Description
I consider three leading artistic and cultural endeavours in South Sudan: an artists’ collective which initially focused on visual and performance art, a theatre group, and organised wrestling competitions. Each endeavour became prominent post-independence, with most growing after the 2013 war began or recurred in 2016. These cases show how peace and art in South Sudan intersect and evolved in the last decade along three main, but not mutually exclusive, pathways: an evolution to activism (the artists’ collective); broad continuity (the theatre); and major interruption (wrestling), followed by imitation by successors. All three of these cases adopted, with varying degrees of introspection, classical liberal discourses of peace and conflict. All have been shaped by their founders’ own personal as well as wider popular demands for everyday and elite peace, by the presence of conflict and awareness of peace processes, and by a desire to influence—whether directly at the negotiating table or indirectly through mockery and social critique—South Sudan’s various engagements with peace. At the same time, it is these attempts at peace that have also played a role in constructing art, both in its organisational and aesthetic dimensions.
