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 previous work, Performing South Africa's Truth Commission (2010), here finding ways to connect the history of apartheid to the afterlife of settler colonialism and racial injustice in the United States and elsewhere.

While maintaining this timely, transatlantic appeal, Cole uses her four substantive chapters to sink more deeply into the specific strategies pursued by performance artists in South Africa (principally) as they attempt to uncover and perhaps even disrupt colonialism's complex legacy. Beginning in Chapter 1 with a return to the antiapartheid stage and Athol Fugard's comparatively maligned two-hander Statements After an Arrest under the Immorality Act (1972), Cole then leaps forward some four decades in her second chapter to the work of contemporary practitioners, including Jay Pather, Mamela Nyamza, and Sello Pesa. Readers familiar with Fugard's practice may well choose to skip straight to these more recent examples, not least because the repertoire of contemporary dance, performance, and installation art that Cole explores here also offers up a tradition rich enough to supplant the lingering authority of the antiapartheid canon. Indeed, in Cole's analysis of works like Pather's Bodies of Evidence (2008) and Nyamza's De-Apart-Hate (2017), the residues of apartheid's many psychic, somatic, and social pathologies emerge in terms that trouble Fugard's particular brand of existential theatre. Pather, for instance, sees the physical body as both subject and object, deploying it onstage to explore the “hieroglyphics of the flesh,” as Cole argues (70). Her reading of Pesa's Bag Beatings (2017) is equally provocative, reveling in its “perplexing and pointless commitment” to violence (108). For Cole, Pesa's production seems to resist “narrative closure” by challenging those “false hopes of a ‘cure’ for apartheid's remaining ailments” (109).

Chapters 3 and 4 chart similar contradictions and controversies, including, most notably, Brett Bailey's interactive installation Exhibit B (2014), which was shut down following protests in London, Paris, and Berlin. A provocateur who rarely fails to offend even as he takes aim at the horrors of the colonial past, Bailey is also the only white male artist featured in Cole's repertoire of contemporary voices. She insists that it is impossible to leave him out. If nothing else, Bailey's inclusion serves to elevate the relative achievements and intercultural sensitivity of the many other practitioners in the study. But others will likely quibble with Cole's selection, especially given some of the voices that seem conspicuous by their absence. For instance, it was a surprise to see Jennie Reznek and her pioneering company, Magnet Theatre, receive little more than a passing mention. That said, in giving ample space to both established practitioners like Pather and Robyn Orlin as well as newer artists, including choreographers like Nelisiwe Xaba and Gregory Vuyani Maqoma, Performance and the Afterlives of Injustice is a hugely welcome addition to a comparatively understudied field.

As with any effective analysis of live art and dance, much relies on the expressive powers of the critic. And Cole devotes the majority of her four chapters to thick description, reflecting in useful and evocative detail not just on the productions themselves but also her own experiences in the audience before, during, and immediately after many of the performances. Sharing in the shock, the pleasure, as well as the confusion that this repertoire often elicits, Cole uses this mode of personal criticism to reflect on her own subject position by querying the sense of responsibility she must maintain when confronted by this record of ongoing injustice. Reflecting, for instance, on a performance of Maqoma's Beautiful Me at the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts in San Francisco in 2009, Cole finds herself drawn into a form of theatrical, almost ritualized communion:

Perhaps more suggestively, then, these experiential notes also reflect something of the tradition under analysis here. For this repertoire of live art is motivated, above all, by the possibilities that emerge from encounters between bodies and cultures and histories. And in Cole's staging of her own body here, she offers up a welcome corollary to exactly the practice she aims to celebrate.