Harm and Repair in Contemporary South African Performance

Addresses the aesthetics of refusal and forms of resistance to ongoing injustice within contemporary South African performance thirty years post-Democracy.

‘A superb piece of scholarship which contributes original, vital understandings of the role of arts in confronting, negotiating and activating in post-colonial, post-gross oppression, post-conflict situations.’— Alexandra Halligey, Wits University, South Africa.

Thirty years after a largely peaceful transition to democracy in South Africa, how is contemporary performance questioning a narrative of harm and repair?

This book considers contemporary South African performance and how justice is enacted, digested or rejected on stage. The study moves beyond the Truth & Reconciliation Commission, to explore how women and queer artists stage diverse claims to human dignity and in so doing resist the fundamental injustices that persist. Walsh outlines the ‘national mythos of harm and repair’ – a logic that claims discursive repair of the past, while present-day state violence, gender-based violence and economic oppression keeps the majority of South Africans in dire circumstances. Chapters cover a range of contemporary performances that resist this mythos.

Beginning with the construction of the Constitution Hill which set the ground for sites of memorialisation, Walsh analyses the work of individual artists, such as Mary Sibande, and performance forms ranging from mainstream theatre (Empatheatre, Koleka Putuma, Nadia Davids) through to the festival circuit (Mamela Nyamza and Mojisola Adebayo) and activist performance interventions (Qondiswa James and Sibongile Mngoma).