The history of modern Asia is interwoven with the history of world's fairs (or world expos, as the events are commonly called today). This history is rich and it is complicated. And it is vast in scope. No one book could cover Asian representations at the dozens of world's fairs that have been held since London's Crystal Palace kicked off the world's fair movement in 1851. Most of these spectacles have taken place in Europe and the United States, but, especially after World War II, not a few world's fairs have been held in Asian nations. Japan has held several world's fair festivals of nation branding (Osaka, 1970; Okinawa, 1975–76; Nagoya, 2005) as has South Korea (Taejon, 1993; Yeoso, 2012). And China hosted the largest world's fair to date (both in terms of hectares and attendance) in Shanghai in 2010.

To gain control over the subjects of this book (Asian self-representations and world's fairs), William Peterson, a professor of drama, had to make some hard decisions. With respect to defining Asia, he opted to have readers think less in terms of political geography and more in terms of “Asia-as-method,” a regime of representation linked to deimperialization and cultural self-representation through performance. With respect to fairs, Peterson decided on a case study approach, focusing on five major international exhibitions. The result is a wide-ranging introduction to both the subjects at hand and, for the uninitiated, the joys and travails of working with world's fairs as sites of cultural representation.

Asian Self-Representation at World's Fairs opens with a chapter that sets the stage for understanding representations of Asia and Asians through the lens of performance theory. Peterson examines ways in which actors are able to draw spectators into becoming co-creators of performances, especially, at recent fairs, through social media transmissions of what audience members themselves want to highlight for retransmission around the globe. Performances in national pavilions, in other words, are best viewed not simply in terms of the intentions of “official” or state-sponsored pavilions, but through the performative interplay of producers (states and exhibitors), actors, and audiences. The book concludes with a look forward at how world's fairs and Asian self-representations might evolve in a world shaped by evolving neoliberal market forces.

With this theoretical framework in place, Peterson proceeds to his case studies: representations of Japan and China at the 1915 San Francisco exposition; Japan's representation at the 1939 New York World's Fair; China's exhibits and performances at the 1988 Brisbane exposition; Philippine, especially Filipina, and Indonesian performances at the 1964–65 New York World's Fair; and South Korean and Thai performances at the 2010 Milan exposition.

This book is at its best when Peterson draws on his own observations at, for instance, the Milan exposition, where he contrasts the performance strategies and effects of the South Korean and Thai governments to link their nation-branding efforts with the exposition's theme—in this case, “Feeding the Planet: Energy for Life.” Whereas Korean performers spilled over from the Korean Pavilion onto Milan's streets during Korean Week festivities, the Thai Pavilion was more carefully controlled, serving as a “paean to the King for his role in virtually single-handedly creating a more efficient agricultural sector” (p. 255).

Peterson's diachronic and synchronic approach allows for many insights into the complex webwork of Asian self-representations at fairs across time and geography. Moreover, it reflects and advances the performative turn in cultural studies that has led scholars to investigate ethnological villages, such as the Underground Chinatown show at the 1915 fair and various Japanese and Philippine “villages” at other US and European expositions, where efforts at self-representation often ran up against hard walls of racist assumptions exploited by the exposition organizers as part of their own imperial ambitions. As interesting as it is, Peterson's approach is limited, as he acknowledges at the outset, by a reliance on English-language sources. And it curiously lacks much information about Asian self-representation at European imperial expositions or at recent world's fairs in Asia—future undertakings that this book should help inspire.

Peterson is right to be uncertain about what the future holds with respect to the world's fair medium. But it is important to remember that from their beginnings in 1851, world's fairs have always generated a current of skeptics who have forecast the demise of the medium because of costs (few fairs generate profits from gate receipts), outmoded means of presentation (who needs world's fairs in the internet age saturated with theme parks?), and, more recently, from the absence (between 2002 and 2017) of the United States from membership in the international convention that allows nations to hold world expos. But past predictions that world's fairs were cultural dinosaurs have proved incorrect, and I suspect the medium will gain new life (for better and worse) as it expands into the Middle East (Dubai is the next world's fair host city) and across Asia as the next phase of neoliberal modernization kicks into high gear. No doubt Asian self-representations will continue to matter, even define future fairs, even at ones currently being planned to occur once again in the United States where the last such event took place in 1984.