This study provides the first close examination of how performance and metaphors of theatre functioned centrally in the internment of Japanese-Americans during the Second World War in the US. Internment history has received much scrutiny from social scientists, but those in theatre and performance studies have so far given it little attention. Roxworthy broadly uses the concept of spectacle to explain the actions of the US government, the FBI and the Hearst press in typecasting Japanese-Americans in various ‘spectacularizing’ roles of ‘expressionless automata or melodramatic villains’ (p. 4). The imposed spectacle ‘became the trauma of Japanese Americans’, and the American public passively observed one of the most problematic moments in US history (p. 5). The author also examines racial performativity both as forced by the US government and as practised by interned Japanese-Americans in order to assert their agency in the camps.

In the first part of the book, she makes convincing arguments about how the US perceived Japan, and by extension and conflation Japanese-Americans, as ‘a race of ingenious marionettes’ (p. 19). Roxworthy surveys pre-Second World War discourses on the perception of Japanese culture as inherently theatrical, and then goes on to trace how such images were coopted by the FBI and the Hearst press in their effort to intimidate and vilify Japanese-Americans and thus justify their internment. While the first three chapters demonstrate Roxworthy's sophistication in applying performance theory to history, the strength of the book is in chapters 4 and 5, in which the majority of the author's primary sources are utilized to examine how theatre was both empowering and divisive at two camps, Manzanar and Tule Lake. Both chapters are complex in material and analysis, but clearer explanations of terminologies such as cultural nationalism, intercultural theatre, and transnational theatre would have been beneficial. Roxworthy uses ‘intercultural’ and ‘transnational’ as shorthand to describe the complicated cultural space between Japan and the US, and, in doing so, she implicitly elides the fact that for the internees, the impossibility of that space was part of the trauma. Needless to say, the Japanese-American community is still contentiously divided about the internment, and this book begins a welcome discussion on why and how theatre, performance and spectacle contributed to the traumatizing of Japanese-American internees.