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Neoliberalism and Global Theatres: Performance Permutations ed. by Lara D. Nielsen and Patricia Ybarra, and: Performance in the Blockades of Neoliberalism: Thinking the Political Anew by Maurya Wickstrom (review)

Throughout these chapters, Kruger explores the imaginative landscape in and about the edgy city by looking comparatively across a range of artistic forms: poems, novels, films, plays, photography, and even, in the final chapter, dance. The author’s spatial orientation to the city of Johannesburg, its landmarks and erasures, combined with her deep excavations of the metropolis across time produce a vision of the edgy city that is both wide and deep. The more elusive question is what exactly the book’s primary argument might be. The introduction announces a challenge to the normativity of “modernity as habitually defined by the North” (6), although this is not a thread carried through in subsequent chapters. The introduction also invokes (although the index infrequently cites) the work of quite a number of important scholars working in the field of global urban humanities, specifically in South Africa: Michael Titlestad, AbdouMaliq Simone, Neville Hoad, Loren Landau, Sarah Nuttall, and Achille Mbembe, among others. One wishes the fine empirical analysis presented across this book’s chapters had been consistently brought into a more substantive and sustained engagement with contemporary scholars of Johannesburg and performance in global urban sites.