THE SHAME OF SHAME (in) contemporary South African performance

181pp., paperback, Makhanda, 2023

Works referenced in Abigail Wiese's study: Stumbling Block by Gabrielle Goliath; Blood Diamond/ Terminal by Brett Bailey, Tshepang: The Third Testament by Lara Foot and Woolworths by Juliet Jenkins.

"The book certainly has merit as a strongly felt, thoughtful and imaginative engagement with the theme of shame in contemporary South African theatre. It brings together a corpus of plays (and performance art, in the case of Stumbling Block) that have not been collected for comparative discussion before, nor have they been considered under the rubric of shame, as a field of high-level research and reflection. The methodology is innovative and speaks to the current zeitgeist in two related ways: by invoking autoethnography and applying it to the experience afforded by the theatre, and by using a personal, even confessional style that uses self-observed affect as a legitimate basis for developing knowledge." David Attwell, University of York, UK, and University of the Western Cape, South Africa

Abigail Wiese is a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the National Institute for Humanities and Social Sciences hosted by the SARChi Chair in Identities and Social Cohesion in Africa at Nelson Mandela University.