D. J. Hopkins and Kim Solga's Performance and the Global City is an “extension” (7) of their volume with Shelley Orr, Performance and the City (2009), which focused on the urban Anglosphere. The editors use the term “global city” doubly: to mark the collection's attention to cities largely outside of the United States and Western Europe and to refer to the often disputed designation of cities as “global cities” by urban sociologists via an index of their cosmopolitanism, culture, and importance in international circuits of capital. Given the rise and proliferation of globalized neoliberalism in much of the world, the acts of urban performance described and analyzed in this volume grapple with issues of inequality, racism, and trauma directly caused by shifting economic paradigms as much as by political conflict or war. The volume's range of essays is impressive at the level of geopolitical diversity as well as methodology. It is for this reason that the volume is so rich.

Part I of the book explores performances where actors and audiences traverse boundaries to make their claims. Loren Kruger's examination of contemporary artists' attempts to create “a drama of hospitality” (19) in economically and racially segregated areas of Johannesburg articulates the promises and limits of taking spectators across cultural divides in urban spaces. Artist Jennifer H. Capraru and scholar Kim Solga's inquiry into a Rwandan production of The Monument carefully explores the complicated production processes of the play to underscore how arts administrations in aspirational global cities—Kigali and Toronto—attempted to meet goals of urban renewal and accumulation of cultural capital via arts management while working with material that affected audiences deeply and differentially. Jean Graham-Jones's chapter about a 2008 revival production of Eva, el gran musical argentino (1986) that opened in the provincial capital, La Plata, rather than Buenos Aires, reveals the deep histories and political roles of the two cities within Argentine and global imaginaries. Her dramaturgical analyses of the play and performative acts by Cristina Fernández de Kirchner's administration sheds light on how star Nacha Guevara as Eva Perón both reconsolidated the nation through a revision of Peronist heroism and reimagined Buenos Aires–La Plata as a global city after the neoliberal economic crash of the early 2000s. Susan Bennett's essay on Shanghai “intentionally reproduces a West/non-West duality” (94) when exploring David Henry Hwang and Robert Lepage's theatrical imaginings of China alongside Shanghai's Expo 2010 and its theatrical productions. Her careful consideration of theses immersive experiences shows how these performances produced the effect (and affect) of encouraging spectators to consume as they performed a “Western”-inspired urban citizenship.

Part II on subjects and cities contains two essays/précis of art projects in cities: an interactive student project designed to create conversations between Venice residents and tourists in an economically depressed city now largely striated by tourism, and a performance in and around Singapore about commuting. Nicholas Whybrow's essay on Venice includes the ephemera of the performance. Simon Jones and Paul Rae's cogently argued essay addresses how the exploration of movement in and outside of the information sector of Singapore can reframe the local as “local” by making “its materiality appear as earth and not as resource” (151, italics in original). The other two essays are ethnographic in nature. Jason Bush analyzes how the movement of the Andean scissors dances often reified urban–rural divides so crucial to many Latin American nationalisms and their neoliberal descendants. Yet his in-depth reading of these performers of “spectacular indigeneity” (125) reveals sites of cultural agency for cosmopolitan performers of the art form, who enact modes of citizenship both in alignment with and at odds with global forms of entrepreneurship. Melissa Butcher's consideration of the commuter experience on Delhi's newly built metro reveals how passengers negotiate their identities as they traverse the city. While often disciplining, the experience of the metro also allows her subjects to deal with and manage “unfamiliarity and inequality” (174) in productive ways complementary to those experienced by the Johannesburg walkers who participate in the art projects featured in Kruger's essay (161).

The third and last part of the book concentrates on “Acts of Dissent” in global cities. Silvija Jestrovic's essay on 1992–5 Sarajevo reveals how it emerged as a global city in the mid-1990s because of its perceived access to the Balkan conflict for the “privileged observer.” She argues that the “heterotopic capacity of the city” emerged in performances in the city as they interacted with two forces—“theatricality and violence” that “destabilize the relationship between a human being and an object” in the midst of crisis (213). Ana Martínez's essay considers the 2001 Zapatista (EZLN) march into the DF (Mexico City) shortly after the election of PAN president Vicente Fox. She argues that by using the space of the Zócalo, the city's main plaza, to imagine a global democracy dictated by their demands for democratization and dignity, the EZLN and supporters effectively made the DF an “anti-global city” (198). The final essays on Athens in the aftermath of the global financial crisis, by Philip Hager, and Cairo in the midst of the Arab Spring, by Nesreen Hussein, reveal how cities can harbor brilliant nondiscursive commentary on oppressive regimes of economic and militaristic natures. Both essays describe the cities through revolutionary modes of travelogue, chronicling quotidian and unauthored performances of everyday protest in the recent past.

Although all of the essays in the collection are excellent, the most fulsome contribution is that of the editors, whose critique of the very idea of the global city and, perhaps more important, of the inextricability of economic and physical violence in urban spaces offer much to performance studies scholarship. Taking their cue less from Michel de Certeau's “Walking the City” essay than from a more contentious body of scholarship on globalization, including champions of neoliberalizing “creative capital” (Richard Florida) and fierce critics of the affect of aspirations to it in the “global South” (Doreen Massey), this volume pulls no punches in underscoring how art makers, audiences, and passersby engage power on a daily basis. Rigorously theorized, but accessible, this volume will be engaging for specialists, generalists, and students of all levels.