Wayward Feeling

Audio-Visual Culture and Aesthetic Activism in Post-Rainbow South Africa

By: Helene Strauss

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Hardcover | 22 July 2022

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Hardcover
280 Pages

Dimensions(cm)
23.4 x 15.8 x 2.1

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Wayward Feeling asks what contemporary audio-visual culture and aesthetic activisms might tell us about the affective afterlives of historical injustice in post-rainbow South Africa.

Inventive new methods of audio-visual mediation and aesthetic activism have been giving shape, since at least the mid-2000s, to feelings of despair, disappointment, and rage at the injustice that South Africa's colonial and apartheid histories continue to trail in their wake. Wayward Feeling reveals how racism, sexism, and other forms of structural disenfranchisement have continued to assert themselves in affective terms, and how these terms have been recast in spaces both public and intimate in "post-rainbow" times.

Helene Strauss argues that the tension between aspiration and achievability has yielded modes of feeling that increasingly disrupt the thrall of post-apartheid nation-building and reconciliation myths, even as wide-spread attachment to the utopian ideals of the anti-apartheid struggle continues to shape dissenting political organising and cultural production. Drawing on a variety of audio-visual forms including video installations, conceptual artwork, documentary film, live art, and sonic installations Wayward Feeling examines some of the affective resources that people in contemporary South Africa have been drawing on to make difficult lives more bearable.

Industry Reviews

In Wayward Feeling, on the practices of aesthetic activism in a world after extraction, Helene Strauss attends to the unfettered, the too-much, the roiling work of artists like Berni Searle, Zanele Muholi, and others. Strauss shows how such works evoke both the now and its long preface and aftermath, and therefore the bodiliness of feeling after trauma - where feeling is touch, emotion, and ambience at the same time. These simultaneities she turns into a theory of presence and practice in a world, this book tells us, we may yet make ours again.

- Gabeba Baderoon, author of The History of Intimacy and co-director, African Feminist Initiative at Penn State University

In Wayward Feeling, Helene Strauss illuminates the complex affective life of South African audio-visual cultures in the tumult of the 'post-rainbow' period. Through careful attention to the wide-ranging moods that drive creative activism and careful consideration of their manifold resonances, Strauss sheds a fascinating light on waywardness as a means of reckoning with ongoing injustices and envisioning more just futures.

- Thy Phu, Professor of Media Studies, University of Toronto

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