“When performance is iterable and citational,” Julia A. Walker writes, “it constitutes itself over and across time as an identifiable style. When it is not—when it introduces new forms into existence—it helps us to conceptualize the experience of change” (16). Such exemplary new performances take center stage in Performance and Modernity: Enacting Change on the Globalizing Stage, which analyzes how they registered, even as they helped to institute, the epoch-defining changes that constituted modernity. Walker introduces her thesis by considering Henry Irving's novel performance as Shylock in 1879, with which the actor expanded The Merchant of Venice's interpretive horizon of possibilities (by making the character sympathetic) while also refining Karl Marx's thinking: in a late revision to Capital, Marx reversed the position of his essay “The Jewish Question” and recast Shylock as the member of an oppressed class. Thus, Irving changed subsequent performances not only of Shakespeare's fictional character but also (thanks to Marx's tremendous influence) offstage, in everyday life. In each chapter, Walker concatenates performances—ranging across countries and over two hundred years—that she associates with five modern phenomena: money, the railroad, the nation-state, advertising, and air conditioning. Exploring these associations, she theorizes how modernity has been “understood and lived, both by stage actors, who, in modelling new habits, gave emerging experiences an epistemological shape, and by their audiences, who, in borrowing the strategies performers enacted, learned to adapt to a modernizing world” (i).

Walker's previous book, Expressionism and Modernism in the American Theatre, upended the long-reiterated view that expressionist experiments in the United States were derivative of European forebears. Here she likewise rethinks claims axiomatic to the field of theatre and performance studies, especially claims related to her title's keywords. Continuing our reassessment of “modernity,” Walker widens that term's temporal and geographic boundaries in order to challenge Eurocentric narratives. Enriching our definition of “performance,” Walker deploys performance studies to show how cultures make meaning, but also advocates to “preserve methods of literary analysis” in the study of performance (13). In Chapter 1, for example, Walker traces the production history of Henry Milman's 1815 Fazio—a transatlantic success that soon faded into obscurity—to argue that the play helped audiences process a painful economic transition: from intrinsically valuable money (i.e., precious metals) to representational currency (i.e., paper). The United States and England inaugurated this modern change differently, and these differences are mirrored, Walker shows, in Fazio's contrasting trajectories in the two countries. Her close reading of narratives (not only Milman's script but also those of economic history) illuminates the performances at the heart of her case study. Its key figure is Fanny Kemble, who played Fazio's female lead on both continents. Her new style of acting, which prefigured modernist concepts, made use of both literal and representational economies insofar as Kemble appeared as both actor and character at once. In my view, that particular stage phenomenon preceded even the nineteenth century. However, Walker convincingly shows that Kemble's performance did important cultural work in a play whose plot, as it happens, allegorized exchange relations between gold and paper money. Thus the actress's performance helped make, and was itself made by, its consequential historical moment. At a pivotal time, Kemble highlighted the commodification of performing bodies, which Walker juxtaposes to contemporaneous slave auctions—a set of performances much more critical to the era's economic story. That the English Kemble was married to a slaveholder from the U.S. South helps Walker tie her threads together and crystallizes her complex argument about performing bodies and monetary value.

Such signal performances anchor all of Walker's analyses, with each case study demonstrating how modern innovations were registered in performance practices and how these performance practices spread offstage and helped catalyze the conceptual or technological shift being inaugurated. Chapter 2 examines the new experiences of space introduced by railroad travel and its theatrical representations; Chapter 3 considers the eurythmics of Émile Jaques-Dalcroze in connection with new conceptions of the nation-state; Chapter 4 juxtaposes two emergent performance repertoires, those of modernist advertising and avant-garde performance. The argumentation in subsequent chapters is sometimes looser than in Chapter 1, the logic sometimes more associative. For example, Chapter 5 begins with the figure of Stanley Ann Dunham watching the 1959 Portuguese-language film Orfeu Negro—a scene narrated in Dreams of My Father by Dunham's son, Barack Obama. Walker explains the strategies by which the French director, Marcel Camus, encouraged white audiences to identify cross-racially with his Black subjects. She considers Camus's source material, Vinícius de Moraes's play Orfeu da Conceição, as well as the novel circumstances of the film's early screenings, in theatres newly furnished with air conditioning. “Within their cool, dark walls,” she writes, “audiences could project a subjective sense of self into the body of a racialized ‘other’ . . . while securing an ontological sense of self within the boundary of their own air-cooled skin, the experience of the former intensified for the unconscious effects of the latter” (205). Camus's film, she argues, put on display a new performance style that enabled such intersubjective encounters: a style informed by Katherine Dunham, who trained the film's star Marpessa Dawn and other performers prized for their midcentury cool, such as Marlon Brando. Their performances, Walker argues, made spectators watching in 1950s theatres attuned to their own subjective boundaries. If these boundaries were reinforced by air conditioning—no sticky sweat or sweaty odors—the subjects were paradoxically made more porous, primed for encounter with the psychologically penetrating performances aimed at them.

As suggested by this summary—which ignores Walker's treatment of Moraes's revivals and (following Gilberto Freyre) their lusotropical appeal—the book is not easy reading. Readers will be delighted by Walker's wit and her associative ingenuity, to be sure, but many may find themselves lost in the thickets of her argumentation. Her exhaustively researched book is finally scholarly, as its list price suggests; its ideal audience is neither those illusory “educated readers” that publishers sometimes describe, nor most undergraduate students, but the author's academic peers. This final observation I do not intend as criticism. If Performance and Modernity undoubtedly requires careful attention, the book not only deserves but also repays it. Applying her keen skills as a literary close reader to a wide range of cultural texts, Walker frequently illuminates the work of performance better than some who focus on it exclusively. Her reconsideration of how modernity and performance have shaped one another, meanwhile, helps us better to understand how cultural transformations are bodily apprehended and bodily lived.