Are other worlds really possible? In this study of Spanish theatre and performance in the Americas from 1931 to 1943, Lisa Jackson-Schebetta argues that the Spanish Civil War inspired performances that challenged colonial modes of thought intrinsic to modernity by using bodies to “imagine and practice decolonial options” (15). To make her case, Jackson-Schebetta borrows and adapts the term modernity/coloniality from theorists of Latin America, such as Walter Mignolo and Arturo Escobar, to highlight how modernity and coloniality are inextricable in time and space, beginning with the Spanish conquest of the Americas and continuing around the globe today. Modernity/coloniality, with the slash imagined as a border, is both a heuristic and a mnemonic device, reminding us that brutal colonial wars are the underside of modern nation-state borders and of the configurations of social and economic power enforced by such borders. Traveler is one of a growing number of works that defies the disciplinary borders between Iberian and Latin American studies by deftly tracing a transatlantic crisscross of artists, images, and ideas.

Chapter 1 focuses on the miliciana, the female fighter active in the early stage of the Spanish Civil War. The author analyzes representations of the miliciana both in Spain and in five little-known US plays, including one Spanish-language work written and produced by Spanish exiles in the United States. This chapter includes fascinating photos of children costumed as milicianas and milicianos in Ybor City, Florida, a community comprising both Cuban and Spanish immigrants. Children smile sweetly as they raise their clenched fists in the Republican salute. Parades and sing-alongs become social stages upon which to embody opponents of fascism.

In Chapter 2, Jackson-Schebetta shifts focus from people to places as she scrutinizes US dramatizations of air-raid attacks on Madrid, Guernica, and Barcelona. She argues that even as the first two cities were lavished with sympathy, the latter metropolis was torn violently by internal political conflicts that excluded it from the US notion of the Spain that deserved rescue. Ernest Hemingway's only play, The Fifth Column (1937), depicted Madrid as miraculously impervious to bombardment yet also in need of US intervention. Four radio dramas, including one by Archibald MacLeish, Air Raid (1938), are also analyzed to show how Spain was often imagined as a pitiful, feminized “sister republic” (66).

Many works discussed in Traveler are primarily of historical interest, which sometimes makes it difficult to appreciate them as more than links in Jackson-Schebetta's larger argument about the spectrum of decolonial strategies. Chapter 3, however, offers a welcome exception: a discussion of a marvelously unwieldy and unproduced drama by Clifford Odets, The Cuban Play (1938). Odets fashioned the protagonist, Antonio Lorca, by amalgamating an actual anti-US Cuban revolutionary, Antonio Guiteras (1906–35), with Spanish poet Federico García Lorca (1898–1936), thus dramatizing the parallels between Spanish and US colonialism. Jackson-Schebetta thoroughly contextualizes the play in the history of US imperialism in Cuba and argues persuasively that Odets imagines an “unmapping” (102) of US empire. While the unfinished work sounds unstageable, its existence adds a fascinating dimension to the author of Awake and Sing! and Golden Boy.

Chapter 4 considers representations of black bodies in the civil war: African-descended people in Spain as well as North Africans, African Americans, and Cubans of African descent who traveled to Spain to join one side or the other of the struggle. Plays such as Irwin Shaw's Siege (1937) and Maxwell Anderson's Bastion of St. Gervais (1938) place the male Moorish fighters allied with Franco's Nationalist forces in architectural settings—a Muslim fortress and the ruins of a medieval castle, respectively—that serve to associate the African body with ancient and implacable menace. Similarly, in Hemingway's The Fifth Column the “Moorish tart” Anita, according to Jackson-Schebetta, “remains implacable, as if she cannot be scared, compromised, or killed; as if she is waiting for her opportunity” (137–8). This chapter also examines Langston Hughes and the Cuban poet Nicolás Guillén in Barcelona and Madrid, where both worked as journalists during the war. Jackson-Schebetta demonstrates that Hughes was fascinated by black men who in some ways looked like him yet who were also Other in their languages (Spanish or Arabic) and sometimes held opposing political views. In analyzing such encounters, Jackson-Schebetta builds on Homi K. Bhabha and Harry Elam to conclude that black bodies from around the world collided in Spain, creating a performative excess that “remaps the blackness of modernity/coloniality to an otherwise” (156). These encounters exceeded national discourses, such as the black–white binary in the United States, and created the potential to imagine more complex racial formations across borders.

Chapter 5 turns to one of the most prominent examples of performance complicating race: the 1943 Broadway production of Othello, directed by Margaret Webster and starring Paul Robeson. Jackson-Schebetta shows how standard interpretations of the production—as a double call for a WWII Allied victory and racial equality in the United States—are insufficient. She argues that Robeson's presence alluded to Moors who were anti-Franco volunteer fighters during the Spanish Civil War, and she shows how the production was ghosted by the disillusioned soldiers in an earlier Broadway production of Maxwell Anderson's Key Largo (1940) and in Barrie Stavis's unpublished and unproduced International Brigade (1938). Jackson-Schebetta coins the term “dramaturgies of no-where” (161) to refer to how such works reveal a yearning for something beyond the nation-state (and its role in modernity and coloniality), to which both the Republicans and the Nationalists aspired.

The title Traveler, There Is No Road was inspired by Antonio Machado's poem about forging one's path with nothing more than one's own footsteps: “caminante, no hay camino, / se hace el camino al andar” [“Traveler, there is no road, / you make the road as you walk”] (1). The poem may be interpreted as a search for either an individual or a national future. By showing how the idea of Spain was formed through and transformed in American theatre and performance, Jackson-Schebetta also clears a path for the future of transatlantic theatre studies, a path for Spain to become more central to American hemispheric theatre history and performance studies.