Post-imperial Brecht: Politics and Performance, East and South (review)

Most photographs simply document theatrical events but the one on this dust cover, of Love, Crime and Johannesburg, the Junction Avenue Theatre Com-pany's 1999 adaptation of The Threepenny Opera, is superb. Often matching its liveliness, Kruger describes, in Post-imperial Brecht, many "texts" on very different "stages."

Yet what does this title mean? In the publisher's blurb, "Post-imperial Brecht challenges prevailing views of Brecht's theatre and politics." Where do they prevail? Where is the book's "here" (12)? It is "the first to argue" that Brecht can only be fully understood if his work is assessed globally or, as the book assumes, "when seen in a post-imperial framework that links the East/ West axis between US capitalism and Soviet communism with the North/ South axis of postcolonial resistance to imperialism." The primacy claim is overdone. More important are the relationships argued for in the text. In the introduction, "post-imperial" unsettles simplistic geopolitical metaphors. East and west sometimes have more in common when north and south confront each other; south can discomfort east as well as west.

The subsequent essays register "tension(s)" (passim) that drive whatever activity is discussed. The context of these discussions is never unclear, the analysis often exemplary and, depending on your "here," highly informative. A short coda summarizes the achieved intention: "to document, in the connection and opposition of East Germany and South Africa, the intersection of performance and politics in the name of Brecht and his associates […] and thus establish points of cultural contact across great chasms of ideological conflict" (376). As a "temporal frame," post-imperial is preferred over "postcolonial," with its "still problematic" boundaries. "Postcolonial" is indeed problematic, offering a multitude of fudges. Australians, for example, use it to escape their wild, colonial, Commonwealth-literature past so as to achieve a more politically dignified if amorphous position.

In contrast, "the post-imperial rubric allows us to see Cold War battles between capitalism and communism anew when juxtaposed with competing discourses of imperialism and anti-imperialism" (377). What was written in the context of an east-west struggle can be re-read in that of an anti-imperial north– south conflict, as they help to focus each other. Perhaps implying the locus of "here," the book concludes with a warning "against the habitual monolingualism of global (usually English) studies and against the premature assumption that all cultural practices can be equally mapped on a global scale" (377). It also argues against "the Cold War cliché of primitive politics and formal crudity" attributed, presumably by such students, to art in the old "east" (59).

Is our age really "post-imperial"? The USA controls the world economy. It is establishing permanent Guantánamo Bays to incarcerate for as long as it likes those who, for any reason or for none at all, incur its wrath. Torture is a sub-contracted instrument of government. Moral monsters keep their diplomatic passports. The European Union has seized the white man's burden and, as Marx and Lenin foretold, controls African prices, prevents development, and sanctimoniously ruins lives. Wearing other masks, imperialism runs the glocal show. How "post-imperial" "provides terms for critical re-examination of the conventionally distinct North/South and East/West coordinates," in any analytically meaningful way, escapes me (376). This complicates the book, without undoing it. The subtitle – Politics and Performance, East and South – is closer to its focus. "East" means East Germany (DDR), a once Second-World real-existing "communist" state, not the farther "cultural" east where most people live. South stands for the Republic of South Africa, a highly conflicted society, where a successful anti-racist struggle has given way to neo-conservative-supported, multi-colour capitalism.

Of many "post-imperial Brechts" (12), the didactic theorist of a one-para-graph 1930 text, Die große und die kleine Pädagogik, prevails here, though his meaning is arguable. Brecht later shelved, as impractical, transformation [End...