Women have been largely invisible in crime discourse in South Africa; they have never been conceived of as either the primary authors or objects of the law. Yet according to the Republic of South Africa Department of Correctional Services (DCS), they are one of the fastest-growing segments of the prison population today. In the eight years following democratic elections in 1994, DCS reports that the number of women behind bars grew by over 31 percent. From 2008 to 2012 alone, the women's prison population rose by 10 percent while the number of men behind bars declined. These increases are not fully attributable to an escalation in women's illicit behavior. Instead, shifts in policing and sentencing policies now mandate longer sentences for crimes for which women are most likely to be convicted—both aggressive and non-violent, often poverty-related, offenses such as theft (shoplifting, robbery, burglary, carjacking, fraud, embezzlement), narcotics (trafficking, sale, distribution), and sex work.

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With Performance and the Afterlives of Injustice, Catherine Cole investigates how a group of contemporary South African artists have used performance to explore the ongoing ramifications or “afterlives” of apartheid. This engaging work spans five decades of South African performance history (1970–2020), posing critical questions about performance as a pedagogical tool and a practice of political engagement.

This chapter recounts the process of developing and the impact of a community-engaged art project at Michigan State University called After/Life. The theater piece dramatized the experiences of women and girls during the 1967 Detroit rebellion, and was performed in July 2017 in conjunction with citywide efforts to mark and commemorate the fiftieth anniversary of the rebellion. The chapter addresses human flourishing by offering the play as an example of a successful effort to build an arts project that was beautiful, moving, respectful, and healing in and with a community that still bore the scars of a traumatic event (the rebellion).

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