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REVIEWS cles have minor structural problems common when writing in a foreign language . Most United States theatre scholars will be familiar with the essays by McConachie, Worthen, and Reinelt from other sources, so there is nothing new there. An ultimate opinion of the text rests on two factors: first, whether one is interested in the application of national identity to the study of theatrical practices and second, whether one is interested enough in Finnish theatre to read seven articles that pertain in some way to it. Also critical, however, is the fact of the book's existence as a tribute to and celebration of the work of a scholar little known in the English-speaking world, whose accomplishments have influenced generations of scholars inside and outside of her homeland, including myself. While not a perfect text, it does provide a glimpse into the vast possibilities of looking at theatre through the gaze of the "nation," and it honours one of the minds responsible for the growth thus far of theatre studies through this critical framework. MICHAL KOBIALKA, ed. OfBorders and Thresholds: Theatre History, Practice, and Theory. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1999. Pp. 311, illustrated . $21.95 (Pb). Reviewed by Michael McKinnie, University ofBirmingham As Michal Kobialka notes in his introduction to Of Borders and Thresholds, border studies has enjoyed a notable currency within cultural research since the late 1980s. He comments, "Like 'race,' 'gender,' 'ethnicity,' 'sexuality,' and 'nation,' 'border' has become one of the privileged themes in the humanities and social sciences" (3). It is an open question whether or not borders necessarily possess the same degree of analytical or historical imperative as the other categories he identifies, but there is little doubt that borders have become both a thematic preoccupation of contemporary cultural analysis and a conceptual frame through which to organize a wide range of critical inquiries . Kobialka argues that borders should be, and implicitly already are, a central concern of theatre studies. He claims that theatre possesses "a very specific reading of borders and border crossings," rooted in the "separation between life and the imitation of life on stage, between the 'real' and the 'illusionary ' conditions of the stage, between the way one functions in everyday life and the way one acts on stage" (4). Borders, therefore, are at the heart of theatrical representation and mimesis. The essays comprising the rest of the collection address this problem with varying degrees of success. Part of the difficulty with border studies lies in the fact that, even if one accepts that the category of border provides an adequate Reviews way to describe how theatrical representation functions, specific analyses of how this process occurs can sometimes fall prey to the ambiguities dominating the field generally. The category of "border" may provide a useful way to draw unexpected connections between a diversity of historical and ideological material. It may also be an overly broad way to characterize any form of meaning-making, the detailed and various processes of which, it could be argued, are already being theorized by linguists, semioticians, phenomenologists , and many theatre scholars, whose work is not prompted by or preoccupied with the issue of borders. The essays comprising Of Borders and Thresholds demonstrate that the "palimpsest" quality of borders (as Kobialka puts it [3]) can, on the one hand, prompt effective investigations into the social circulation of performance and, on the other, supply an imprecise conceptual catch-all to frame research whose imperative resides elsewhere. Rosemarie K. Bank's "Meditations upon Opening and Crossing Over: Transgressing the Boundaries of Historiography and Tracking the History of Nineteenth-Century American Theatre" identifies a link between passage over geographic borders and passage over cultural borders that is often productively explored in the collection. Though marred by a slightly coy meditative introduction and conclusion that do a disservice to the thoughrful historical analysis undertaken throughout the rest of the essay, Bank documents the ways in which America was represented in European cultural production between the sixteenth and nineteenth centuries. For Bank. the circulation of these representations - predominantly performances of American indigeneity - constitutes a kind of performance economy, through which a once illegible America is "turned into stories all Europe could read...

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