Darkening Mirrors: Imperial Representation in Depression-Era African American Performance. Stephanie Leigh Batiste. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2011.Darkening Mirrors explores the ways in which black performance artists in Depression-era America used their participation in initiatives such as federally-funded projects to critique, replace, and enlarge the cultural practices and understandings which contributed to their consignment to second-class status. A central concern in Batiste's book is with black agency. Her text chronicles how artists in a variety of genres, ranging from plays to operas and from promotional films to big studio productions, used their art not only to forge identities that departed from the images that dominated the cultural imaginary of themselves but also to construct alternatives to these representations that were consistent with a more empowered vision of self. The chapters of Darkening Mirrors demonstrate that black performers achieved this task in a dizzying variety of ways. In some performances, motivated by a desire to construct an identity that mirrored that of the dominant culture, they became complicit in participating in the elision of their own history. The promotional film, Idlewild, Michigan, is a good example of this. In an effort to secure representation of the existence of an affluent black middle class, the film never references racism on the frontier but instead focuses exclusively on showing black families vacationing at an all-black resort in the midwest. The representation of a successful and affluent black middle class positions them in a cultural space of Western Expansion and simultaneously depicts them as participating in a national ideology that values leisure, the economic success to secure it, as well as family. As Batiste repeatedly demonstrates, performance afforded black artists opportunities to create-and enact-new representations of themselves, and blacks took on these opportunities, some of which required them to inhabit and negotiate complex cultural spaces for the first time. What became known as the Voodoo Macbeth is a good example of this. In that version of the play, which was produced in 1936 and performed by an all-black cast in Harlem, a young Orson Welles introduced elements of voodoo culture into the production's lighting, set, costumes, and music. These elements were not only consistent with the theme of political ambition and military intrigue that is at the heart of the play, but they also embodied-particularly in the voodoo dance of the witches-the dark forces at play inside Macbeth. …