This volume emerges from the International Postgraduate Programme in Performance and Media Studies (IPP) at the Johannes Gutenberg-Universität Mainz and primarily contains essays by graduates and faculty. Entries cover an array of topics, such as Chinese television costume drama, the activist work of The Yes Men, the Brazilian tropicália art movement, the political scandal as a field of research, the concept of mediaclash, James Shirley's Catholic iconoclasm and the mythic dimensions of telenovelas. The editors, in their introduction, suggest coherence, asserting that the essays all use the concept of the hostile takeover as ‘a starting point to look at the interrelations between economic–political power and the cultural negotiations of media and performance as they are expressed in the representation of violence or in the potential violence of representational acts’ (p. 5). This theme is so broad, however, that no unifying issues come into focus. It might have been helpful if the editors had included more information about the specific genesis of the project, and how the student essays were solicited and chosen.

The two faculty essays offer interesting insights into their respective topics of flagellation ceremonies and flagellation scenes in medieval passion plays, and the intermediality and ethnic politics of Broadway theatre in the early 1900s. Also, some student essays are very interesting and informative, such as Kristin Becker's ‘Silent Landscapes Telling Tales: On Gangster Tourism in Chicago’ and Michael Bachmann's ‘Taking the Place of the Witness: Peter Weiss at Auschwitz’. Several others, however, seem unfocused or incomplete. Some take on topics that are too broad for a short essay, and one suspects that these entries have been culled from the students’ dissertations. Unfortunately, the volume is also sprinkled with erroneous English syntax and grammar that further undercut the impact of some contributions. While the collection offers an overview of the diverse and interesting topics studied by IPP students, it does not contribute much new insight into the subject matter suggested by its title. The desire to give graduate students a publishing opportunity is laudable, but one would hope that future volumes will feature a more unified theme and only include complete, stand-alone essays rather than abridged excerpts from doctoral theses.