The ten books reviewed examine the role of performance (broadly defined to include dance, music, and protest) in Latin America and Latin American performance in the world. Beside this point of commonality, the works vary greatly. For instance, authors analyze from different vantage points, focusing on the performances of a single person (Kosstrin), single city (Fortuna and Kun), single country (Höfling, González Varela, and Scialom), and several countries or regions within Latin America and

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... n American USA (Fuentes, Palomino, Dorr, and Castillo-Garsow and Nichols). Three studies critically call into question what constitutes Latin America (Palomino, Dorr, Castillo-Garsow and Nichols), while the rest accept the category Schwall: Performance in Latin America 740 as self-evident. Equally, scholars employ rather different disciplinary methods including those from history, dance studies, anthropology, geography, performance studies, and musicology. Nevertheless, these books share an interest in thinking about how performers use their cultural productions to do something. That is, performances in Latin America and beyond become powerful tools for making political statements, asserting authority, challenging structural inequalities, shaping the construct of Latin America, and destabilizing assumptions about how people move or what a place sounds like in the region. Demonstrating the power of Latin American performances is an important contribution. These scholars build on rich precedents, but address gaps and erasures in their respective fields. 1 For instance, Fortuna brings previously overlooked contemporary dance (meaning choreographed works presented on stages rather than popular dances of ritual and revelry) into conversations about resistance to Argentinean state violence from the 1960s through the twenty-first century. Essays in the edited volume La Verdad attempt to counter the marginalization of hip-hop in the academy and non-English artists within hip-hop studies. Höfling restores authorship to capoeira innovators, usually picturesquely portrayed as anonymous and static purveyors of tradition. In short, the ten studies work to demonstrate the value of performance as a means for analyzing Latin American societies and the region as a whole. The authors succeed in their goal. Whether focusing on African American dancers in Lima, enterprising musicologists in Uruguay, or Mexican hip-hop musicians in Queens, they show Latin America as a wellspring of innovative productions and cultural producers who have used their work to respond to US imperialism, racism, exploitative capitalism, and gender violence, among other historic injustices. Below, I connect different titles that resonantly examine what performances have done and continue to do: build community, circulate, and shape understandings of place.