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

"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

"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