Making a show is an intrinsically social act, ideologically underscored and inflected with political understandings that are produced reciprocally in the interplay between performers and spectators. The twelve essays collected in Showing Off, Showing Up: Studies of Hype, Heightened Performance, and Cultural Power demonstrate the power of the act of showing, in both its vernacular and its vulgar senses, to perform cultural work in diverse historical and geographical contexts. In framing the book's aims and theoretical underpinnings, the editors attempt to move to one side of performance studies in order to articulate a field of study more precisely poised at the intersection of “the spectacular and mundane” and on acts “of becoming or asserting” (11). As such, each of the book's case studies focuses on “the dynamics of showing off or up” (13) in order to reveal something new about what happens between the show and the social.

Three of the four chapters in the first part of the book, “Race and Breed: Showing Off ‘Natural Bodies,’” are focused on shows featuring nonhuman animals, but the targets of analysis are the human coperformers and spectators who make spectacles of themselves alongside the animals. In Chapter 1, “Saddle Sensations and Female Equestrian Prowess at the National Horse Show,” Kim Marra looks at how the posture and dress of “lady riders” (31) developed in relation to the disciplined bodies of the horses on which they (uncomfortably) sat and were then mirrored by the fashionable ladies in the stands at turn of the twentieth century. Both the third chapter, “Shamu the (Killer) Whale and an Ecology of Commodity,” by Jennifer A. Kokai, and the fourth, “Hyping Clyde Beatty and His Wild Animal Show,” by Virginia Anderson, take on the problematics of animal shows past and present. By contrast, in Chapter 2, “Painting the Body Brown and Other Lessons on How to Dance Latin,” Laurie Frederik wrestles with her unease about fake tanning (“browning”) for Latin-ballroom dance competitions. Her narrative is self-reflective and circular, and it remains skin-deep as she repeatedly returns to her unresolved ambivalence about the racialized requirements of her beloved performance practice.

The second part of the book, “Power and Presence: The Politics of Showing Up,” is more wide-ranging in attending to the politics of display. Marlis Schweitzer looks at “Princess Beatrice's Ridiculous Wedding Hat and the Transnational Performances of Things.” In “Strobridge Posters and Late Nineteenth-Century Melodrama,” Katie Johnson explores the cultural work performed by show posters in the wake of the American Civil War. In considering the “two ways showing off is used to call others to show up” (176; italics in original), Chelsey Kivland gives us access to the social implications of these concepts. Her chapter, “Carnival Bands, Popular Politics, and the Craft of Showing the People in Haiti,” persuasively shows us how a public can be constructed, engaged, and activated through street performance. The final chapter in this part of the book, “The 2014 Sochi Olympiad Shows Off Putin's (New, Great, Open) Russia,” by Catherine Schuler, offers a personal reflection on the nationalist reconstruction of Sochi “from seedy resort into an international showplace” (206).

The editors’ play on the word “show” carries on into the title of the final part of the book, “Provocation and Titillation: To Show Off the Unshown.” Each of the four chapters presents a literal and/or figurative take on the problem of what ordinarily cannot or should not be seen, from the sacred to the secular, from the spiritual and ghosts to pornography and striptease. Elayne Oliphant's discussion of “The Intimate Provocations of Showing Religion in Secular France” unpacks the complexities of French (Catholic) nationalism. In “Not-for-Profit Pornography and the Benevolent Spectator,” Joy Brooke Fairfield effectively considers the way Seattle's HUMP! Festival creates a “performative structure of community witnessing [that] extends across individual enactments, rehearsing a respectful relationship between viewers and viewed that disrupts the traditional divisions between subject and object” (257). Robert Thompson uses his experience as a guide to explore “A Paradoxical Show of Hunted Ghosts and Haunted Histories” at the edges of Gettysburg's killing fields. Finally, Daniel Sack muses on the not-to-be-seen in “Strip-Showing and the Suspension of a Naked End.”

There are some editorial anomalies in this book. In particular, some chapters eschew bibliographies and rely solely on endnotes instead. For those of us who regularly turn first to the works cited for the scholarly context in advance of reading or who want to follow up on references after the fact, this can be disconcerting. For me, this somewhat laissez-faire approach to the formalities seems to be tied to the editors’ suspicion that their subject matter might be less worthy of rigorous scholarship. Showing Off, Showing Up evolved, we are told, as an opportunity to wade into areas that are beyond their usual fields of study. They use a “Coda” to explain that the project began when they “discovered certain remarkable, and largely unanticipated, commonalities between their extracurricular activities” (311):

Well, yes, of course. But why so squeamish? Of such ambivalent engagements with the uneasy and less savory but perhaps more seductive end of the performance spectrum, much provocative, potentially profound performance scholarship has emerged over the past decades. With this in mind, the essays in Showing Off, Showing Up serve to confirm that it's never “‘just a show’” (1). They demonstrate just how pervasively performative and diverse popular pastimes are and how our participation implicates us in these social acts in ways we cannot always comfortably contain.