Maurya Wickstrom’s book is an ambitious, complex and provocative intervention into debates surrounding the politics of identity and the politics of performance in contemporary, neo-liberal culture. Redressing ideas which have shaped our understanding of political action for the best part of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, primarily informed by discourses of development, humanitarianism and human rights, but also by ideas of tolerance and alterity which are central to post-structural philosophy, Wickstrom challenges the presumed political efficacy of merely re/presenting victimized identities. In so far as capitalism colludes in the production of difference, this formula is intrinsically flawed. Chiefly drawing on the philosophy of Giorgio Agamben, Alain Badiou and Jacques Rancière, Wickstrom argues that we need to think beyond politics-as-is to explore what it might be. In doing so, she maintains that theatre and performance have the potential to imagine and enact new ideas and alliances which do not merely reproduce neo-liberal ideologies, but clear ground for a new present. As with the philosophers she invokes, Wickstrom is interested in tracking scenes of dissensus and rupture – real and figurative gaps in the blockades of neo-liberalism – that might rehearse or inaugurate new ways of organizing the world, ways led by a universal axiom of equality.

The book's four core chapters include a diverse range of theatre and performance case studies which the author claims present possibilities for thinking about new forms of political subjectivity. Chapter 2 examines theatre in Palestine, focusing on the ways in which a range of artists resist neo-liberal ‘development’ initiatives, given their incompatibility with a struggle for independence. Chapter 3 considers two theatre-for-development projects: the work of the New York-based Winter/Summer Institute, which works on HIV/AIDS is Lesotho, Africa, and a travelling installation created by Médecins sans Frontières called The Refugee Camp in the Heart of the City. Here Wickstrom critiques work carried out by those ‘who have’ to help those who seemingly ‘have not’, ultimately championing ‘actions taken in the absolute assumption of equality’ (p. 24), even asserting the political virtue of waiting – joyfully, affirmatively – for something new to unfold. Chapter 4 analyses performances carried out by Irish travellers Michael Collins and Rosaleen McDonagh between 1997 and 2007, which can be seen to oppose Ireland's neo-liberal ‘hyper-drive’ (p. 131). Finally, chapter 5 looks to Gunther von Hagens's Bodies: The Exhibition to expose how biopower is put on display.

While the arguments within each chapter are too nuanced to go into in any depth here, Wickstrom is consistent in striving to reveal how neo-liberal policies for justice, inclusion and equality tend to reproduce more insidious forms of violence and exclusion, as do theatre and performance initiatives led by the same school of thought. In place of this, the author proposes alternative ways of interpreting and organizing the world, in which theatre and performance can play a significant role. Some may find Wickstrom's study too theoretical or speculative, but in its daring paradigmatic originality it can only be a crucial reference point for anyone interested in the intersection of political subjectivity and contemporary theatre and performance practice.