The purpose of this well-edited, well-indexed, idea-filled anthology is to answer a simple question: what will an examination of “performance” tell us about the histories, cultures, and peoples of the circum-Caribbean region? Viewing the area from the lower Mississippi River Valley, to French Guiana, to the Bahamas, and including the Caribbean islands and the Lower South in the United States, the ten essays analyze languages, poetry, literature (oral and written), music, dance, theater, and carnivals. “Performance” also includes gesture, song, processions, proverbs, gossip, rites, and rituals. Written by a broad range of scholars, from a variety of disciplines, including, among others, English, French, etholomusicology, literature, and “humanities,” the essays illustrate the similarities and differences in the region with regard to race, gender, religion, language, and cultural attitudes and values. The authors believe that much can be gained in understanding the present as well as the past by looking at performance in a transnational context, especially considerating that many of the people in this region trace their ancestry back to West Africa. The anthology argues that viewing performance offers an important new way to conceptualize the circum-Caribbean and a new methodology to comprehend race, slavery, and interracial mixing. A few of the essays look directly at history. In an intriguing view of “neo-African Dances,” one of the articles cites the ordinances passed in the 1600s by the French government to phohibit Kalenda, a dance described as men and women “bumping bellies together on the beat” (124) on the island of Martinique. Another essay, discussing carnivals in Trinidad, quotes Nobel laureate V. S. Naipaul lamenting that the popular understanding of slavery on the island was like “a fairytale” (167), stressing only the great victory of abolition rather than the reality of slave life. There are also forays into the realm of language, as scholars seek to define, in both the past and the present, the meanings of the word “Creole.” Indeed, as the editors of the volume suggest, the meaning of “Creole” has “been a subject of intense debate in Louisiana since the latter part of the nineteenth century, with white Creoles struggling to retain their social power particularly during and after Reconstructin” (13). But most of the essays focus on the present or not-too-distant past. This tends to perpetuate rather than clearify some of the historical myths about the region. In its defense, however, the volume is primarily about the legacy of history. In this respect the anthology makes a valuable contribution.