Performing Post-Apartheid Feeling: A review of 'Wayward Feeling: Audio-Visual Culture and Aesthetic Activism in Post-Rainbow South Africa'

A book review of 'Wayward Feeling: Audio-Visual Culture and Aesthetic Activism in Post-Rainbow South Africa' (2022), in which cultural theorist and literary scholar Helene Strauss focuses on how “political emotions that surge unpredictably across the social”, result not only in melancholic paralysis, but animate resistance and multiple forms of aesthetic activism. Through tracing what she terms “wayward feelings”—complex, unwieldy, affective responses to the post-apartheid present—and how they are made manifest and mediated through the work of artists, activists, writers, and filmmakers, Strauss provides a seismographic reading of the present.