By pairing Bruno Latour's actor-network theory (ANT) with emerging affect theories, Leo Cabranes-Grant moves away from an analogic historiography and towards an understanding of the intercultural as hyper-legible nodes of becoming. In addition to providing historical insight into three events that occurred in the viceroyalty of New Spain in the late seventeenth century, the study projects (through performance) a model for reading these scenarios of sociopolitical rupture and repair and exposes the way societies come to be. Given that meaning often clarifies as it is breaking down, the intercultural invites an archaeology of poiesis; more than what these historical events mean, the book responds to that invitation by asking ‘how’ they mean.

Cabranes-Grant's employment of ANT figures seamlessly in the current trends in intercultural research, and the author clearly references his debts to relevant scholarship. He is certainly not the first to think of transatlantic identities in post-structural terms, but his work expands the conversation with three innovations. First, rather than discard previous postcolonial discourse as essentialist, Cabranes-Grant follows Alessandra Russo in resituating concepts like hybridity and mestizaje (miscegenation) as active tools within an ANT environment, thus incorporating the work of Homi Bhabha while carefully veering away from racially derived constructs of cultural interplay. Second, though not explicitly claimed as a response to criticism that ANT fails to account for the intentionality that might distinguish human-actors from object-actors, the inclusion of affect theory via Silvan Tomkins and Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick goes some way in thickening ANT's critical purview. Of the book's theoretical contributions, this is perhaps the least developed and most promising. Third, the diffident final chapter challenges performance theory's tendency to undervalue literary objects in preference of life events and analyses the 1690 Corpus Christi play El divino Narciso (The Divine Narcissus) by Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz. This inclusion provides a way to link theatricality and affect in the context of merging transatlantic identities.

The fourth and final chapter also unifies the book by making sense of the first three chapters, which, independent of the overarching aspiration of the book, address seemingly random and disconnected events of late sixteenth-century New Spain. Chapter 1 uses the pre-empted Avila-Cortés insurrection of 1566 to identify how vectors of sociological influence play out in public performances that substantiated both the authority of the Marquis Martín Cortés and the evidence used to indict him. Chapter 2 sees in the 1575 Jesuit celebration of a shipment of relics the relays and translations of cultural agency, arguing that as a society becomes, performances precede identities. Chapter 3 focuses on the song-dances performed at the 1564 wedding of Don Luis de Santa María Cipactzin and Doña Magdalena Chichimecaçihuatl; the drums, as Cabranes-Grant argues, act as mediators, bridging the Spanish and Nahuatl linguistic, religious and cultural translations. Here, affect theory makes its most notable contribution as it explains the physiological entrainment induced and repeated by the rhythmic presence of the Aztec drums. This final piece of the puzzle sets up the fourth and final chapter's analysis of Sor Juana's sacramental play. By noticing the affective integration of Aztec song-dances, Catholic transubstantiation and pagan mythology, Cabranes-Grant posits an idea of dramatic text as ‘geochronic’ discourse. Sor Juana's merging of time and place in the choreography of her play's song-dances makes the literary object of El divino Narciso an ample site for excavating the performative nature of the transatlantic interculture of colonial Mexico.

As the ‘(Not a) Conclusion’ finish to the book implies, From Scenario to Network seeks to be an opening of rather than a resolution to intercultural historiography. Readers well versed in ANT will appreciate the careful adherence to the post-structuralist lexicon, while a wider readership may find the jargon frustratingly exclusive. Nevertheless, the interdisciplinarity of the work invites collaborative and supplementary enquiry from a variety of fields.