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Performing Whitely in the Postcolony: Afrikaners in South African Theatrical and Public Life. By Megan Lewis. Studies in Theatre History and Culture. Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 2016; pp. xv + 246, 29 illustrations. $55.00 paper, $55.00 e-book.

A timely take on whiteness in South African theatre and performance, Megan Lewis’s Performing Whitely in the Postcolony: Afrikaners in South African Theatre and Public Life offers readers a new perspective on a notoriously challenging topic. Whiteness, as an unmarked universalized norm, shapes our cultural and political realities; yet scholarship that treats whiteness as a monolithic identity risks paradoxically shoring up its power to define (and further displace) its “Others.” Lewis destabilizes the familiar narrative of Euro-American whiteness by highlighting the performative construction of South Africa’s Dutch-descended Afrikaners, a minority group whose potent narrative of racial superiority and ethnic victimhood resulted in nearly fifty years of racist apartheid. Rather than focusing on performing “whiteness”—a monolithic imagined or idealized identity—Lewis documents the varied ways Afrikaner theatre makers, performance artists, and musicians have performed whitely, which she defines as “describ[ing] the gerund state of being, the doing of actions or the performing of self” (10). Ultimately, Lewis demonstrates that performing whitely—doing whiteness—is, in the postcolony as elsewhere, always accompanied by an undoing. Lewis anchors her diverse constellation of sites to the recurring metaphor of the laager, the protective encirclement of ox wagons that has long served as an iconic touchstone in Afrikaner cultural mythology. A self-protective yet claustrophobic formation, the laager ensured the survival of nineteenth-century Afrikaner families as they ventured into the South African interior. Metonymically, the laager functions as a bastion for civilization; consecrated by an angry Calvinist god, it shields the white nation from a savage black continent. Throughout the apartheid era and continuing to the present, the laager was used to justify colonial expansion and white supremacy. It is a profoundly gendered metaphor, populated by hardy, intrepid men (trekboere) who patrol its boundaries and safeguard the vulnerable, stoic women (volksmoeders) who reproduce the Afrikaner culture and progeny from within. Following a Preface and Introduction, the first three numbered chapters of Performing Whitely in the Postcolony detail the performative history of this mythology, outlining the construction and maintenance of Afrikaner whiteness across three centuries. Chapter 1 sets up the gendered myth of the laager through insightful readings of early film, the national pageantry of the 1938 Eeufees (Great Trek Centenary) celebrations, and symbolic commemorative architecture. Lewis then traces how shame from the loss of the (Second) Anglo-Boer War (1899– 1902) impacted the Afrikaner psyche, and analyzes instances where the war has since been theatrically reenacted and reimagined. Chapter 3 highlights the work of Deon Opperman, the most prolific contemporary dramatist writing in