Transnational Theatre Research Articles

Translating and performing China for the English-speaking stage: Royal Shakespeare Company’s re-staging of The Injustice to Dou E

Contemporary China is increasingly open in its interaction with the global cultural community, generating one of the most prestigious projects—the Royal Shakespeare Company’s “Chinese Classics Translation Projects” (2015–2023). This article examines this project’s first production Snow in Midsummer, a performance based on a new translation of the Chinese classic Dou E Yuan (窦娥冤, The Injustice to Dou E That Moved Heaven and Earth). Through exploring the multiple agents involved in the RSC’s re-staging of the play, this article traces the processes of translation and performance characterised by an oft-hidden collaborative agency. It uncovers the collaborative agency at work and argues that the agency in this theatre production aims to set the conditions to make the original Chinese classic new, so as to enable its rejuvenation and transformation. Key finding of this article is that the collaborative agency of the translator, playwright, director, stage designer, and actors/actresses in re-staging has enlivened the 13th-century Chinese classic with enriched narratives and produced a performance that is nuanced and relevant to the contemporary world. This article makes a case for the paradigmatic shift from a product-based approach to theatre translation to a process-based one. It opens new avenues to future research into the question of complexity of collaborative agency in restaging the foreign classic to the contemporary English-speaking audiences for both areas of theatre translation for performance and transnational theatre production.

BERTOLT BRECHT AND THE TRANSNATIONAL THEATRE

Transnationality and transculturality, which have been attracting increasing attention within the scientific community in recent decades, have become an integral part of modern literature. Decolonization and globalization, as well as the mobility and migration caused by them, have become triggers for the blurring of ethnic, national, and cultural boundaries. These processes have also found their embodiment in literature. The transnational turn observed in literature since the 1990s shows that the understanding of literary works within national frameworks no longer corresponds to modern reality, and nations, cultures, and identities are featured with convention, fragmentation, and hybridity. And although consideration of transnationality is mostly focused on lyric and epic works, its manifestations take place in drama and theatre as well.
 This article examines the influence of Bertolt Brecht on contemporary transnational and/or transcultural theatre. It is noted that the manifestation of transnational elements in the playwright's work occurs both at the level of his plays and performances. In particular, the effects of alienation used by B. Brecht to depict the strange, foreign and unusual in one's own self have a significant impact on the formation of transnational theatre. Another manifestation of the transnational is the playwright's departure from the idea of closed nations and cultures in favour of open, conditional and fluid ones. An important aspect is also the intertextual references of his plays, which are artistic interpretive models of famous works of the past and thus enable their existence through space and time. Focusing on the processes of alienation, B. Brecht's epic theatre shows the hybridity and fragmentation not only of cultures and nations, but also of identities, therefore encouraging readers and viewers to search for the strange in themselves. At the same time, topics and problems raised in his plays and performances are not limited to local or national contexts, but are transnational in their nature.

Theatre across Oceans: Mediators of Transatlantic Exchange, 1890–1925 By Nic Leonhardt. Transnational Theatre Histories. Cham, Switzerland: Palgrave Macmillan, 2021; pp. xvi + 336, 19 illustrations. $149.99 cloth, $149.99 paper, $109 e-book.

Theatre across Oceans: Mediators of Transatlantic Exchange, 1890–1925 By Nic Leonhardt. Transnational Theatre Histories. Cham, Switzerland: Palgrave Macmillan, 2021; pp. xvi + 336, 19 illustrations. $109 e-book. - Volume 64 Issue 1

Troubling Englishness: The Eastward Success and Westward Failure of the Parsi Theatre

The Parsi theatre that emerged in the second half of the nineteenth century was India's principal commercial theatre and an answer to the bourgeois aspirations of a new middle class. Although its importance has been acknowledged due to its role as the predecessor of the South and Southeast Asian ‘modern’ theatre, there exists to this date no published critical history of the politics of its professionalisation and transregional expansion. This article will serve as a corrective measure, filling in the gap in existing research through a comparative analysis of the reception of the Parsi theatre marked by the Victoria Nāṭak Maṇḍali's (Victoria Theatrical Company's) decision to tour Burma in 1881 and subsequently to participate in the Colonial and Indian Exhibition of 1886 in London. As a vehicle of increasingly globalised mass consumption practices, the Parsi theatre was a resounding success in Southeast Asia, inspiring the creation of ‘imitation Parsi theatre’ in present-day Indonesia, Singapore and Malaysia. In stark comparison, the Parsi theatre's portrayal of a cosmopolitan, urban, industrially advanced orient was ‘doomed to disappointment’ in London and was an unequivocal financial failure. By demonstrating the reasons for the Parsi theatre's eastward success and westward failure this article demonstrates not merely the unevenness of cultural globalisation but also the need for a reconsideration of the place of material, socio-political and racial imbalances and relatedly of immobilities, embargoes, disjunctures and exclusions in our understandings of global or transnational theatre history.

The Controversial "Case of the Opera Children in the East": Political Conflict between Popular Demand for Child Actors and Modernizing Cultural Policy on the Child

The Controversial "Case of the Opera Children in the East":Political Conflict between Popular Demand for Child Actors and Modernizing Cultural Policy on the Child Gillian Arrighi (bio) In 1910 a political and media panic erupted over the physical mistreatment of Australian child actors who were touring the Indian subcontinent with Arthur Pollard's juvenile opera company. Dubbed by Australian journalists as the "case of the opera children in the East," the subsequently explosive legal proceedings that took place in Madras and the morally charged reporting of the case in Australian and Indian newspapers resulted directly in a new Australian federal law. The Emigration Bill (as the new law was called) sought to prevent anyone taking a child out of Australia to perform theatrical, operatic, or other work. In this instance the juridical intentions of the lawmakers extended well beyond theatre industry practices or narrow concerns about the labor of child actors. The social ramifications of the Emigration Bill meant that it was prohibited for any child of European race or extraction to be taken out of Australia, "unless in the care or charge of some adult person of European race or extraction." Curiously, the new law also extended its ruling to Australia's First Nation people, preventing "any aboriginal native" being taken off shore by another party, either for the purpose of laboring or exhibition in circuses or other popular entertainments, such as ethnographic people shows.1 (Exceptions to these prohibitions had to be covered by a legal permit, with assessment on a case-by-case basis.) A chain of events, instigated by child actors touring with Pollard's theatrical troupe in Madras, [End Page 153] led also to definitional clarity of the terms child and aboriginal native in Australia's legal system. The Emigration Bill of 1910 established the age definition for a child as well as the racial definition for an aboriginal native: yet, it is almost unknown that long-running debates about the accepted legal meanings of these terms were unequivocally settled as a result of the Pollard case. This fascinating case represents a defining moment in transnational theatre history and the cultural history of childhood. Knowledge of the intricacies of the case caused Australian lawmakers to end the three-decades-long industrial practice of traveling child actors in the Asia Pacific region. The case initially drew international attention because of obvious malfeasance by the company's manager. But as I argue, Pollard's popular repertoire of Edwardian musical comedy, with its "playful gambolling on the verge of indecency,"2 framed the child actors as possessing adult levels of insight and understanding that contradicted reformist ideas about acceptable childhood experience. Since the 1880s, industrial and education reforms had been gradually reshaping cultural attitudes to children and childhood. From 1883 to 1910 numerous juvenile theatre troupes working under the Pollard name participated conspicuously in the international transference and exchange of culture that Stephen Greenblatt and others have critically analyzed as "cultural mobility." Proposing a theoretical apparatus for understanding the mobility of "peoples, objects, images, texts, and ideas," mobility studies critically addresses the "physical, infrastructural, and institutional" means by which culture is transmitted across space and time.3 Pollard's troupe journeyed restlessly among south Asian centers of colonial administration and Australia's major cities, at first developing and then maintaining a reliable and popular audience base in India, present-day Malaysia, Indonesia, Burma, and Singapore. Without bricks-and-mortar roots in Australia—there was no fixed building or geographic home base for this troupe—it nevertheless identified and was received as being culturally from Australia, and its aesthetic and business strategies both reflected and influenced the operations of other producers of touring projects in the Asia-Pacific region.4 This essay explores the broader theatrical and social contexts of this watershed moment in theatre history when child entertainers were the key protagonists in "the making of social meaning."5 It illuminates the contribution of child actors to south Asian theatrical circuits at the turn of the twentieth century, reveals that child performers contributed to the global transference of Edwardian musical comedy (a popular entertainment form that has attracted scant attention from theatre historians),6 and [End Page...

Editor's Note

Editor's Note Rebecca Rovit, Associate Professor I am honored to observe the thirtieth anniversary of JDTC by featuring the work of seven esteemed scholars in Theatre and Performance Studies. The authors have received awards for their widely-read monographs, articles, and edited studies. As educators and researchers, they have developed and contributed to distinguished book series, and served at the helm of major journals in our field. They have led departments, interdisciplinary programs, and international theatre associations. And they have worked as dramaturgs and directors in professional and university settings. Their ideas about historiography, queer theory, performance philosophy, feminist theatre, transnational performance, and modernist drama resonate in our classrooms. These authors graciously answered my call for this special issue to present their research and reflections on the state of our art. Their articles offer a range of scholarship, allowing us to deepen our understanding of historical, theoretical, and dramaturgical approaches to theatre, and gain insight into developing scholarly inquiries. Thomas Postlewait draws on his extensive oeuvre in theatre and historiography to focus on "the evidence," proposing four methods with which to engage historiographical research. Kim Marra adopts a queer approach to equestrian performance and historical memory in her article on Peter Schaffer's Equus and its ancient precedents, engaging links between homoeroticism and hippophilia. Freddie Rokem proposes the dramaturgical significance of Walter Benjamin's correspondence with Gershom Scholem to consider the exilic onstage in Passport, a contemporary Israeli intertextual production about refugees and displacement. Penny Farfan focuses on dramaturgy by interviewing contemporary Canadian playwrights Colleen Murphy and Judith Thompson about their fact-inspired dramatic work, showing how they use recent traumatic events to comment on the sexism that victimizes women in North American societies. Aparna Dharwadker reveals the role of poverty in theatre-making as a structurally-inherent challenge in postcolonial countries as she explores the transnational theatre work of modern playwrights from the Caribbean, sub-Saharan Africa, and India, noting the need to acknowledge drama, authorship, and context in her study. Christopher Balme also maintains a postcolonial framework, using a combination of methods in theatre history and cultural discourse to show how we may study the dynamic of theatrical institutions. Joseph Roach, known for his Player's Passion (1985), the World Performance Project, and a scholarly approach to circum-Atlantic performance (Cities of the Dead just marked its thirtieth year), reflects on the serendipitous evolution over decades of a field of study. It is up to us to sustain for future research the vibrancy of scholarly purpose that these authors represent in their work. I would like to acknowledge several people including Kate Nygren, whose managerial and editorial assistance has been helpful during my sabbatical year away from KU. I extend my appreciation to Chris Woodworth now in her second year as [End Page 7] Book Review Editor. Congratulations go to our former Managing Editor, Dr. Jeanne Tiehen, for successfully earning her doctorate in Theatre. To our reviewers, thank you for your service in helping us to recognize and publish original scholarship. And to our subscribers and readers, thank you for reading! [End Page 8] Rebecca Rovit, Associate Professor University of Kansas Copyright © 2017 Rebecca Rovit

Broadway as Global Brand

AbstractFor people around the world, “Broadway” means the Broadway musical, the epitome of singing and dancing, glamor and dazzle. Although the Broadway musical is customarily perceived as the most distinctively U. S. theatre form – whose national and municipal identity is embedded in its name – it has circumnavigated the globe countless times. As the globalized cultural economy increasingly facilitates the worldwide circulation of multinational theatrical productions, Broadway-style musicals are being manufactured from Hamburg to Shanghai. They are no longer a specifically U. S. form, but a global brand that freely crosses borders, genres, and styles.The mobility of the newly deterritorialized Broadway musical is the result of many phenomena, notably the rise of a generation of producers, writers, directors, and actors around the world who have absorbed the musical’s conventions and vernaculars and who disseminate locally-produced musical entertainments. In the twenty-first century, these new Broadway-style musicals have become the preeminent transnational theatre form, whose conventions have also been absorbed into both popular and elite theatrical entertainments around the world.

Performing the Nation in Global Korea: Transnational Theatre by Hyunjung Lee

Performing the Nation in Global Korea: Transnational Theatre by Hyunjung Lee

Greek Dispossession Staged, or When Street Politics Meets the Theater

Revisiting the historically rich relationship between theater and politics in the wake of worldwide protest movements at the turn of the last decade, this essay examines what theater can still do for street politics. With a turn to contemporary political and transnational theater in Berlin, the 2013 theater production Telemachos – Should I Stay or Should I Go?, written and directed by Anestis Azas and Prodromos Tsinikoris, comes into focus. As a play about Greek-German relations and the repercussions of the on-going Greek debt crisis, Telemachos not only recharges and re-localizes European politics but also orchestrates a performative cross-cultural encounter that promises to resonate beyond the theater space.

Performing Cultural Memory: The Travelling Hibernicon and the Transnational Irish Community in the United States and Australia

The proliferation of popular touring companies in the late nineteenth century provides an opportunity to explore how popular ideas of Irishness travelled and transformed across national borders. Through its international reach and unique form, the hibernicon — an Irish variation on the moving panorama — had the potential to create an imagined collectivity among Irish emigrants and their descendants in the US and Australia. Looking at the hibernicon and transnational theatre emphasises the ways that performances of cultural memory shift over time and are dependent not only on the relationship of the Irish to homeland, but also the transnational relationships among those who have left. The hibernicon highlights the crucial role popular entertainment played in conversations about cultural memory and demonstrates the importance of transnationalism in cultural memory's formation.

An Aesthetics of Narrative Performance: Transnational Theater, Literature, and Film in Contemporary Germany by Claudia Breger (review)

Reviewed by: An Aesthetics of Narrative Performance: Transnational Theater, Literature, and Film in Contemporary Germany by Claudia Breger Matthew Cornish An Aesthetics of Narrative Performance: Transnational Theater, Literature, and Film in Contemporary Germany. By Claudia Breger. Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 2012. Pp. x + 315. Cloth $72.95. ISBN 978-0814211977. Fifteen years after Hans-Thies Lehmann’s Postdramatisches Theater (1999), and almost ten after Erika Fischer-Lichte’s Ästhetik des Performativen (2004), it feels as if many of the most discussed German directors and playwrights are telling stories again. In German-language novels and films, categorized as pop lit or Berlin School, that have captured the attention of readers, audiences, and Feuilleton editors alike, characters (characters again!) recount events and give us access to their thoughts; often, we even can trust them a bit. Sometimes, these narrators have an almost Godlike access to their worlds. Are we now living after postmodernism? “[N]arrative—as a means of ordering and evaluating the world,” writes Claudia Breger in An Aesthetics of Narrative Performance, “might be back with a vengeance” (3). Breger ambitiously works to tackle some of the most substantial questions of scholarship on contemporary theater, film, and literature, bringing together these disciplines to show the relationships between narrative and, broadly speaking, the diagnosed performative turn. Focusing on Germany (her specialty), but with a diverse and intercultural perspective from within that nation, she proposes a conceptual framework of “narrative performance”: “a set of techniques that develop narrative in performative and performance in narrative forms—widely different in many respects but also attesting to shared preoccupations” (267). Well-read across German studies, theater studies, gender studies, literary criticism, and performance studies, Breger engages many of the most influential scholars in these fields, from Gérard Genette (Narrative Discourse, 1980) and Paul Ricoeur (Time and Narrative, 1983–85) to Fischer-Lichte. She remains in constant dialogue with the existing literature throughout her book, incorporating many scholars’ ideas, but also criticizing them and making new insights into the works she discusses, all from the late 1990s and 2000s. Founding her case for such an aesthetics in the contemporary period on both theoretical and historical grounds, Breger’s argument encompasses internationally [End Page 482] well-known works such as Good Bye, Lenin! (2003) and Doug Wright’s play I am My Own Wife (2003), as well as artists and writers famous in the German cultural scene including René Pollesch and Rainald Goetz, and some with Turkish backgrounds including Feridun Zaimoğlu and Emine Sevgi Özdamar. In the most successful chapter of An Aesthetics of Narrative Performance, the chapter in which the application of her critical apparatus most clearly illuminates her chosen cultural objects, thereby making a case for her methods, Breger analyzes films made “around 2000”: Lola und Bilidikid (1999), Sonnenallee (1999), and Good Bye, Lenin! She persuasively argues that Sonnenallee, though a highly-popular “pop” film, does not merely engage in exercises of nostalgia, but rather use performative methods to open up politically subversive possibilities, with narrators and other meta techniques creating a “defiant countermemory” (90) of the German Democratic Republic. She also demonstrates how “the evoked image of Turkish masculinity” in Lola und Bilidikid “is situated in the realm of transnational media discourse and self-stylizing mimicry” (61). Throughout the book, the sections on gender, particularly Turkish masculinity, illustrate the potential of her interdisciplinary “narrative performance” model, neatly weaving together the insights of performance studies with literary analysis, showing the techniques through which narrators and characters construct and perform their ethnic and gender identities. The structure of the book, unfortunately, considerably hampers Breger’s arguments. In each of the five chapters that follow the theoretical introduction, Breger analyzes three to four objects in three to four distinct sections, with an introduction and conclusion as well. The sections more or less stand alone as essays on the individual objects, and while Breger will occasionally refer to the other works included elsewhere in the book, she rarely puts them into deep conversation with one another. (Sonnenallee and Good Bye, Lenin! are a happy exception to this.) Though she chooses her objects well—with the exception of Jonathan Safran Foer’s Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close...

An Aesthetics of Narrative Performance: Transnational Theater, Literature, and Film in Contemporary Germany. By Claudia Breger. Columbus, OH: Ohio State University Press, 2012. x + 315 pages + 15 b/w illustrations. $72.95.

An Aesthetics of Narrative Performance: Transnational Theater, Literature, and Film in Contemporary Germany. By Claudia Breger. Columbus, OH: Ohio State University Press, 2012. x + 315 pages + 15 b/w illustrations. $72.95.

Moving Islands: Mapping the Samoan Diaspora in Contemporary Transnational Theatre from the South Pacific

Even in the twenty-first century, the term ‘South Pacific’ still conjures up images of a timeless, apolitical paradise, redolent of exotic landscapes and heady sensuality; more negative association...

Theatre and the Rwandan Genocide

Theatre and the Rwandan Genocide Chantal Kalisa (bio) When I wrote this article in 2006, I was fascinated by the number of artists, writers, filmmakers, and photographers who were interested in exploring the Genocide of Rwandan Tutsi through their own artistic expressions. I focused on theatre because I knew from my own personal experience that this form had been used by Rwandans in exile as a way to express loss of land and identity. Writers and performers such as Kalisa Rugano, Jean-Marie Vianney Rurangwa, and Jean-Marie Kayishema were writing and performing stories to denounce their conditions as perpetual refugees and most importantly to ensure cultural survival by invoking history, "umuco kinyarwanda," through dances, music, rituals incorporated in their plays. My original question for this essay was to ask whether theatre existed in postconflict Rwanda. When I recently addressed the same question to a Canadian theatre Director working with Rwandan artists, she responded by saying "what theatre?. . . but there is no culture in Rwanda." What she meant by her answer was that artistic expression is not a priority in Rwanda, echoing Cynthia Cohen's idea that states that "(i)n addressing painful historical legacies, trials and tribunals are likely to claim far more resources than theater, poetry or exchange programs for artists."1 As I showed in this article, however, theatre is not absent in Rwanda. First of all, it presents itself in unfamiliar ways to Western audiences. Like in most oral-based societies, Rwandan forms combine art (dance, music, etc.) with culture and rituals. The word "umuco" translated as "culture" means both art and culture. In other words, rituals performed in Rwandan daily practices as well as major life events are both cultural and artistic expressions. Since 2006, the number of formal theatrical productions on postconflict Rwanda continues to grow and these can be found in Africa, Europe, and North America. What has since intensified is the transnational nature of this theatre. As I mention in the essay, the Genocide of Rwandan Tutsi brings together a number of global actors, compelling artists around the world to explore its causes, effects, [End Page 159] and possible preventive solutions. Whether in Rwanda or not, artists feel the responsibility to intervene with their craft for the sake of reconciliation, healing, and violence prevention. A play on genocide is a representation of and not the "true" story, as Jean-Pierre Karegeye explains. "[T]o paint, to film and to write genocide is to recreate . . . a drama shared by humanity at a smaller scale, without site and time contingency."2 This universality is well-illustrated in the words of the Senegalese writer Boubacar Boris Diop, who goes as far as saying, "I do not live in Rwanda, Rwanda lives in me."3 Thus, the existence of a transnational theatre can be explained by this universality, by non-Rwandan artists feeling inhabited by Rwanda and its history. Many of the productions are collaborative and a veritable mix of languages, cultures, and nations. The contexts vary and are flexible. The work of multitalented artist Koulsy Lamko, discussed below, shows him as the initiator of this transnational trend that currently dominates artistic responses to conflict in Rwanda. It should also be noted that for the last few years, Lamko has continued his interventions in Mexico, proving once again that geography is no hindrance to art projects. In 1994, Rwanda was the scene of genocide, or more precisely in French le théâtre du génocide (theatre of genocide). Perpetrators and victims played their role while the rest of the world watched the "spectacle" live on television. Perhaps because of its spectacular aspect, the Rwandan genocide has inspired a number of artistic materials. In the last decade, we have indeed witnessed the growth of literary and artistic expression in relation to the Rwandan genocide. Survivors and witnesses have told their stories in books and songs, and journalists as well as other travelers "to the end of Rwanda," to use Véronique Tadjo's words, have borne witness to the genocide.4 Artists who were not there have also attempted to represent the "African genocide" and have cast themselves as participating in the process of reconciliation. I am...

Continental Crossroads: Remapping U.S.-Mexico Borderlands History

This collection of essays showcases the work of young, U.S.-based scholars working on U.S.-Mexico borderlands history during what the editors refer to as the region’s “formative” period, the 1820s through the 1940s. Samuel Truett and Elliott Young begin with an introduction situating the collection within existing literature. Rather than redefine the field, the editors insist that there is more to gain by seeing borderlands history as a “meeting place” for multiple fields, where Chicana/o, U.S. West, Spanish borderlands, and Mexican specialists can converse together “on their own terms” (p. 12). The essays reflect the fruits of such conversations.Many of the contributors add welcome complexity to familiar borderland subjects. In the opening essay, Raúl Ramos explores a range of attitudes held by Spanish and Mexican officials in San Antonio, Texas, regarding their powerful Indian neighbors. Locating interesting continuities in outlook and policy before and after Mexican independence, Ramos nonetheless has little to say about Indians themselves — a curious omission given the volume’s emphasis on multiple perspectives and boundary crossing. Andrés Reséndez’s excellent essay on borderlands literary cultures in the mid – nineteenth century begins with a failed attempt by Texans to extend their dominion over eastern New Mexico in 1841. Reséndez taps into fascinating differences in the ways borderlands peoples articulated corporate identity by placing sensationalized U.S. accounts of the Texan endeavor alongside the published accounts of Mexicans and pictographic calendars of Kiowa Indians. Louise Pubols presents a subtle portrait of political culture in post-1848 California. Writing against the more familiar story of elite Californios naively colluding with American newcomers and quickly losing their wealth and power, the author focuses instead on the prominent de la Guerra family of southern California and the endurance of their patriarchal political network into the 1870s.Benjamin Johnson’s essay serves as a tight précis of his important 2003 book, Revolution in Texas (Yale Univ. Press). When in 1915 ethnic Mexicans began attacking ranches and killing Anglos along the lower Rio Grande, Texas Rangers and vigilantes responded with often-indiscriminate reprisals. Johnson argues that in the disastrous aftermath of the rebellion, Tejanos came to embrace their American citizenship and fight politically for the ideal of “multiracial democracy” (p. 293). Alexandra Minna Stern explores the creation of the U.S. Border Patrol. Stern tells a tale of a hardening border, racist medical quarantines, and punitive immigration laws, all policed by a newly constituted Border Patrol service armed with extraordinary powers and inflated notions of masculinity.Other contributions enlist little-known actors to guide the reader through a complex and rich landscape of borderland dreams, schemes, and social relations. Bárbara O. Reyes explores the story of Bárbara Gandiaga, a native woman convicted in 1806 of conspiring to kill a friar at a mission in Baja California. By putting the official, Dominican account in conversation with a very different telling collected in the late nineteenth century, Reyes offers a penetrating critique of how one woman’s story became fodder for competing discourses: one Catholic and colonial, the other anticlerical and reformist. Elliott Young uses a pair of travel narratives written by the journalist and anti-Díaz revolutionary Ignacio Martínez to gesture at critiques of modernity arising out of the borderlands in the late nineteenth century. Young mines the travel narratives for Martínez’s evolving and sometimes contradictory thoughts about colonialism, development, and justice. Grace Peña Delgado explains how class structured opportunities for Chinese immigrants on the U.S.-Mexican border during the 1880s and 1890s. As exclusionary legislation complicated Chinese immigration through places like San Francisco or New York, many would-be immigrants — especially merchants — found better opportunities for life and for border crossing in northern Mexico.In one of the collection’s strongest pieces, Karl Jacoby recounts the efforts of William H. Ellis to organize an African American colony in Mexico in 1895. Billed as a nondiscriminatory haven for poor black farmers, Ellis’s colony attracted enough immigrants to panic white landowners in the U.S. South. Jacoby is at his best when discussing the complex but fascinating reasons for the project’s demise, an event that he argues prefigured growing prejudice against blacks in Mexico. Samuel Truett’s essay on Emilio Kosterlitzky, a Russian immigrant in Mexico who became a lauded military figure in northern Sonora, follows the transformation of the northwestern borderlands from a frontier zone of Indian wars to a transnational theater of labor struggle. Kosterlitzky’s eventful life, ending as a spy for the U.S. government, highlights the changing possibilities and limitations of transnational identity in the turn-of-the-century borderlands.While organized both chronologically and thematically, this collection is not (and was not meant to be) a comprehensive text for borderlands history. However, its clear, engaging essays would enrich undergraduate classes, and graduate students and professors will find in Continental Crossroads a lively tour of the region’s new and clearly flourishing historiography.