Prismatic Performances: Queer South Africa and the Fragmentation of the Rainbow Nation by April Sizemore-Barber (review)

What insights can we gain about post-1994 South African national identity from queer and gender-nonconforming peoples' artistic and everyday performances? What effects, and affects, do mediated representations of queer South Africans produce in audiences? In Prismatic Performances: Queer South Africa and the Fragmentation of the Rainbow Nation, April Sizemore-Barber attempts to answer these questions. The author convincingly argues that "queer embodiments, because of their ambiguous relation to the nation-state serve as unstable and prismatic lenses on the post-apartheid moment" (18). Sizemore-Barber shows that artistic, theatrical, everyday, and mediated aspects of queer individuals' and groups' performances, can help us better understand the shortcomings of South African "rainbowism" and "the shifting borders of national belonging" (5). Because of their paradoxical position in the nation—constitutionally protected but culturally and sociopolitically vulnerable—the quotidian and staged performances of queer South Africans can serve as "prismatic lenses" on the failures, as well as the possibilities, of the new nation.

Prismatic Performances spans over two decades, including the peak "rainbow" rhetoric years, which were between the much-anticipated 1994 elections and President Mandela's passing in 2013. The book's introduction opens with the powerful intervention staged by members of the One in Nine Campaign at 2012 Joburg Pride that commemorated the lives of Black lesbian women lost to deplorable violence and also illuminated the existing fractures within and outside of the queer community—fractures attributable to racism and significant economic disparities between Black South Africans and whites. The author then explains her mobilization of the prism, writing that it "provides an animated, multidimensional way to think through the embodied, deconstructive work performances do" (8). Next is a discussion of the book's methodologies followed by an overview of the four chapters. Prismatic Performances's important intervention lies in its sustained emphasis on the power of the performing body with the author provocatively asking, "if we were to view performance as a method of refraction—of seeing differently—allowing us to disentangle unexamined emotional responses and attachments, what do queer South African performances do and show us in this field?" (7). In this way, Sizemore-Barber contributes to the growing field of queer African studies. She skillfully mobilizes the prism as a metaphor to assert that re-presentations and performances of queer South Africans, and audiences' reactions to them, reflect and refract the complexities and contradictions of post-colonial-apartheid society. Key to the text is embodiment, space, and audience.

Chapters 1, 3, and 4 demonstrate the strengths of Sizemore-Barber's work. In chapter 1, she examines drag performances by Pieter Durk Uys and Stephen Cohen, arguing that "drag and gender subversion allowed for prismatic deconstruction of white identity in the context of political transformation" (24). Their culturally contextualized performances reflected and refracted white anxieties, mourning and feelings of displacement and while Uys's performances sought to displace whiteness in order to make it serviceable for nation-building, Cohens were more "melancholic" and invested in exploring the limitations and unbelongingness of his white male body. Sizemore-Barber writes that beyond visibility, both performances "made [post-apartheid era] contradictions palpable—that is, able to be felt, experienced, and acted upon by their various spectators" (original emphasis; 42).

Chapters 2 and 3 explore everyday and staged performances by lesbians and queer and nonbinary people. Sizemore-Barber conducts ethnographic research on the Chosen FEW soccer team, a team of Black lesbian women from different townships around Johannesburg. She argues "ikultcha—Zulu-ized slang for culture—is the nebulous ground on which queer Africanness continues to be negotiated" (original emphasis; 48). Drawing on thinkers such as Ann Pellegrini, Sizemore-Barber avers that by assuming a "projected, subjunctive orientation" or living "as-if" they currently enjoyed the protections and rights to which they are constitutionally entitled, members of the Chosen FEW were able to "enact a projected...