Performance and the Afterlives of Injustice: Dance and Live Art in Contemporary South Africa and Beyond By Catherine M. Cole. Ann Arbor: Michigan University Press, 2020, pp. xviii + 286, 18 illustrations. $85 cloth, $39.95 paper, $39.95 e-book.

For good reason, proscenium staging has fallen out of favor in recent decades. Taken to be a synonym for passivity, its constraints on the theatrical imagination have been largely replaced by a suite of more active, immersive, and site-specific strategies. In performance spaces across the Global South, however, it is not only this rising taste for interaction that has driven the proscenium’s demise. Caught up in the history of colonial power, as Catherine M. Cole notes in Performance and the Afterlives of Injustice: Dance and Live Art in Contemporary South Africa and Beyond, proscenium staging served originally to displace many of those indigenous performance traditions ill-suited to such a comparatively static form. Cole cites, for example, the “more communal” (170) circular stages once common to Congolese dance. We might recall, too, the participatory impulses that historically conditioned performances of praise poetry across southern Africa. In this context, the fading popularity of the proscenium stage has also been understood as vital for the revival of these and many other more kinetic indigenous traditions. In charting the recent rise of live art in countries like South Africa and the DRC, however, Cole is careful to resist the idea of a pristine return to the precolonial past, whether onstage or in society at large. Attuned to the entangled, often intractable afterlives of racial injustice not just in Africa but across the globe, her latest book explores instead the unresolved wrongs that often remain long after the basic architecture of white, colonial power has been dismantled. This is not to give up on the possibility of “a world that is otherwise,” as Cole puts it (220), echoing decolonial thinkers like Walter Mignolo. But neither is it to assume that simple strategies like a return to circular staging can perform theatre’s decolonization. Rather, Cole’s critique attempts to “dwell in complexity” by enduring the “lack of resolution” that necessarily stalks the pursuit of justice after colonialism (32). As such, in this latest study, she actively extends the sense of political irresolution that animates her