“What can we do when apparently nothing can be done, and doing nothing is not an option?” (2). Rebuffing complacency and despair as appropriate responses to systemic brutality, Diana Taylor advances ¡presente! as an ethical and political answer to performance scenarios born of conquest, colonial histories, imperial invasions, and neoliberal violence. Being presente is an argument and a methodology for artists, activists, researchers, and human beings to challenge and intervene in situations of injustice through “acts of acuerpamiento” (2).

As embodied engagement, disposition, and political attitude, presence, Taylor argues, is the foundation for ethical action. Being presente links “knowing to a doing, to thoughtful and sustained action” (2). Attending to the politics of presence begets ontological questions, such as how “I” come into presence inside and outside various regimes of recognition, and how “I” coemerge and coexist in relation to others as conqueror and conquered, victimizer and victim (12). The bilingual feature of “presente” is significant: “neither language is enough, and even both together fall short” (6). The Spanish exceeds the English with its emphatic exclamation to reflect attitude and commitment, yet meaning builds on each variant, highlighting the multivalence of signification and the incommensurability of translation.

Taylor contributes to the corpus of anti- and decolonial theory that pushes back the rise of capitalism and modernity to the conquest, colonization, and slavery of the 15th and 16th centuries when racial difference was created and naturalized to serve capitalist expansion. She distinguishes the ethical thrust of ¡presente! from the Western epistemic understanding of self-reflective individuated subjectivity, and she advances an argument for “para-times,” alternative times and spaces in which Afro and Indigenous peoples might come into presence not merely as subjugated and expendable labor, or racialized things. In connecting a diverse range of case studies across national, cultural, linguistic, and disciplinary borders, Taylor illustrates how Western temporalities, colonial spatial boundaries, and disciplinary demarcations conceal systems of power that have systematically denied subjectivity to nonwhite Western subjects.

Throughout the book, Taylor shows various performance strategies to make migrants, subversives, the disappeared, Indigenous women, queer and trans people, and the poor ¡presente! in the public sphere through embodied, affective, and political modalities. In chapter 2, Taylor analyzes the explosive student protests in Mexico in 1968, in which civil servants presented themselves as political animals and performed their agency by becoming nonagents, to develop the notion of “political animatives,” an “unspoken resistance that exists as and through enacted refusal” (47). Like performatives, animatives are neither true nor false; their power lies in their ability to disrupt and “derail the performative utterance through expressive and affective body-to-body transmission” (48). They differ from performatives as “codified act[s] of noncompliance” (48). Animatives “are key to political life,” and they “expand the range of political possibilities and methodologies within the broader rubric of performance” (48; 51). Taylor describes a range of animative acts across the book. In chapter 3, she reads the Zapatistas’ activism as a refusal that evolved into a new way of life and living politics. In chapter 4, she analyzes how Regina José Galindo positions her body in the way of obliterating power to make present the violence of femicide and other cruelties against Indigenous women. Throughout, Taylor grapples with how nonliberal subjects come into presence through creative acts of self-expression and representation, all the while defying racist, colonial, imperial, and neoliberal logics that fail to recognize some humans as humans, and manifesting other ways of being based on different principles, politics, and practices.

In contradistinction to Western theorizations of “spaces of appearance” by theorists like Hannah Arendt, Taylor engages theories developed in relation to the absenting of Indigenous and African peoples to investigate spaces of disappearance in the Americas (10). Chapter 5, “Traumatic Memes,” is a standout theorization of necropolitics in relation to performance. Here, Taylor tracks the circulation of a tenacious animative and “traumatic meme” that makes ¡presente! the 43 disappeared students of Ayotzinapa, Mexico, and shows how the number 43 illuminates absence and keeps the disappeared visible and present. In chapter 6, she evaluates the risks of injury when queer, cuir, and trans communities become present through comic performance. In chapter 8, Taylor engages a different kind of disappearance when she interrogates how global capitalism traps us in a system that depends on bodies being thingified and exploited, while consumerism keeps us distracted as spectators and disrobes us of our capacity to care. Taylor’s final investigation of the struggle to become a person with, to, and among others occurs in chapter 9 where she reflects on a hoax she costaged with the Yes Men in which they adopted the persona of Monsanto and impersonated the corporation to challenge its status as a legal person.

Taylor develops a “peripatetic method” for staging the work that foregrounds the relational and embodied nature of knowledge production and transmission (38). By returning to sites of inquiry through manifold paths at multiple moments of time, Taylor deepens her understanding of how performance scenarios reappear in different shapes, with different actors and modified contexts, and how artists, activists, and communities stage protests, pranks, performances, and memes to change the scenarios they find intolerable. Her itinerant method is especially illuminating in chapter 7, where she recounts several walks through Villa Grimaldi, a space of torture, detention, and killings by Augusto Pinochet. As she reflects on the ethical complexities of access, mobility, and knowledge acquisition, Taylor contends we respond to epistemicide by walking and talking with others and being presente to evolving scenarios of colonial violence and social injustice. For Taylor, knowledge acquisition is best understood as “an active doing we undertake with many different kinds of others”; it is “inseparable from struggle” (79; 27).

¡Presente! will quickly, and aptly, be assigned in classrooms and discussed by students, artists, and activists who will take up the politics of presence in their practices. Taylor challenges us to reexamine what we believe we know, how we know, and the obligations and responsibilities that accompany such knowledge. I believe I will not be the only one who reads ¡Presente! and is inspired to turn being ¡presente! into a “life project” and “sustained political practice” (248; 247).