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Here we hear from playwright and theatre producer Walter Kefuoe Chakela, Wits University theatre director and teacher Gita Pather, independent playwright and director Maishe Maponya, and actor-director Tony Kgoroge on the cultural policy of theatre in South Africa. Nawa's two papers clearly demonstrate how little analysis of cultural policy there is in South Africa and the impact this omission is having on the arts in the country. Motsumi Makhene traces the important history of the Funda Community College in South Africa from the 1980 s to the 1990 s in Soweto and so starts addressing important gaps in South Africa's theatre history. [Extracted from the article]

Ultimately, by emphasizing performance-studies approaches to meaning-making, Sizemore-Barber's book presents a critical reminder of, and new insight into, the role of agency and interactivity. (7) While the prism recalls Wendy Griswold's (1986) classic "cultural diamond" model of sociological processes of meaning-making, Sizemore-Barber's model brings us into the very moment of performance. The chapter pairs Erving Goffman's understanding of identity performance with a sensitivity to performance context to analyze self-construction as context dependent. [Extracted from the article]

(14) The first chapter, "A Queer Transition: Prismatic Whiteness in Postapartheid Drag Performance", discusses drag performances by two white men, Pieter-Dirk Uys and Steven Cohen, in the transition and early postapartheid years; Uys played the character of Evita Bezuidenhout, and Cohen adopted multiple disruptive queer identities through drag. These prismatic queer performances disrupt the idyllic concept of South Africa as the "Rainbow Nation", a term that had been widely adopted in the early postapartheid years to describe the supposedly inclusive multiculturalism and communitarianism of the country. These performances challenged concepts of white male identities and staged dramas of white people grappling with their place in a supposedly new nation. [Extracted from the article]

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. 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). Reflecting, for instance, on a performance of Maqoma's I Beautiful Me i 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: As I listen and watch, I am aware that I am sitting next to others. [Extracted from the article]

This review article sets in context what is said of the Namibian liberation struggle in the nine volumes of the recently-published Southern African Liberation Struggles series, initiated by the former Executive Secretary of the Organisation of African Unity's Liberation Committee, Hashim Mbita. The article is critical of what the volumes say about the Namibian struggle in part because they do not add significant new analysis but also because of the fragmentary and scattered way in which the history of that struggle, and its transnational aspects, is presented. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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