Enacting Others: Politics of Identity in Eleanor Antin, Nikki S. Lee, Adrian Piper, and Anna Deavere Smith by Cherise Smith

Cherise Smith’s book Enacting Others brings together a disparate group of artists who “have all crossed racial, ethnic, gender, and class boundaries in works that they have conceived and performed.” Smith delivers a particularly engaging study because questions of identity and the possibilities of shifting or transforming identities are particularly relevant in societies, such as the United States, that seem emphatically riven and delineated along fixed lines of identity — of race, sex, gender, and so on.