Aylwyn Walsh – författare

Thirty years after a largely peaceful transition to democracy in South Africa, how is contemporary performance questioning a narrative of harm and repair?The book considers contemporary South African performance and how justice is enacted, digested or rejected on stage. It is an account that moves beyond the Truth & Reconciliation Commission, to explore how women and queer artists stage diverse claims to human dignity, anticipating horizons of freedom, and in so doing, resist the fundamental injustices that persist. Grounded in a queer and feminist methodology forged in Black Study, it offers new understandings of the ways performance and resistance can create openings of refusal.Walsh outlines the ‘national mythos of harm & repair’ – a logic that claims discursive repair of the past, while present-day state violence, gender-based violence and economic oppression keeps the majority of South Africans in dire circumstances. Against this backdrop, the chapters cover a range of examples of contemporary performance of different scales that resist this narrative and which confront ongoing injustices. Starting with the monumental level construction of the Constitution Hill which sets the ground for sites of memorialisation, she moves on to the work of individual women and queer artists (Mary Sibande) and performance forms ranging from mainstream theatre (Empatheatre, Koleka Putuma, Nadia Davids) through to the festival circuit (Mamela Nyamza, Mojisola Adebayo) and activist performance interventions (Qondiswa James; Sibongile Mngoma). The artists’ core tactics are Remembering, Revisiting, Resisting, Refusing, Redressing, Restituting, Revolting.

In periods of intense crisis the pressing need to take sides comes to the surface and trumps neutrality. The claim to objectivity, always a little problematic, can no longer be sustained, and becomes itself a ground of confrontation as the conflicts amongst economists and constitutional lawyers show. As the world is moving towards a state of permanent crisis the engaged intellectual and the committed media are coming back (Costas Douzinas, Professor of Law and Contributor to The Guardian). This is a crucial collection that provides a new perspective on the social dimension of crisis - exemplified in the new wave of social mobilization gaining ground across the globe. The collection is an invigorating addition to the market of ideas circulating at this time of uncertainty, austerity and social change. It is an important and timely contribution to the study of social movements and the rise of direct civil action in pursuit of democracy. In this milieu of social change, Athens is its muse. This book is one of the first collections of chapters devoted to the specificities of Greece's crisis in English that does not focus solely on economics.Its scope and intention aligns it with other recently published books on the 'Arab Spring' and the 'Occupy' movements, although its register moves away from journalistic commentary to academic considerations of futurity and the potential of the city to reinvent itself. This makes it a unique interdisciplinary project with a broad appeal.

Prison Cultures offers the first systematic examination of women in prison and performances in and of the institution. Using a feminist approach to reach beyond tropes of 'bad girls' and simplistic inside vs. outside dynamics, it examines how cultural products can perpetuate or disrupt hegemonic understandings of the world of prisons. The book identifies how and why prison functions as a fixed field and postulates new ways of viewing performances in and of prison that trouble the institution, with a primary focus on the United Kingdom and examples from popular culture. A new contribution to the fields of feminist cultural criticism and prison studies, Aylwyn Walsh explores how the development of a theory of resistance and desire is central to the understanding of women’s incarceration. It problematizes the prevalence of purely literary analysis or case studies that proffer particular models of arts practice as transformative of offending behaviour.