For many, the mention of “New Zealand” conjures incongruous associations: the country is at once a linchpin of Asia-Pacific modernity, and a flexible scenic wonderland subtending the mythic excesses and racialized fantasies of Xena: Warrior Princess, The Chronicles of Narnia, and The Lord of the Rings. The intricacies of this contested destination image—its historical conditions, contemporary manifestations, and implications for indigenous and nonindigenous participants—form the core of Margaret Werry's compelling monograph, The Tourist State: Performing Leisure, Liberalism, and Race in New Zealand. In parsing the multivalent relationships between nationalism and tourism, Werry moves beyond postcolonial interpretations of tourist representation as ethnographic encounter to enact a more nuanced anatomy of the institutional and personal performances of tourism and their role in state making, reading tourism as not merely a symptom but a constitutive element of liberal statehood.

Werry grounds her argument in Foucault's critique of the liberal state and the concomitant concept of “governmentality” (a mode of state control that gives the impression of individual freedom while directing citizens’ action to specific ends), with a particular focus on how racial, ethnic, and cultural factors underwrite governmental processes. Taking up the question of how the cultivation of New Zealand's national image has been worked so deeply into the social fabric, Werry's analysis addresses not just the macrostructures of state governance, but local and intimate performances as well, attending to the state's “cultural poetics” (xxxii)—the embodied, affective, and ephemeral—to investigate the varied, shifting, and ambivalent intersections between tourism and state policy (especially as they pertain to New Zealand's indigenous Māori population).

In tackling this ambitious task, Werry focuses on two parallel periods in New Zealand's social history, each characterized by liberal ideologies, an international purview, specific policies regarding the relationship of the state to Māori, and tourism as a focus of government attention: the Liberal era (1890–1914), and a more recent decade of neoliberal dominance (1998–2009). Five substantial body chapters (three from the first era, two from the second) pursue finely detailed case studies that illuminate broader social and historical processes from a microscopic perspective.

In her first chapter, Werry explores tourism as an instrument of liberal governmentality by positing the North Island tourist enclave of Rotorua as a metonym for the turn-of-the-twentieth-century liberal state. She shows how, a century ago, tourist aesthetics became linked to government surveillance and the constitution of the state's subjects through the spatial logic, construction, and functioning of the colonial township, the spa where the health and hygiene of white visitors was regulated accordingly, and the “restorative encounter with Māori” (33) amid the adjacent “savage” geothermal topography they inhabited. The following chapter considers the intersubjective operations of ethnic tourism of the period: namely, the codes of conduct developed through social interaction that managed relations between citizens. Werry's exemplar is the Rotorua-based Māori guide Makereti Papakura, whose strategic deployment of the codes of well-bred Victorian conduct allowed her not only to deflect the colonial gaze but to enter an international, cosmopolitan community. Makereti's success and failure in sustaining this performance (curtailed ultimately by the very liberal doctrines that enabled it) offer an object lesson regarding the ambivalences of cosmopolitanism.

The concepts of transnational cosmopolitanism and the touristic exchange of Māori bodies are developed in broader geopolitical ways in Werry's subsequent Chapter 3 discussion of New Zealand's engagement with the nascent “American Pacific” during Roosevelt-era expansionism. Werry analyzes how Māori cultural displays both played into and undermined enunciations of shared white supremacy during the brief visit of Admiral Sperry's “Great White Fleet” of 1908, and demonstrates how this dynamic was mirrored when many of the same Māori entertainers traveled to the United States the following year as contracted melodrama extras, appearing as both tourists and spectacle in New York's urban environment.

The book's final two chapters shift to the turn of the twenty-first century to assay the impact of contemporary neoliberal tourism on Māori citizens, entrepreneurs, and policy makers. Both chapters view the coterminous existence of a shared “indigeneity” that transcends “race,” and the endurance of older racialized representations, as indicative of the paradoxes of an ostensibly “postracial” milieu. Chapter 4 contrasts the reciprocal encounters premised on indigeneity favored by Free Independent Traveler (FIT) tourism with the more bounded racial depictions performed in Rotorua's Tamaki Māori Village; Chapter 5 pursues the film industry's imbricated relationship with tourism, examining the ascendance of indigeneity exemplified by Niki Caro's Whale Rider compared with the racial melodrama of Peter Jackson's The Lord of the Rings behemoth. These discussions foreground the promise and penalty of trying to compete in a global neoliberal economy, raising the question of how to represent and share indigenous culture while retaining cultural ownership and sovereignty.

The cumulative effect of these case studies is a layered portrait of the role of tourist performance in the constitution of the (neo)liberal state, and the choices available to minority groups beyond an antithetical relationship to the state, cultural co-optation, or being left out altogether. Featuring rigorous historiography, lapidary prose, and dexterous navigation of its interdisciplinary theoretical terrain, The Tourist State goes well beyond extant approaches in its exploration of the reciprocities between the macro logic and minutiae of state making. For international readers, the book might have benefited from more developed connections between its two historical eras: Beyond their evident commonalities, how is the comparison mutually informative? Further, how might readers extrapolate transferable critical paradigms from the minutely focused analyses based in New Zealand's rather peculiar circumstances? Answers to these questions remain more implicit than explicitly stated, so perhaps a more substantial concluding chapter would have been useful to explain the study's implications more fully.

Werry's book, however, is an ambitious achievement that will be of value to scholars of theatre and performance studies, postcolonial and transnational theorists, cultural historians, cultural geographers, and tourism scholars. Evocatively illustrated throughout and containing a helpful glossary of common Māori-language terms, The Tourist State successfully recounts “good stories” (xxxix) about little-investigated aspects of New Zealand's history in ways that are intellectually satisfying, engaging, and memorable.