Life in late nineteenth-century New York City was highly public: identities were consciously performed, both in an attempt to define oneself within a suddenly burgeoning city that played a leading role in the nation's project to describe itself, and as a way of passing, functioning, making a living and surviving in a society increasingly touchy about race and ethnicity. New York at the time thus offered a plethora of characters negotiating ethnicity and class through performance. Esther Romeyn has chosen some of the most interesting to use as a lens through which to examine the construction of American identity politics, and at the same time to mine the theoretical ground between ‘performativity’ and ‘performance’, ‘real’ and ‘theatrical’.

Each chapter focuses on a theoretical concept relating to performance and ethnicity and uses a performer or set of performers as illustration. The chapter on ‘Crossing the Bowery: Female Slumming and the Theater of Urban Space’ includes a discussion of those residents of the slums who learned to perform their own poverty for a fee, and an account of the murder of Elise Sigel, which leads to a theorization of the ‘conflation of commodity culture, eroticism, and Orientalism’ of the time (p. 76), as enacted through shopping and slumming excursions. Another notable case study is ‘My Self/Other Self: Impersonation and the Rehearsal of Otherness’, in which Romeyn examines the research techniques of vaudeville performers such as Frank Bush, Edward Harrigan and David Warfield. She deftly ties their insistence on the ‘reality’ of their ethnic impersonations to the desire to ‘pass’ personally as nonracial, thereby raising their own social status.

The chapters on theatrical and social performers fit the author's theoretical purpose better than the somewhat forced sections on novels and urban guidebooks, but altogether the examples combine to provide a compelling picture of the imperative of performance for immigrants, or those entering the ethnicity conversation, at the time. The history is admirably researched, drawing together information from hard-to-find plays, popular magazines, newspapers, memoirs, and song lyrics, as well as from secondary sources from a wide variety of disciplines. Romeyn's work is an immensely useful resource for interdisciplinary scholars interested in the convergence of immigrant life and popular culture forms.