In Precarious Forms: Performing Utopia in the Neoliberal Americas, Candice Amich works transnationally, between disciplines, and athletically across media to theorize what she terms “precarious forms”: performatic and poetic enactments that disrupt the neoliberal sensorium “[numbing] us to economic, social, and state violence” (155). Together, the artworks and texts that Amich analyzes offer creative lines of flight that call attention to, critique, and have the potential to disturb the many violent premises upon which neoliberalism rests, which is to say, historical amnesia, extractive capitalism, free‐market logics of competition, masculinist revolutionary logics of sacrifice, accumulation via dispossession, and the destruction of community, among others. Amich’s theorization therefore brings together precarity as neoliberalism’s “dominant structure of feeling” (21) and a thoughtful attention to a certain flexibility of aesthetic form in order to unfold the ways in which hemispheric performance art and poetry serve as powerful assertions of presence, testimonios, and ephemeral — often communal — gestures toward neoliberalism’s disavowed political alternatives.

Amich’s focus is on cultural production that is responsive to “the violence of U.S. economic and military interventions in Latin America and the Caribbean” (14), and her study stretches from the 1973 Chilean coup that instantiated “the neoliberal hegemony of our present” (17), through the era of Central American wars and revolutions, the implementation of NAFTA, and into “the shifting free‐trade zones of the twenty‐first century” (17). Throughout, she asks us to consider how art and poetry function as performances of utopia — ones that allow us to sense and feel other futures, urging us “to encounter each other and the world anew” (25), even as the precarious forms themselves serve to “translate this utopian longing into something concrete” (25) as we reach toward other worlds together. These utopian longings, she argues, emerge “from the experience of living in a broken world” (51), and it is to the dreams that grow from brokenness — to the generative if painful ways in which brokenness indelibly shapes dreaming and its concomitant aesthetic labors — that Amich carefully attends.

Engaging urgent questions of migration, displacement, and forced exile; precarious labor, feminicide, and border violences; Indigenous sovereignties and the forging of transnational solidarities; and postrevolutionary, postwar, and postdictatorship struggles for justice and remembrance, Amich impressively brings together works of poetry and performance from multiple artists across several historical periods. These are: Chilean poet and artist Cecilia Vicuña’s precarious “performances of cultural memory” (27) that mobilize menstrual imagery; the intimate feminist testimonios of poet‐activists Nancy Morejón (Cuba), Margaret Randall (USA), Adrienne Rich (USA), Dionne Brand (Trinidad and Canada), and Daisy Zamora (Nicaragua); the now‐famous earth‐body works of Cuban American artist Ana Mendieta placed, here, in conversation with both reenactments and intimately related works by Cuban artist Tania Bruguera and Cuban American artist Coco Fusco; the prefigurative political performances of the EZLN (Ejército Zapatista de Liberación Nacional/Zapatista National Liberation Army) read alongside Fusco and Ricardo Dominguez’s exploration of the neoliberal gaze in their digital performance Dolores from 10 to 22 (2002); Raúl Zurita’s poetic presencing of Chile’s “screeching landscapes” (117) haunted by the Disappeared; and Guatemalan artist Regina José Galindo’s powerful protests against state violence rendered through the extreme deployment of her own body, through which she “[makes] visible the resistance of those deemed most vulnerable by the neoliberal economy” (25). Throughout, Amich’s focus returns to these multimedia artworks and texts not as “blueprints that promise to improve the world” (155) — this, it seems, would be naïve — but rather as multisensory and affective disruptions that work to awaken, animate, and nurture our collective — if always and necessarily unselfsame — desires for a better world.

Amich’s monograph is undeniably impressive in its scope, theoretical rigor, and attentiveness to entangled transnational histories, as well as in the thoughtfulness of its close readings and precise unfolding of the dynamic relationships between art and politics. A more sustained and robust engagement with work in critical Indigenous studies, however, might have bolstered this monograph’s engagement with Indigenous epistemologies, temporalities, forms of political organizing, and ongoing worldmaking in the Americas. Moreover, as a scholar who similarly thinks across live and nonlive forms of creative practice, I was at times left wondering about the status of liveness — even of performance itself — in Amich’s theorization of “performance[s] of cultural memory” (15), which is also to say that the braided if oftentimes fraught relationship between embodiment and textuality occasionally felt flattened. Nevertheless, Precarious Forms: Performing Utopia in the Neoliberal Americas offers an important interdisciplinary contribution to the fields of Latin American studies, literature, and art history, as well as to hemispheric performance studies. Staging an important insistence on working across both media and discipline in the humanities, Amich’s work joins an urgent body of scholarship that attends to the multiple ways in which minoritarian art and performance can allow us to critically engage with the past, critique the present, and ultimately reach toward and enact more just futures.