In Drumming Asian America: Taiko, Performance, and Cultural Politics, Angela Ahlgren presents the diversity of performers, institutions, and spectators that make up the practice of North American taiko to argue that it is this very diversity that performatively coconstitutes Asian America. As she makes clear in Chapter 1, which serves as her introduction, taiko—an ensemble drumming performance practice—is another of the twentieth century's invented traditions, emerging in Japan in the 1950s. In the United States, the first groups formed amid the broader Asian American movement: although the earliest Japanese American practitioners certainly authorized their playing via connection to Japan, they were also involved, to varying degrees, with the social justice activism of the 1970s—an engagement that, for Ahlgren, is central to the significance of taiko in North America. Drawing upon her own years of taiko practice, ethnographic engagements, institutional histories, and performance analysis, Ahlgren highlights different geographic regions while attending to the dynamics of race, gender, and sexuality as they arise in the practice, performance, and spectatorship of the form.

In Chapter 2, “A New Taiko Folk Dance: San Jose Taiko and Asian American Movements,” Ahlgren examines this company, formed in 1973, and their participatory taiko-dance piece, “Ei Ja Nai Ka?” For many of their original members, taiko was appealing as a multipronged political practice: its loudness and physical expansiveness challenged stereotypes of Japanese as meek and quiet. Simultaneously, it offered a way for sansei (third-generation) players to connect both with their cultural roots in Japan and with the issei (first-generation). Ahlgren argues that “Ei Ja Nai Ka?,” which teaches a history of the issei's physical labor in the United States, enacts these ideals of generational connection and of forging a communal identity in order to fight for social justice. The chapter closes by examining the difficulty San Jose Taiko has encountered in trying to publicize itself as Asian American rather than an exotic export from Japan. The orientalist pressures of the US performance market examined here become a recurring focus of the book.

Chapter 3, “Taiko Scenarios: Performing Asian America in the Land of 10,000 Lakes,” turns to the crucial, yet understudied, area of outreach performance, highlighting the work of Minneapolis-based Mu Daiko. The group's low-tech, educational outreach performances challenge the image of Minnesota as pervasively white, both by educating white spectators and by offering points of contact and inspiration for young Asian American spectators, many of whom are Korean adoptees. Ahlgren frames these performances as sites of two kinds of improvisation for Mu Daiko's players: they can experiment with new styles and solos in these lower-profile events, but they must also improvise on the spot as they carry out the emotional labor of managing racialization. Borrowing Diana Taylor's concept of “scenarios,” Ahlgren thinks through the limited but impactful ways that players can respond to racist incidents and performatively enact new conceptions of the state's racial makeup.

In Chapter 4, “Practicing Ambivalence: White and Black Women in Asian American Performance,” Ahlgren counters the assumption of taiko as a purely “Asian” practice and troubles the common white–black binary of US racial discourse. Reflecting upon a session at the 2003 North American Taiko Conference, as well as spectators’ reactions to her own presence as a member of Mu Daiko, Ahlgren highlights moments of white racialization to consider the dynamics of gendering, white fragility, and expectations of authenticity in taiko. As counterpoint to her own subject position, interviews with three black women reveal that within the context of taiko—where white spectators’ racialized assumptions about Asian foreignness predominate—blackness often signals “Americanness.” The chapter concludes with Ahlgren and another white player's endeavor to learn the song “Torii,” an homage to a Japanese American activist, Esther Torii Suzuki. The possibilities in taiko for intersectionality, Ahlgren proposes, must begin with a humble desire to learn about taiko's Asian American history and activist genealogies, and a willingness to examine the nature of one's own participation in the form.

The final chapter, “Butch Bodies, Big Drums: Queering North American Taiko,” highlights performances by the group Jodaiko in Vancouver, and its leader, Tiffany Tamaribuchi, to examine performance and spectatorial practices that “queer” taiko. Jodaiko's relatively uniform butch appearance suggests to Ahlgren a “homo-geneity” (113) that allows the players to be legible as queer Asian American women, an identity that is invisible within white supremacy's racial imaginary of Asian bodies as either effeminized men or hyperfeminized women. This performance aesthetic pairs with Ahlgren's proposal for a mode of queer spectatorship that does not necessitate queer identity, but rather asks audience members to recognize and engage with these queer aesthetics and with the kinesthetic erotics of the relationship among drum, drummer, and spectator that is fundamental to taiko. As with previous chapters, this proposal of affiliative spectatorship offers a concrete model for intersectionality in performance. Here, Ahlgren foregrounds, with refreshing forthrightness, the orientalism that is difficult to disentangle from the erotics of her viewing position. As she explains, acknowledging the imbrication of race with structures of sexuality and desire is the crucial first step in building this theory of queer spectatorship and relationality. In the conclusion, Ahlgren considers Tamaribuchi's “Joy Bubble,” composed after the 2016 presidential election. Prompting people to drum and dance, the song exemplifies taiko's power to form affective and political coalitions and bring about change through collaborative, joyful physical and musical practice.

Ahlgren makes significant contributions in her foregrounding of women in taiko and in her theorization of the performative coconstruction of Asian America. Like many cultural practices, the presentation and historiography of taiko has emphasized men, even though in the United States women are the majority of participants. The prominence given to female players, even in chapters not explicitly focused on gender, corrects this imbalance. The book's core argument—that taiko's enacting of Asian America is a coconstituted performance—comes from the reality that taiko is practiced by people of different racial identities. Ahlgren's attention to how cultural practices become raced and how audiences make sense of what they see onstage provides a model for articulating processes of racial, ethnic, and cultural formation in the United States. The book offers these interventions with stunning accessibility; because she writes with her community of fellow taiko players in mind, this text will be as useful in undergraduate classrooms as it is important for scholars in Asian American and performance fields.