Dominic Johnson Unlimited Action: The Performance of Extremity in the 1970s Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2019. 232 p. £17.99. ISBN 978-1-5261-3551-3.

Abstract

interesting because the play premiered in Johannesburg and toured to London with an all-white cast to engage interracial audiences in both locations at the height of the anti-apartheid struggles fighting censorship and racism. Against this historical backdrop, Cole’s analysis of white South African contemporary theatremakers becomes more critical as she moves into the 1990s and the present in the following chapters of the book. The work of Robyn Orlin and Brett Bailey often raised controversy as it engagedmixed casts from a privileged white director position. Cole’s reading of their work asserts that their aesthetic strategies fall somewhat short of the dismantling potential she sees in the work by South African artists of colour in the way their aesthetics are juxtaposed and compared in Chapters 2 and 3, ‘sharing the stage’ under persistently unequal terms.Dance takes a prominent position in Cole’s analysis across Chapters 2, 3, and 4, especially in works by Jay Pather, Mamela Nyamza, and Sello Pesa, as well as those by Gregory Maqoma and Congolese choreographer Faustin Linyekula, drawing on Brenda Dixon Gottschild’s work amongst several other dance scholars. Cole’s book is at its strongest in those instances where she draws parallels with issues of systemic racism, human rights, and colonial violence in the USA and elsewhere. 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. sabine sörgel