Christel N. Temple’s urgent and theoretically rigorous book sets out to consolidate and revitalize the study of cultural memory of African Americans and African diasporic populations. In this ambitious project, Temple pioneers a new critical lens, which she labels Black cultural mythology, to investigate the legacies of Africana creative production through which disparate fields can jointly perceive a more “wholistic vision of myth, memory, mythology, and heroics” (xv). Responding to blind spots in cultural memory studies that ignore an African worldview or relegate Black cultural memory to only negative remembrances of slavery, Black cultural mythology offers a revisionist framework that analyzes Africana legacy, resistance, heroics, and survival. Reframed as an active and ongoing process, Black cultural mythology encourages a revised reading of diasporic oral, literary, and artistic production that both celebrates and memorializes Black identity on new soil. After an exhaustive review of the varied ways scholars have conceptualized myth, mythology, and memory in Africana discourses, Temple elaborates on the distinct attributes that comprise Black cultural mythology. Consolidating and building upon terms from various scholars, Temple’s 15 attributes, such as ancestor acknowledgment, hyperheroic acts, and resistance-based cognitive survival, act as “a lexical unit and as a glossary for the first unified, conceptual orientation” to her framework of analysis (90). Subsequent chapters showcase the flexibility of these discursive tools for productive analysis; a range of subjects such as the 2019 Quadricentennial, the Haitian Revolution, and the figure of Malcolm X all become fresh sites of investigation as they explore Black resistance, survival, and commemoration. In her conclusion, Temple argues for Black cultural mythology as an appropriate conceptual framework for the emergent subfield of Africana cultural memory studies and invites others to build on her work.

Ric Knowles spends the opening pages of The Cambridge Companion to International Theatre Festivals delineating the scope of what they could cover in this finite collection of essays on the diverse range of worldwide festivals. Acknowledging that this inaugural work is but a “relatively small slice of the large global festival pie,” the Companion focuses on professional festivals that highlight works from various countries and indigenous nations while celebrating the current scholarship that interrogates these events as 21st-century mainstays of theatre and cultural production (1). The breadth of topics and theoretical approaches to international theatre festivals represented in this Companion positions it as a valuable introduction to these events as productive sites of cross-cultural and border-crossing performance. Part one offers theoretical tools for analyzing international theatre festivals; readers explore a variety of critical lenses through which to inspect the intersection of these festivals with globalization, neoliberalism, identity formation, and intercultural negotiation. The 11 essays that comprise part two present case studies of representative festivals across the world. These examples reflect cultures on every continent except Antarctica and preview the range of cultural work and challenges faced by these disparate festivals. Finally, the Companion offers a comprehensive list of international theatre festivals within an incredibly exhaustive 54-page appendix. Alphabetically organized by country, the appendix offers a snapshot of the state of festivals today and excites readers to heed the editor’s call for future research on this topic.

Within the last decade, the rise of nationalism and renewed debates and contestations regarding the porousness of borders across Europe make Contemporary European Playwrights feel especially timely. Looking at the shared ways in which European playwrights have “negotiated the positive growth of multiculturalism and the related rise of nationalism and xenophobia,” Maria M. Delgado, Bryce Lease, and Dan Rebellato’s edited collection interrogates the shared concerns, triumphs, dramatic forms, and artistic philosophies that cross borders to comprise an articulable form of European playwrighting (12). Drawing on an exceptionally broad pantheon of playwrights, the collection includes representative voices from a range of regions, generations, models of playwrighting, and professional recognition; indeed, the collection has taken steps to include many playwrights whose artistic work has largely been absent from English-language scholarship. Rather than simply collecting the voices of disparate European playwrights, this collection separates itself from other projects by highlighting the shared concerns of transnational ideas, theories, and values that influence and link seemingly disconnected playwrights. These communal topics — such as the rise of violence against minorities, issues of diversity and representation, and the inequitable nature of neoliberalism — allow playwrights’ work to cross borders without losing its impact. Its chapters, therefore, attempt to pair related playwrights together “to contrast or compare their histories, styles, aims, and attitudes” (2). This structure, therefore, intentionally emphasizes influence, collaboration, and overlap.

Just as Sisyphus forever pushed his boulder uphill only to face the pain and disappointment of having it slide down and begin again, Clifford Mason traces the cycle of accomplishments and disavowing setbacks experienced by Black artists throughout American theatre history. Sharply written in a conversational tone that balances friendly sarcasm with burning poignancy, Macbeth in Harlem inspects the absence of Black heroes that reflect “realistic portrayals of Black life” in mainstream US theatre and drama (8). Mason challenges our knowledge of theatre history by introducing a litany of prominent African American playwrights and performers and meaningfully confronts the reader with the wager that despite their contemporary fame, “you’ve never heard of any of them, right?” (128). The project argues that despite systemic oppression and erasure of Black artistic talent, gifted performers and playwrights were not only present but immensely influential pioneers of US theatre. Broadly, Macbeth in Harlem traces the development and influence of significant artists, productions, and events of Black performance between 1820 and 1960. While its examples are legion, they are situated around well-known artists and productions such as the career of Ira Aldridge, the 1921 musical Shuffle Along, and Orson Welles’s 1936 “Voodoo” Macbeth. Perhaps most noteworthy and useful to readers is the project’s painstaking archival use of newspaper reviews to analyze the cultural reception of the artistic works by Black artists. However, the project’s excellent use of newspaper archives is weakened by a larger pattern of missing citations and unsupported claims, statistics, and anecdotes.

Deploying a different understanding of “racial immanence” than scholars, such as Manthia Diawara, who use the term to denote “racial truths or pure racial characteristics” (32), Marissa K. López explores the manifestation of race as an ongoing discursive function that reveals itself through the intersection of bodies, language, and image. Racial Immanence, then, posits language as “part of an embodied, racial process” that produces affective experiences and “catalyzes personal and political change in the world” (32). A historical exploration of chicanidad cultural production through Chicanx literature produced in the 1980s and 1990s, Racial Immanence pushes back against what López refers to as “reading representationally” wherein literary bodies function as objects meant to be reduced to their racial signification. Instead, López examines literary works that resist representation and locates racial formation as both a noun and verb enacted in and through the body, rather than on it. In order to do this, Racial Immanence advocates a “choratic” mode of reading texts that looks at cultural production as both constituting and being constituted by texts in which language, bodies, and the world “become intra-actional performances” (17). Grounding its theoretical underpinnings in case studies that highlight parallels between Chicanx literature and other artifacts of cultural materiality such as art installations, photography, and archeological relics, readers are asked to linger on the body and consider how its resistance to representation enables a process of “corporeally imagined political community” and “communal sense of place” (92). Chicanidad, therefore, is not represented but actively produced through strategies of corporeal self-determination created through language.

In their edited collection, Theatermachine, Magda Romanska and Kathleen Cioffi address the lack of recognition and critical attention given to Polish theatremaker Tadeusz Kantor and attempt the important work of remedying this dearth of scholarship by repositioning the study of his productions and theoretical writings as productive sites of contemporary theory and aesthetics. In the introduction, Romanska frames the reemergence of Kantor as a result of new analytical approaches and historical events. While much of 20th-century performance theory found Kantor’s oeuvre inaccessible due to his innovative use of bio-objects to explore Polish trauma following World War II, new theoretical approaches that decenter the body as the site for all “cultural, biological, and political significations” (xii) can produce a richer conversation with Kantor’s work. Striving to revitalize Kantor’s legacy, part one of Theatermachine begins by analyzing Kantor through a variety of critical lenses ranging from posthumanism to postmemory and from contemporary thing theory to new approaches to trauma. After laying its foundations, part two contextualizes and advances the director’s importance in Polish art and culture. Finally, the collection turns outward to consider Kantor’s work within the larger avantgarde movement. The essays here explore both the ways Kantor was influenced by new theatrical forms as well as the ways he helped shape the development of innovative theatre globally in the 20th century.