Characteristic of Daphne Brooks's thoroughly original and important study is the brief comparison of William Wells Brown's play The Escape (1857) with Pauline Hopkins's 1879 play Peculiar Sam that appears towards the end of her introduction (12). Hopkins's work is frequently compared with that of Brown, but more usually in terms of their novelistic output. In Bodies in Dissent Brooks thus succeeds in broadening and reshaping the contours of inquiry into African American cultural production from the mid-nineteenth century on by focussing specifically on performance: those “pioneering acts of nineteenth- and early twentieth-century performers who drew from the condition of social, political, and cultural alterity to resist, complicate, and undo narrow racial, gender, sexual, and class categories in American and British cultures” (3). By examining well-known figures, such as Sojourner Truth and Hopkins, alongside more obscure players, such as Adah Isaacs Menken and Aida Overton Walker, Brooks both shifts the gaze away from, and offers fresh perspectives on, the more well-worn discussions of race and performance in this period: “the ubiquitous master narrative of minstrelsy” (5), stage adaptations of Uncle Tom's Cabin (30), Truth's speeches (156–63) and so on.

While broadening the contours of inquiry undoubtedly proves greatly enriching, Brooks occasionally steers a narrow course between legitimizing and undermining her field of research. In other words, the strength of the study is also its potential weakness: the failure to demarcate the exact limits of the term “performance” threatens to render it both everything and nothing. In a fascinating first chapter, Brooks yokes together the discourses of spiritualism, racial ambiguity and monstrous corporeality in discussions of Dion Boucicault's The Octoroon (1861) and an 1887 stage adaptation of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. Here, then, “performance” is most definitely associated with the stage. In chapter 5, however, Brooks discusses the representation of vocal performance in Pauline Hopkins's novel Of One Blood (1902–3).

In some ways, this slippage is inevitable, for while Brooks has clearly undertaken impressive archival work in researching the book, the dearth of primary material – the absence of witnessed live performances, as it were – ensures that her arguments frequently hinge on texts written by the performers she discusses, such as Menken and George Walker, rather than on their actual performances themselves. Overall, though, this does not detract from the unique and engaging insights Brooks makes, and Bodies in Dissent is a considerable contribution to the fields of performance and African American studies.