Performance and the Afterlives of Injustice

“Lest we lull ourselves into complacency after profound and explicit state violence, Catherine Cole reminds us that understanding the uses and abuses of embodied performance in post-apartheid South Africa is a key component of understanding cites of possibility at the nexus of social justice and the performing arts. Deftly navigating genres and artists, Performance and the Afterlives of Injustice provides rich, persuasive, and nuanced close analyses of performance in order to challenge us to reconsider important concepts like time, restoration, the law, kinesthesia, stasis, isolation, naming, history, meaning, and closure among others in many of the small and grand reckonings of contemporary South Africa.”
—Nadine George-Graves, The Ohio State University

2021 de la Torre Bueno Special Citation, Dance Studies Association, for a book published in the English language that advances the field of dance studies

* 2021 de la Torre Bueno Special Citation, Dance Studies Association *

"When you know, from the first few phrases of a book, that you are in good and powerful storytelling hands, the rest of the text sings beyond the confines of its pages. This is the kind of experience you can anticipate in Catherine Cole’s foray into South African dance, Performance and the Afterlives of Injustice..."
—My View

* My View *

"Cole’s book does the important work of demonstrating the significance of these artists and their theoretical and performance work for contemporary academic conversations. Moreover, she collaboratively imagines with these artists how to generate a theoretical language and toolset to go about the continual and nonlinear process of decolonization."
—Theatre Journal

* Theatre Journal *

"By critically engaging with African American scholarship, Cole adds valuable commentary to existing critical paradigms such as ‘interculturalism’ or ‘interweaving’ to challenge facile notions of reconciliation that often operate to protect white privilege in these debates. As such, Performance and the Afterlives of Injustice presents a much-needed critical reckoning with the unreconciled histories of colonial and racial trauma very much alive in today’s multiple political crises, and will be of relevance to performance scholars, students, cultural theorists, and artists alike."
—New Theatre Quarterly

* New Theatre Quarterly *

"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."
—TDR: The Drama Review

* TDR *

"Performance and the Afterlives of Injustice is a hugely welcome addition to a comparatively understudied field."
—Theatre Survey

* Theater Survey *

"Cole’s evocative prose and transportive performance descriptions make Performance and the Afterlives of Injustice both readable and imminently valuable for expanding the study of dance and live art in the Global South. Its profering of new archives through detailed description and exegesis makes this book useful to both scholars of postcolonial performance and students of non-Western performance modalities."
—Journal of Dramatic Theory and Criticism

* Journal of Dramatic Theory and Critici