Puro arte is a phrase that describes forms of performance, of theatrical showing off; it also invokes questions about the veracity and authenticity of the performer's “acting up.” Lucy Mae San Pablo Burns extends this phrase, used by family members to describe her own childhood dramatics when growing up in Olongapo City, to apply to a range of performative acts staged by Filipinos in the United States, expertly tracing a history of Filipino presence and (often oblique) resistance on the “stages of [US] empire.” This is a compelling and carefully sustained analysis of transitory and liminal acts of performance in the face of a largely “invisible” or “forgotten” history of US–Philippines relations.

Burns is interested in addressing a “whitewashed colonial narrative” and US imperial “amnesia” (5), which extends to the whole of US imperial designs on the Pacific, but in particular here to the brutal legacies of the Spanish–American War and the annexation of the Philippines. Described as a “splendid little war” when John Hay wrote to his friend Teddy Roosevelt in 1898 and reputedly finished after ten weeks, the US incursion in the Philippines was commonly represented as a “civilizing mission.” Yet military actions against “insurgents” raged on for another fifteen years, and calls for independence were delayed for decades, only finally granted in 1946.

Puro Arte traces this turbulent history as played out in the US, tracking a range of performative phenomena over the past century, starting with the “Philippine Reservation” at the 1904 St. Louis World's Fair, and moving on to a trenchant analysis of the neglected musical comedy Shoo-Fly Regiment, a collaboration between Bob Cole and the brothers J. Rosamond and James Weldon Johnson. Navigating the shifting role and status of the Filipino performing body is central to the book's aims, with an emphasis on the body as acting, engaging, mimicking, and transgressing boundaries – as opposed to more established discussions of the colonized body as a kind of static or displaced figure situated within debates about US imperialism and immigrant belonging. This is not a fixed or easily fixable immigrant body, but a kind of critical and historical moving target, and Burns carefully develops an analytical and methodological approach that reanimates performances that “exceeded the assigned script” (7) of colonial discourse, and that might have remained ephemeral or lost to the analogues of history.

Chapter 2 extends these interests in addressing what was called the “splendid dancing” of Filipinos in taxi dance halls, characterized here as “one of the few spaces of social interaction between Americans and the new Filipino subjects of American imperialism” (17). The notion of “splendid dancing” cuts several ways, both problematically animating anxieties about masculinity and exoticizing the spectacular dancing figure, yet also forcing questions about the corporeal delimiting and emasculation of the “oriental” as an established colonial stereotype. Chapter 3 explores the ways that martial law under Ferdinand Marcos (1972–81) was negotiated in US theatrical contexts, concluding with a reading of Jessica Hagedorn's theatrical adaptation of Dogeaters, attending to the ways in which martial law both haunts the play and became lodged “deep in the body politics of the nation” (18). The final chapter engages with the blockbuster musical Miss Saigon, once again foregrounding liminal spaces of performance. Rather than lingering on debates about the production's “yellowfacing,” Burns meditates on the embedded pressures and politics of excess underlying Filipino/a performances in this kind of global production.

This is a carefully researched, highly original project that explores the dense entanglements of corporeality and history. Moving backward and forward, exploring the present through the past, and vice versa, the book evinces the author's commitment to excavating transitory and unevenly mapped histories of Filipino performance. It fills a gap not only in the study of Filipino theatre in the diaspora, but also in the complex, often ephemeral, series of negotiations that have taken place between US imperial relations and emerging American Filipino/a identities.