The editors assemble a wide range of essays from international scholars to respond to what they perceive as the increased performance and representation of violence in contemporary ‘world-making’. Moreover, they consider the relationship between performance and political violence by tending to the manner in which performance modalities intervene or reproduce dominant subnational, national and transnational violence. The sixteen chapters variously focus on plays, street theatre, hunger strikes, lynching, image theatre and war photography within politicized national contexts such as Britain, France, the Middle East, Turkey and the United States. Theoretical writings of Agamben, Barthes, Butler, Derrida, Lyotard and Sontag support many of the analyses, and contributions by Catherine M. Cole on South Africa's Truth and Reconciliation Commission, Mark Phelan on Northern Irish photography of ‘the Disappeared’ and Jon McKenzie on Abu Ghraib and ‘the Society of the Spectacle of the Scaffold’ rank among the most engaging.

While it may appear surprising to some readers that so little attention is devoted to addressing the inevitability of violence, or even to considering its productive force – a position forwarded most notably in recent times by Slavoj Žižek, for instance – it is hard to criticize the collection on this basis. In their introduction, Anderson and Menon firmly position the project as an ethical intervention by identifying themselves, and the community of performance scholars more generally, as ‘uniquely qualified and ethically obligated to explore specific sites of violence as well as larger questions about how violence is specifically performed’ (p. 3). While this proposition is both ambitious and challenging, the book's refusal to fetishize violence with familiar singularities such as ‘subversion’, ‘resistance’ or ‘rupture’, in favour of more deliberate examinations of its form, affect, and effect, does well to illuminate what form politically aware and ethically invested performance criticism might take.

Although the book includes a rich mix of topics from scholars across the globe, the US defines its geographical, temporal and performative centre of gravity. 9/11 and its after-effects are presented as a turning point in the contemporary experience of and response to violence, so much so that much of the introduction, from the very opening line, is devoted to this subject, as are the last two chapters by McKenzie and Tony Perucci, as well as the sizeable afterword by Peggy Phelan. While she is careful to remark that her discussion of Abu Ghraib photography does not mean to imply that ‘the broader horizon of sanctioned torture and abuse is not worthy of serious discussion in a book devoted to Violence Performed’ (p. 372), the particular weighting and arrangement of material might be seen to suggest otherwise. Nonetheless, this vibrant and vital collection urges scholars to tend more closely to similar issues surrounding the braided questions of ethics, performance and violence, to reorient our thinking beyond purely notional and symbolic matters in order to give attention to the deliberate, systematic doing of violence in the politically fraught everyday.