It might be a truism to suggest that the twenty-first-century child is a seasoned performer, fashioned, as many are, with an intensely mediated awareness of themselves. Entertaining Children: The Participation of Youth in the Entertainment Industry, edited by Gillian Arrighi and Victor Emeljanow, applies a rich series of lenses to this striking contemporary phenomenon.

Five chapters in the collection are located in the entertainment cultures of (post-) industrial Britain, North America and Australasia and collectively map what Dyan Colclough describes, in her essay on the legal regulation of British child performers from 1920 to 1940, as ‘the development of the vast . . . performance-based leisure industry and the emergence of the . . . sentimentalized cult of the child’ (p. 73). This working child became most visible as the Hollywood child star, a figure who operated between paradigms of what Noel Brown terms ‘priceless object’ and ‘exploitable entity’ (p. 93).

A number of contributions forcefully demonstrate how the working lives of child performers were reshaped by industrial modernity. In Shauna Vey's study on acting contracts in the mid-nineteenth century, the shift from apprenticeships to waged jobs in the United States signalled the moment when child performers became ‘less like artists and more like labourers’ (p. 33). Here the entertaining child is one locus of a rapidly changing world where the paternalizing protections of a barter economy gave way to a ‘modern profit-driven employer’ (p. 39). A similar but much earlier utilitarian approach is addressed by Rossella Del Prete in her fascinating study of the seventeenth-century Neapolitan music industry, which transformed child welfare institutes into training conservatoria.

If the performing child is situated at the nexus of capital and craze, then the sentimental affects endowed upon that child were only intensified by empire. Jamie Skidmore provides a unsparing ethnography of the conditions in which underprivileged children entered 1950s training regimes for Indian circus to be ‘indentured’ (p. 222) into a life of ‘death-defying’ (p. 224) work for India's middle classes. Shih Ching H. Picucci's study of Taiwanese opera is equally penetrating, contrasting the Western mythology of the innocent child with the Confucian image of a child ‘characterized by “a dislike of play”’ (p. 192). Laura Noszlopy's interviews with the first Balinese child star to tour Indonesian dance to the US paints a more optimistic account of the cross-cultural commerce involved in bringing the East to the West.

Arrighi and Emeljanow ground the discussion of imperialist capital flows with a study of the legal frameworks that attempted to regulate the age of the child in the face of emerging tours of child performers across Australasia in the early twentieth century. They also make the thought-provoking suggestion that these imperialist precedents have shaped the global distribution of the performing child today. Ken Cerniglia and Lisa Mitchell's insider take on the role of Disney as both entertainer and educator emphasizes that the business of globalizing childhood is itself tied to the business of an authentically performed child-ness, a thread continued by Gilli Bush-Bailey's acute recollections of her own time as a ‘natural’ child television star, which contrasted with ‘the wholly unnatural pursuit of a child's paid career’ (p. 112). Here, the agency of child performers emerges as a vital critical thread, one challenged by Mark Branner's study of the disciplinary training regime of traditional Chinese theatre in the still pre-capitalist China of the late 1990s, as well as underscored by Broderick D. V. Chow and Darren O'Donnell's consideration of the framework developed by Canadian company Mammalian Diving Reflex to view ‘children as full collaborators and emergent cultural producers in their own right’ (p. 149).

The scholarship of this wide-ranging collection is exacting and paints a vivid picture not only of how children have been regulated by various legal, philosophical or economic imperatives, but also of how the figure of the child performer has been produced through them, appearing as a densely shapeshifting locus of competing interests and tensions.