joins Cole’s in its astute analysis of contemporary South African performance, exploring a diverse array of practices and media, from public parades to virtual message boards. Prismatic Performances begins with a scenario of disruption at the 2012 Gay and Lesbian Pride Parade in Johannesburg, when the feminist direct action group One in Nine staged a die-in across the parade route to make visible the experiences of nonwhite LGBTQ+ people within the festive atmosphere of the predominantly white parade. Sizemore-Barber’s book analyzes such “evocative moments of disruption” (5) of queer bodies as they navigate the tensions of the postapartheid nation-state — between theoretical legal protections afforded by the new constitution and ongoing exclusions and violence in practice.

Covering the era of the “rainbow nation” narrative between Nelson Mandela’s election in 1994 and his death in 2013, this study interrogates the rainbow concept, as both a symbol of gay pride and postcolonial multiculturalism, exploring its potentials and pitfalls. Through the lens of a prism — a “messy and ambiguous assemblage of conflicting viewpoints” (8) — Sizemore-Barber asks what performance as a method of refraction, “of seeing differently” (7), can reveal to us about life and identity within the postcolony. In an already fractured postapartheid society, she asks, how do queer performances illuminate the fracture, animate it, or elicit audience responses?

An important intervention of this study is the author’s assertion that the field of performance studies offers us the promise of an “imperfect translation” (16) between theory and practice when queer subjects put theory into practice with their bodies on the line. This book argues for a radical decolonization of the imagination that converts alienation into acts of belonging. It is a timely, vital, beautifully researched and articulated contribution to the scholarship on queer African identity.

Sizemore-Barber begins her study with an exploration of two queer artists who use drag to reflect and refract whiteness and privilege in an altered political landscape: satirist Pieter-Dirk Uys and performance artist Steven Cohen. The next chapter, drawn from five years of Sizemore-Barber’s fieldwork, is focused on the all-black, out lesbian soccer team known as Chosen FEW and their enactment of queer utopian possibilities. Through her discussion of lesbian communitas, swagga (confident self-presentation), and resisting ikultcha (Zulu-ized word for culture), Sizemore-Barber paints a portrait of lesbian agency and subjectivity that defies the commonly held assumption that homosexuality is “un-African.” She describes a “subjunctive cultural citizenship” as the Chosen FEW perform “as if” their rights were actualized, enacting a “projected ‘could be’ via a protective ‘not yet’” (72).

Chapter 3 addresses the trauma of “corrective rape,” whereby men target lesbians to correct or cure their homosexuality, through Zanele Muholi’s photography and the choreography of Mamela Nyamza and Mojisola Adebayo’s I Stand Corrected (2012). Deploying what the author calls an “aesthetic of displacement,” these queer artists depict sexual violence in ways that defy the traditional “scopic regimes” that have framed women of color since the colonial era (79). They indict the process of looking and disrupt audience expectations of the black lesbian as the abject other.

In the book’s final chapter, “When Jason Kissed Senzo,” Sizemore-Barber analyzes various virtual spaces and the fora they create for deliberation and contestation about queer African identity. She shifts her analysis to audience reception, conducting an online ethnography of the fan community Gensblog, focused around the popular soap opera Generations.

Both these books are welcome contributions to the scholarship on African performance studies. Cole picks up Sarah Nuttall’s concept of “entanglement” as she explores the tensions that hold South African culture in a web of tangles, both engaging and messy, life threatening and life affirming. Cole and Sizemore-Barber’s engagements with the entanglements of theory and practice, within the space of a transformed and transforming nation-state, are carefully researched and articulated case studies from South Africa. They also offer lessons from the Global South that are applicable to other spaces still haunted by unresolved ghosts of the past as we imagine and perform new futures. These studies are provocations of how, as Sizemore-Barber puts it, “queerness might animate a socially fractured society” (137) or in Cole’s phrasing, art can “wedge open spaces where necessary new fictions can take root, gestate, and become sentient, living, breathing realities in the now” (220).