Kathleen Gough's text considers shared performance styles and political strategies across African-American and Irish experience, and intervenes in an ongoing discussion of transatlantic contact. Like other celebrated texts in the field, including Frederick Douglass and the Atlantic World (Fionnghuala Sweeney, 2007) and How the Irish Became White (Noel Ignatiev, 2008), Haptic Allegories illuminates gaps in narratives of the Atlantic world. Gough contends that while women are metaphors for national territory and cultural origin, they are not perceived as social actors; women are ‘everywhere present in, and yet rarely relevant to, the circum-Atlantic exchange of ideas’ (p. 9).

Situating her text as a remedy, Gough sheds light on women who have played significant roles in shaping cultural debates across the United States and Ireland. Through readings of public lectures, theatrical performances, and plays, Gough connects paired female figures, including Ida B. Wells and Maud Gonne, Zora Neale Hurston and Lady Augusta Gregory, and Alice Childress and Bernadette Devlin. As this selection of figures shows, Gough covers a breadth of time, forging ‘a dramaturgy of the figure of woman in movement’, by which she means ‘across time’ (p. 13). ‘Flashpoints’ (p. 7) of trauma and civil unrest structure the text. Chapter 2 shows how Frederick Douglass's speeches on slavery in Dublin and portrayals of the Famine in America focused on female bodies as allegories for dispossession throughout the mid-1800s. Chapter 3 considers turn-of-the-century female figures who emblematized national struggle. Chapter 4 explores recordings of cultural heritage and folklore between 1900 and 1930. Chapters 5 and 6 turn to more contemporary events: first, the civil rights marches in America and Northern Ireland (1955–70), and then the pressing issue of Irish citizenship during the Celtic Tiger era.

Gough's examination of women as an absent presence in historiography is crucial to reconsidering the archive and the literary canon, yet the text's methodology leaves something to be desired. Portions of the introduction, the first pages of each chapter, and the epilogue employ creative fiction, or what Gough calls ‘playlets’ (p. 91). These dramaturgical turns situate readers in a space of broader historical comparison, which is less rooted in the particularities of context. Certainly, it is interesting to imagine how historical personalities may have interacted. However, the ‘playlets’ become trickier when they are referred to as evidence (pp. 91, 93), as they do not draw substantively on primary sources. Similarly, the mode of casual comparison that informs the ‘playlets’ occasionally transcends the fictional asides and turns up in assertions about historical events. This is marked in the chapter concerning Northern Ireland: the reading mentions that the American civil rights movement ‘foreshadowed’ (p. 149) Northern Ireland's Troubles, bypassing centuries of conflict, segregation and colonialism. Similarly, the argument in this chapter considers how television broadcasts of the Troubles garnered American support, omitting television's role in a propaganda war of responsibility for the Troubles within the United Kingdom. A closer engagement with germinal texts in the field may help to bolster readings. Such an issue demonstrates the text's ambitiousness: Haptic Allegories ultimately opens an imperative debate on the place of women as agents of social change.