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Humanitarian Performance: From Disaster Tragedies to Spectacles of War by James Thompson

into ‘the complicity of the general population and the attitudes to women and sexuality that motivated this violence’ (p. 77). Harding’s essay draws upon John Osborne’s A Patriot for Me (1966) to illuminate connections between performance grammars, governmental secrecy, and lying to ‘those who have no right to know’ (p. 199). A few chapters, however, do not demonstrate the same level of excellence when combining theory and performance. These include chapters with political or rhetorical frameworks that seem disjointed from the disciplinary dialogues evoked so eloquently elsewhere. Achieving a clear coherence among chapters from scholars across fields and institutions may not have been the goal of this project, but rather to set the challenge to building more disciplinary bridges. In this and many other respects, the volume represents a remarkable resource for theatre and performance scholars, and I imagine for political scholars interested in, as Rai and Reinelt suggest, performance beyond the level of metaphor and as a ‘set of behavioural practices’ intrinsic to political transactions (p. 1). As conditions of increased precarity and cycles of popular unrest continue as hallmarks of the early twenty-first century, ideas about politics and performance are necessarily being reformulated. Where Judith Butler and Athena Athanasiou’s Dispossession: The Performative in the Political provides a reflective dialogue about systems of sovereignty, subjectivity, and recognition, Rai and Reinelt offer a refreshingly grounded set of essays that tie these issues back to the bodies, communities, and actions from which they arise. The grammars of performance and politics developed in the volume provide helpful models worthy of further application and testing. This significant contribution will be of interest to scholars and practitioners across disciplines. Rai and Reinelt propose a new paradigm and deliver several superb chapters that stand on their own, but which also work collectively as a notable interdisciplinary project investigating the value and legibility of politics in performance and vice versa.