Africa Today最新文献

{"title":"Coups d'État, Political Legitimacy, and Instability in Mali","authors":"Susanna D. Wing","doi":"10.2979/at.2023.a905851","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.2979/at.2023.a905851","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract: Mali, once argued to be a democratic model for Africa, is in a state of perennial crisis, the result of poor governance, unmet democratic expectations, and competition for domestic political legitimacy among the political class, the military, and religious leaders. After the 1991 revolution, international donors poured money into Mali to promote democratization. Meanwhile, most Malian citizens were becoming increasingly disconnected from a growing political class dependent on these funds. This article shows how popular protests led to both the reversal of family-law reform and the instigation of military coups d'état. The lack of accountability of the political class and the influx of donor money have contributed to increased popular perceptions of state corruption and impunity. Peace and security are impossible amid governance failures and serial coups d'état. This article explains the political consequences of the breakdown of popular trust and political legitimacy of the ruling elite and argues that restoring trust and legitimacy is a critical element to rebuilding Mali.","PeriodicalId":39703,"journal":{"name":"Africa Today","volume":"9 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-09-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135346993","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Rifle, Pen, and Prayer Beads: Constructing Political Legitimacy in Mali","authors":"Dorothea E. Schulz","doi":"10.2979/at.2023.a905847","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.2979/at.2023.a905847","url":null,"abstract":"Rifle, Pen, and Prayer Beads:Constructing Political Legitimacy in Mali Dorothea E. Schulz (bio) Introduction On August 18, 2020, after months of popular unrest targeting the increasingly unpopular presidency of Ibrahim Boubacar Keita and rallies coordinated by Imam Mahmoud Dicko, a leading figure of Muslim opposition, a group of colonels from the Kati military base seized power and forced President Keita's resignation. Ignoring international calls for an immediate return to civilian rule, the leaders of the coup d'état underlined their determination to \"put state politics on new foundations\" before the next elections so as to reestablish law and order and put a stop to a general economic malaise brought about, in their account, by an increasingly corrupt civilian political elite under the previous presidencies of Alpha Oumar Konaré, Amadou Toumani Touré, and Ibrahim Boubacar Keita. Only nine months later, in May 2021, a transitional government put into place by the military leaders to signal their intention to return to civilian rule was terminated by another coup (the third one within a decade), when Colonel Assimi Goita, then vice president and leader of the 2020 military coup, arrested President Bah N'Daw and Moctar Ouane, the prime minister of the transitional government, and had himself installed as the head of state. The military leaders then retracted their promise to ensure a transition to civilian rule within the next eighteen months and hold presidential elections in February 2022—a move to which the country's long-standing allies in the Euro-American West responded by rallying other members of the West African bloc ECOWAS1 to impose economic and financial sanctions on Mali in January 2022. This special issue brings together studies that aim at historically grounded empirical investigations of political legitimacy in Mali.2 Many scholarly accounts and reports by foreign donor agencies have depicted the rising level of insecurity and political instability in Mali's different regions since the 2012 coup d'état as a sudden and somewhat surprising disruption of the country's role as a beacon of democratization in Africa (Bergamaschi 2007, 2014; Gavelle, Siméant, and Traoré 2013; Wing 2008, 2013). This special issue seeks to add analytical and empirical nuance to this view by [End Page 1] proposing a three-pronged intervention. First, we read the precarity and instability of present-day political institutions and procedural legitimacy as mirroring long-standing trends of asserting and contesting public authority. We thus seek to understand the instability that has shaped Malian politics since the toppling of President Touré in 2012 in light of the precarious legitimacy of political institutions and actors that has shaped political dynamics throughout Sahelian West Africa for decades. Second, in contrast to studies of the \"Malian crisis\" that center on either \"the north,\" the \"central region,\" or \"the south\" and Bamako, its political epicente","PeriodicalId":39703,"journal":{"name":"Africa Today","volume":"2 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-09-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135347219","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Decolonizing African Knowledge: Autoethnography and African Epistemologies by Toyin Falola (review)","authors":"","doi":"10.2979/africatoday.70.1.06","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.2979/africatoday.70.1.06","url":null,"abstract":"Reviewed by: Decolonizing African Knowledge: Autoethnography and African Epistemologies by Toyin Falola Bernard Nwosu Falola, Toyin. 2022. Decolonizing African Knowledge: Autoethnography and African Epistemologies. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 536 pp. $39.99 (hardback), $39.99 (ebook). In this book, Toyin Falola challenges the search for African history exclusively in nonexistent or scanty alphabetic records. He draws attention to different forms of nonalphabetic text, such as sculptures, hairstyling, painting, cultural norms, and other such sources that provide copious historical records and insights. Outsiders who lack a connection with the symbolism of these texts and their cultural media end up with a limited understanding of Africa and its history. The book introduces a novel form of historical archive, which the author views as a broad knowledge-scape, encompassing experiences, material artifacts, cultural practices, and even insiders' narratives of their own cultural epistemologies. This archive, an embodiment of unconventional history, is a system for connecting culture, self, and dimensions of sociocultural existence. Drawing materials from it, Falola undertakes an intellectual freedom struggle against the dominant knowledge form, which disparages non-Western cultural standards by obscuring their presence in scholarly narratives. Falola designs a decolonial project and undertakes it with an autoethnographic method, drawing from his experiential encounters, from which his appreciation of the context of research enables him to extract deeper meanings to counter hegemonic projects of Eurocentric scholarship and assert the value of African epistemologies. Yoruba culture is his case study, but his account of it mirrors several sub-Saharan African contexts that share striking similarities. The book is divided into fourteen chapters. In the first two, Falola conceptualizes the novel archive as a sort of cultural \"signage … [a] systemic collection of signs and referents\" (2). These chapters present a justification for using an autoethnographic method. On the side of justification, autoethnography lends voice to subaltern cultures that have different codes of record and interpretations unknown to mainstream epistemology. Chapter 3 deals with narrative politics and cultural ideologies. In it, Falola contests that African histories are embedded in manifestations of orality, including proverbs, riddles, myths, and legends. It presents the concepts of time and memory tracing, the cultural norm of long discursive greetings, naming as a circumstantial practice, taboos, and superstition. It illuminates the practices of collectivism and cultural spirituality, especially [End Page 101] the Yoruba cosmic belief in the interdependence of the worlds of the living, the dead, and the spirit or unborn (64). The salient issues in chapter 4 include narratives of magic and myth and their comparison with miracles. Chapter 5 illuminates the importance of p","PeriodicalId":39703,"journal":{"name":"Africa Today","volume":"19 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-09-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135688503","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"\"When a Father Speaks, the Child Cannot Answer Back\": Patriarchal Anxiety, Gender Equality, and Malian State Authority","authors":"Bruce Whitehouse","doi":"10.2979/africatoday.70.1.04","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.2979/africatoday.70.1.04","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract: In long intertwined constructions of political and household authority, the figure of the domestic patriarch has served as an analogy for the centralized postcolonial state of Mali, even as it clashes with discourses of natural rights stemming from the European Enlightenment. In early twentyfirst-century Mali, anxieties ran rampant among senior men who feared losing their status and privileges. These anxieties came to a head during efforts by the Malian government and civil-society groups to eliminate gender discrimination from Malian family law in the early 2000s. A broad coalition of patriarchal interests emerged to defend senior males' prerogatives against the perceived threats posed by gender equality. This backlash challenged the legitimacy of Mali's governing elite and exposed its weaknesses in the run-up to Mali's 2012 political collapse.","PeriodicalId":39703,"journal":{"name":"Africa Today","volume":"16 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-09-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135688504","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Prismatic Performances: Queer South Africa and the Fracturing of the Rainbow Nation by April Sizemore-Barber (review)","authors":"","doi":"10.2979/africatoday.70.1.09","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.2979/africatoday.70.1.09","url":null,"abstract":"Reviewed by: Prismatic Performances: Queer South Africa and the Fracturing of the Rainbow Nation by April Sizemore-Barber Susanna Sacks Sizemore-Barber, April, 2020. Prismatic Performances: Queer South Africa and the Fracturing of the Rainbow Nation. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. 194 pp. $75.00 (cloth), $34.95 (paper). April Sizemore-Barber's Prismatic Performances: Queer South Africa and the Fracturing of the Rainbow Nation asks what a theory of queer performance that puts Africa first might look like. The book opens at the 2012 Johannesburg Pride Parade, where members of the One in Nine Campaign staged the first die-in, protesting the corporatization of pride parades. The protesters risked their own bodies to challenge the image of the \"rainbow nation.\" Their actions insisted that, seen through the right lens, pride could transform from a spectacle of consumption into a performance of solidarity against inhospitable political systems. The tension between performing for an audience and performing within a community grounds Sizemore-Barber's analytic stance: Where a prism deconstructs light into its many-hued parts, creating a flattened image of a rainbow (nation), a prismatic performance reflects and refracts the emotional investments projected onto it by varied audiences. What remains is not a clearly defined spectrum, but an often messy and ambiguous assemblage of conflicting viewpoints that forces both audience members and performers to encounter their own most deeply held beliefs and desires anew. (7) While the prism recalls Wendy Griswold's (1986) classic \"cultural diamond\" model of sociological processes of meaning-making, Sizemore-Barber's model brings us into the very moment of performance. Through detailed close readings of individual moments of performance, the book illuminates how individual artists work with and against audience expectations to challenge and expand the place of queerness in contemporary South Africa. Prismatic Performances unfolds across four chapters, analyzing drag performances, media campaigns, choreography, photography, and digital fan forums. Its topical breadth is complemented by an expansive methodology, which moves smoothly among critical theory, formal analysis, [End Page 108] ethnographic interviews, and historiographic interventions. The first chapter compares two white drag queens' conflicting approaches to the postapartheid moment: Pieter-Dirk Uys, who performs an outmoded white Afrikaans femininity to incite conversations about past injustices, and Steven Cohen, whose shocking performances intrude into daily life to insist that violence continues to violate the country's social order. The prism reveals the contextually situated meaning of each performance: tracking Uys's performance from stage to screen, and Cohen's from township to biennale, enables Sizemore-Barber to \"chart the different performative tactics used by each to re-envision whiteness and Africanness through the prism of drag\" (2","PeriodicalId":39703,"journal":{"name":"Africa Today","volume":"25 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-09-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135688485","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Animality and Colonial Subjecthood in Africa: The Human and Nonhuman Creatures of Nigeria by Saheed Aderinto (review)","authors":"","doi":"10.2979/at.2023.a905853","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.2979/at.2023.a905853","url":null,"abstract":"Reviewed by: Animality and Colonial Subjecthood in Africa: The Human and Nonhuman Creatures of Nigeria by Saheed Aderinto Odinaka Kingsley Eze Aderinto, Saheed. 2022. Animality and Colonial Subjecthood in Africa: The Human and Nonhuman Creatures of Nigeria. New African Histories. Athens: Ohio University Press. 261 pp. $80.00 (hardcover), $36.95 (paperback). Since the 1990s, African historians have been encouraged to investigate the complexities of the colonial past, the intricacies of its operation and imagination, and the interplay of power beyond the locale in a more extensive manner, one that would demonstrate the connectivity of Africa's past with global history while writing for African audiences. Saheed Aderinto's Animality and Colonial Subjecthood in Africa not only answers this call, but charts innovative and groundbreaking terrain in African historiography. In only a few books on African history will readers find interactions between humans and animals, involving symbolism, representation, and embedded characterization of animal personae in historical narratives, as Aderinto has done—which compels us to rethink and reimagine what we know about history, how we interpret it, why we choose a particular narrative over another, and the implications of what we decide to write about in the present. Indeed, Aderinto's prescient inclination makes this book capable of stimulating other scholars to undertake further research in this field. Moreover, writing a history that includes animals not only assigns agency to them, but lifts them from their position as objects to subjects, whose place is not \"at the nibbling edge\" in the footnotes of African historical texts, conferences, and journals (5). Aderinto boldly seeks to challenge the conceptualization of history as a discipline that has concentrated on the human past, sidelining animals despite ubiquitous relationships forged between them and humans since time immemorial. Therefore, Aderinto insists that \"we may not truly comprehend the extent of imperial domination until we bring animals into our understanding of colonialism\" (3). He uses animals to portray familiar themes in African historiographies, such as colonial modernity and civilization, ideology and subjecthood, ethnicity, violence, resistance and hegemony, and colonial power and nationalism. For instance, discussing dogs, he contends that dogs owned by British colonial administrators enjoyed more privileges than their counterparts that belonged to Africans. [End Page 103] Similarly, Aderinto weaves donkeys, cattle, and horses into the tapestry of the colonial political economy. Donkeys and horses were significant for transportation—which made them accomplices in colonial conquest and consolidation, utilized by the British colonial power to exploit Nigeria's resources. Donkeys conveyed mineral resources and agricultural products, but horses were the most reliable means of moving across unmotorable topographies and a spectacle of imperial ","PeriodicalId":39703,"journal":{"name":"Africa Today","volume":"25 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-09-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135346994","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Decolonizing African Knowledge: Autoethnography and African Epistemologies by Toyin Falola (review)","authors":"","doi":"10.2979/at.2023.a905852","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.2979/at.2023.a905852","url":null,"abstract":"Reviewed by: Decolonizing African Knowledge: Autoethnography and African Epistemologies by Toyin Falola Bernard Nwosu Falola, Toyin. 2022. Decolonizing African Knowledge: Autoethnography and African Epistemologies. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 536 pp. $39.99 (hardback), $39.99 (ebook). In this book, Toyin Falola challenges the search for African history exclusively in nonexistent or scanty alphabetic records. He draws attention to different forms of nonalphabetic text, such as sculptures, hairstyling, painting, cultural norms, and other such sources that provide copious historical records and insights. Outsiders who lack a connection with the symbolism of these texts and their cultural media end up with a limited understanding of Africa and its history. The book introduces a novel form of historical archive, which the author views as a broad knowledge-scape, encompassing experiences, material artifacts, cultural practices, and even insiders' narratives of their own cultural epistemologies. This archive, an embodiment of unconventional history, is a system for connecting culture, self, and dimensions of sociocultural existence. Drawing materials from it, Falola undertakes an intellectual freedom struggle against the dominant knowledge form, which disparages non-Western cultural standards by obscuring their presence in scholarly narratives. Falola designs a decolonial project and undertakes it with an autoethnographic method, drawing from his experiential encounters, from which his appreciation of the context of research enables him to extract deeper meanings to counter hegemonic projects of Eurocentric scholarship and assert the value of African epistemologies. Yoruba culture is his case study, but his account of it mirrors several sub-Saharan African contexts that share striking similarities. The book is divided into fourteen chapters. In the first two, Falola conceptualizes the novel archive as a sort of cultural \"signage … [a] systemic collection of signs and referents\" (2). These chapters present a justification for using an autoethnographic method. On the side of justification, autoethnography lends voice to subaltern cultures that have different codes of record and interpretations unknown to mainstream epistemology. Chapter 3 deals with narrative politics and cultural ideologies. In it, Falola contests that African histories are embedded in manifestations of orality, including proverbs, riddles, myths, and legends. It presents the concepts of time and memory tracing, the cultural norm of long discursive greetings, naming as a circumstantial practice, taboos, and superstition. It illuminates the practices of collectivism and cultural spirituality, especially [End Page 101] the Yoruba cosmic belief in the interdependence of the worlds of the living, the dead, and the spirit or unborn (64). The salient issues in chapter 4 include narratives of magic and myth and their comparison with miracles. Chapter 5 illuminates the importance of p","PeriodicalId":39703,"journal":{"name":"Africa Today","volume":"58 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-09-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135346999","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"From Militia to Army: Ganda Koy's Struggle for Political Legitimacy in Mali","authors":"Andrew Hernández","doi":"10.2979/africatoday.70.1.03","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.2979/africatoday.70.1.03","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract: In response to the occupation of northern Mali in 2012, Ganda Koy, a primarily Songhay militia, has attempted to increase its political legitimacy within and beyond Mali, in part through more formalized integration within the Malian army. To justify such integration, many of its leaders have highlighted its combat and surveillance prowess while portraying it as supportive of a racially and ethnically unified Mali, thereby contrasting it with more Tuareg- or Arabseparatist militias based in the Sahara Desert. It has presented itself as a grassroots organization; however, many in its ranks publicly argue for a more Songhay- and Blacknationalist approach to Malian politics. While such an attitude might privately resonate among much of the political elite in Bamako, it contrasts with Mali's postcolonial myth as a harmonious ethnic melting pot and serves to undermine Ganda Koy's integration in more formal state institutions.","PeriodicalId":39703,"journal":{"name":"Africa Today","volume":"4 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-09-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135688497","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Fragments of Legitimacy: Symbolic Constructions of Political Leadership in Twenty-First-Century Mali","authors":"Souleymane Diallo, Dorothea E. Schulz","doi":"10.2979/at.2023.a905848","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.2979/at.2023.a905848","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract: This article examines official constructions of political legitimacy since the introduction of multiparty democracy in Mali and asks how some segments of the population have responded to them. We argue that these constructions evolved in the context of three symbolic repertoires, symbolized by the rifle, the ballpoint pen, and prayer beads. In this process, politicians have mobilized repertoires in selective and changing ways, subject to continuous reformulation, bricolage, and rearticulation. We end with the proposition that the result of these constructions, a cross of the pen and the rifle repertoires favored by the military regime of Colonel Assimi Goita, high-lights the popularity of the imagery of military strongmanship in Mali—and in sub-Saharan Africa more widely.","PeriodicalId":39703,"journal":{"name":"Africa Today","volume":"32 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-09-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135346989","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Prismatic Performances: Queer South Africa and the Fracturing of the Rainbow Nation by April Sizemore-Barber (review)","authors":"","doi":"10.2979/at.2023.a905855","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.2979/at.2023.a905855","url":null,"abstract":"Reviewed by: Prismatic Performances: Queer South Africa and the Fracturing of the Rainbow Nation by April Sizemore-Barber Susanna Sacks Sizemore-Barber, April, 2020. Prismatic Performances: Queer South Africa and the Fracturing of the Rainbow Nation. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. 194 pp. $75.00 (cloth), $34.95 (paper). April Sizemore-Barber's Prismatic Performances: Queer South Africa and the Fracturing of the Rainbow Nation asks what a theory of queer performance that puts Africa first might look like. The book opens at the 2012 Johannesburg Pride Parade, where members of the One in Nine Campaign staged the first die-in, protesting the corporatization of pride parades. The protesters risked their own bodies to challenge the image of the \"rainbow nation.\" Their actions insisted that, seen through the right lens, pride could transform from a spectacle of consumption into a performance of solidarity against inhospitable political systems. The tension between performing for an audience and performing within a community grounds Sizemore-Barber's analytic stance: Where a prism deconstructs light into its many-hued parts, creating a flattened image of a rainbow (nation), a prismatic performance reflects and refracts the emotional investments projected onto it by varied audiences. What remains is not a clearly defined spectrum, but an often messy and ambiguous assemblage of conflicting viewpoints that forces both audience members and performers to encounter their own most deeply held beliefs and desires anew. (7) While the prism recalls Wendy Griswold's (1986) classic \"cultural diamond\" model of sociological processes of meaning-making, Sizemore-Barber's model brings us into the very moment of performance. Through detailed close readings of individual moments of performance, the book illuminates how individual artists work with and against audience expectations to challenge and expand the place of queerness in contemporary South Africa. Prismatic Performances unfolds across four chapters, analyzing drag performances, media campaigns, choreography, photography, and digital fan forums. Its topical breadth is complemented by an expansive methodology, which moves smoothly among critical theory, formal analysis, [End Page 108] ethnographic interviews, and historiographic interventions. The first chapter compares two white drag queens' conflicting approaches to the postapartheid moment: Pieter-Dirk Uys, who performs an outmoded white Afrikaans femininity to incite conversations about past injustices, and Steven Cohen, whose shocking performances intrude into daily life to insist that violence continues to violate the country's social order. The prism reveals the contextually situated meaning of each performance: tracking Uys's performance from stage to screen, and Cohen's from township to biennale, enables Sizemore-Barber to \"chart the different performative tactics used by each to re-envision whiteness and Africanness through the prism of drag\" (2","PeriodicalId":39703,"journal":{"name":"Africa Today","volume":"77 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-09-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135346991","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}